Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution

Satia argues that gun manufacturing was central to England’s rise to dominance, not just or even primarily from the use of the guns but from the development of technologies, administrative procedures, and economic relationships out of government gun procurement practices. The Industrial Revolution thus is not about doux-commerce or private enterprise so much as public-private partnership, with gun manufacture and export sustaining domestic industry through economic hard times. Satia centers her story on a Quaker gun manufacturer who defended his business against accusations of lack of peacefulness; he could see guns as compatible with peace by emphasizing the role of guns in trade with Africa and in protecting property. Satia argues show more that, for the first guns were unpredictable in performance/aim and that their social meaning was initially about war or defense of property against break-ins, rather than on non-property-based interpersonal violence. show less

Empire of Guns posits that firearms manufacturing was central to the Industrial Revolution and to the rise of the British Empire. Priya Satia argues that it was so as a result of what we would today term a public-private partnership, with the government much more heavily involved in gun manufacturing and by extension the history of the Industrial Revolution than has hitherto been appreciated.

There are some interesting sections here, such as Satia's analysis of the roles a number of prominent Quaker families—a denomination known for its pacifism—played in the gun industry and how they rationalised their involvement. But for me, those individual parts didn't quite add up to a convincing whole. I'm not an early modernist, so I don't show more have any particular horse in the race about the extent of and nature of the British state's entanglement with how the Industrial Revolution unfolded. As an Irish person, I'm pretty amenable to the conception of 18/19th century Britain as a fairly militarised/war-oriented state.

But the most empirically-heavy parts of Satia's study are focused on early modern Britain and its colonising activities, and here there wasn't enough sustained comparison with other early modern European states to convince me of the exceptional nature of British economic activities during this period. And in the last part of the book, Satia spends time looking at, shall we call it America's unique relationship with guns, but doesn't really advance an argument for why it should get primacy in a discussion of the British Empire or why things have turned out so differently there as opposed to the U.K., or Ireland, or elsewhere in the former Empire. I'm sympathetic to most if not all of the arguments Satia puts forward here, but they felt part of a different study.

(The audiobook narrator was poor. I could deal with the leaden, lockjaw reading by listening to it at 2x speed, but that couldn't do away with the narrator's frequent mispronunciations. I get that, for e.g., some English placenames don't sound like how they're spelled, but if you're being paid to read a book aloud I think you should make sure you know how to say Ipswich or Norwich or Southwark. But if you render Māori as "May-OHR-ee", I am going to end up replaying that part of the audiobook to listen again in disbelief.) show less

I liked this history, which focused on the role of gun making in the Industrial Revolution, and the specific story of the Galton family, which manufactured arms despite their Quaker heritage. The author links guns to their wider social and economic context, and highlights the changing views of guns as they became weapons of impersonal conflict. An interesting history and a useful one for thinking more deeply about the role of these weapons today.

Empire of Guns starts out as a scholarly history and ends up as a polemic on gun usage and making. The polemic, not so well laid out, does come directly from the history, that is superbly laid out and told. This leaves an unequal quality in emphasis and focus and strength. Satia follows the Galton family to make the point that because of constant wars involving Great Britain that gunmakers like the Galton's working with the state gave vital impetus to the Industrial Revolution. Constant war and threat of war was key. It is fair to say this book was not meant for the general reader.

Quotes: (page 6) “At the center of these networks stood the British State. It did much more than minimalistically provide the financial and transportation show more infrastructure for industrial revolution, as traditionally portrayed; it consumed metal goods in mass quanities that made industrial revolution necessary and possible. Just its bulk demand for guns alone stimulated innovations in industrial organization and metallurgical technology with enormous ripple effects. At the start of the eighteenth century, it contracted for tens of thousands of guns, by the early nineteenth century, its needs were in the millions. That shift in magnitude signifies industrial revolution in the metallurgical world. It was not the result of application of machinery but of state-driven expansion of and experimentation with industrial organization of the artisanal trade.”

(page 7) “He[Samuel Galton Jr.] was not alone in perceiving the way war was transforming British productivity: the East India Company permitted voluminous gun sales even to enemies in South Asia partly to enfeeble gunmaking traditions there and thus prevent industrial revolution.”

(page 106) “The office was looking beyond immediate needs, determining to keep Tower stores constantly at these levels: 50,000 long land muskets; 10,000 short land muskets; 30,000 short muskets for marines or militia; 5,000 carbines for artillery or Highlanders; 2,000 carbines for cavalry; 12,000 pairs of land pistols; 20,000 sea service muskets; 2,000 musketoons; and 10,000 pairs of sea service pistols.”

(page 161) :Major turning points of industrial revolution-the steam engine, puddling, copper sheathing- were triggered by war and produced networks of contractor-industrialists. Casual relations between science and industry were not direct, unitary, or simple. Formal scientific persuits were often critical to innovation in the nineteenth century, but in our period, science and industry tended to be parallel pursuits that at times intersected or overlapped.”

(page 377) “Cold War ideological priorities helped shape our understanding of the industrial revolution as the product of innovation rather than mass production for the state. We accordingly remember Preistley, Boulton, Watt, and Keir more than the wealthier Galton, who sponsored much of their work.” show less

A history broken into three parts: a plethora of evidence that displays how the State's want for more land, the war that came of it, and the need for larger and larger number of guns to wage those wars helped create and drive the industrial revolution; how society historically viewed and used guns; the historic morality of gun ownership. Highly recommended.