At first glance, the Dzungar Khanate appears to have been a typical nomadic state of the Eurasian steppe: a people living by the movement of their herds and building their power upon horses, bows, and cavalry. Yet by the eighteenth century, this Oirat state had begun to change.
In the Ili Valley and along the northern slopes of the Tianshan, the Dzungars did more than raise livestock. They mined minerals, smelted metals, and manufactured firearms and artillery. Their power was no longer based solely on a pastoral economy, but increasingly rested upon a combination of steppe nomadism, oasis agriculture, and military industry. For an Inner Asian state with a relatively limited population and urban base, this was a remarkable development.
One of the most fascinating figures in this transformation was the Swedish artilleryman and engineer Johan Gustaf Renat. Originally a Swedish soldier, Renat was captured by Russia during the Great Northern War and sent deep into Siberia, only to be captured again by the Dzungars. Fate never returned him to Europe. Instead, it carried him to the distant lands of the Ili Valley.
To the Dzungars, Renat was more than a foreigner who knew how to cast cannons. He brought with him an entire body of military and engineering knowledge: the extraction and processing of ore, metalworking, artillery casting, and the organization and training of gunners. Under such influences, the Dzungars developed an increasing capacity to manufacture their own cannon and ammunition. They were beginning to cross an important threshold—from merely acquiring and using firearms to establishing a military industry of their own.
The Dzungar army of the eighteenth century therefore possessed a particularly distinctive character. It remained fundamentally a cavalry power, relying upon the mobility and traditions of Oirat warfare across the vast spaces of Inner Asia. Yet alongside mounted warriors and bows came matchlock firearms, cannon, and mortars. The military inheritance of the age of Chinggis Khan was gradually meeting the technologies of the early modern gunpowder revolution.
Strictly speaking, the Dzungar Khanate cannot easily be placed alongside the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires as a classic “Gunpowder Empire.” It lacked their immense populations, urban centers, fiscal resources, and stable bureaucratic institutions. Nor could it sustain military production on the same massive and continuous scale.
Yet from another perspective, the Dzungars stood remarkably close to that threshold.
Perhaps they are better understood as a firearms-oriented nomadic empire: a state whose military remained rooted in the traditions of steppe cavalry while gradually incorporating muskets and artillery, and which sought to build its own military-industrial capacity through the adoption of foreign technology. Its greatest limitation was not a failure to understand the importance of gunpowder weapons, but rather the difficulty of transforming technological knowledge into large-scale and sustainable national production with limited population and resources.
The Dzungar Khanate thus presents one of the more intriguing images of eighteenth-century Eurasia. In the mines and workshops of the Ili region, a Swedish engineer could be found helping craftsmen cast artillery far from the battlefields of Europe. Beyond those workshops stretched the vast grasslands, where Oirat cavalry still mounted their horses and rode to challenge the Qing Empire in the east and compete with Russia in the north.
The Dzungars never became another Ottoman Empire. Yet they may have come closer than any other nomadic state to becoming a true “Gunpowder Empire of the Steppe.
