This engaging book, laced with wry asides by American historian Tonio Andrade, is partly a history of the first nine months of the conflict, explaining the initial Dutch loss. It's also partly an exploration of an argument between historians - traditionalists vs revisionists - over Europe's domination of much of the world by 1800.

Andrade gives a colourful, detailed explanation of the Chinese victory at Zeelandia, carefully weighing both sides' leadership, tactics, weaponry, ships and fortifications. Koxinga's forces matched the Dutch skills in artillery, stood up to massed musket fire without fleeing, and profited greatly from ancient Chinese military maxims about using terrain and luring the enemy out of position.

True, the Dutch were far outnumbered but they were leaders in the devastating use of musketry and artillery, and their fortresses were considered impregnable because of the devastating cross-fire made possible by their design.

'According to the military revolution theory, Europeans owed their ascendancy over the world - or at least those parts of the world that they controlled before 1800 - primarily to their superior guns, ships and forts. So it's intriguing that in the first few days of Koxinga's invasion Dutch muskets lost to Chinese lances; Dutch ships lost to Chinese junks; and a Dutch fort surrendered to a Chinese siege. What do these defeats tell us about the military explanation for European expansion?'

That military revolution theory claims Europe's ability to dominate much of the world before the Industrial Revolution was rooted in its long history of warfare - practice had honed their expertise and technology. The rival, revisionist, view is that Europe's expansion was due more to its political will than technological prowess.

Andrade, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, admits he was firmly in the revisionist camp when he began work on this book. But he changed his mind when he uncovered the nitty-gritty military details.

He concluded that the Dutch did indeed have superior technology in their ships and fort design, and might have won the war with better leadership and less appalling luck with the weather.

In the end, Andrade takes the longer view. 'Modernisation itself was a process of interadoption,' he writes. 'The military revolution began in China. It spread to Europe. Then it spread back. We must broaden our understanding of modernity and our search for its deep causes.'

The first true guns, he notes, emerged in China as early as the mid-1100s. European guns overtook the Chinese weapons after 1500, but the Chinese were quick to adopt the European improvements, in Andrade's 'interadoption' process.

This is engaging history, rooted in copious records kept at the time, by a reflective writer with a good story to tell - both about the events of 1661 and how history itself gets written.