Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution

by Priya Satia

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade

A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose.--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies

We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion.

Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war.

Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the military-industrial complex -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it.

Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Economics, Politics, Military Fiction, World History, British Literature

550 pages, Hardcover

First published April 10, 2018

About the author

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She specializes in modern British and British empire history, especially in the Middle East and South Asia. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.

Reviews

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Industrial Revolution brought to you by guns.

Some strange facts..

Factories owned by Quakers produced guns. Peace loving Quakers!

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At first guns were sold "to protect people and property"

Guns cross national boundaries. Even though England was at war with the Dutch the government bought guns from the Dutch gun makers.

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Some manufacturers produced toys as well as guns, but not toy guns.

Guns sold to Africans were of such bad construction that the guns often exploded maiming or killing the shooter.

The father of a young lady was shot by a man who said she disappointed him in love.

In America Captain John Smith and Pocahontas are mentioned and have no relation to Disney's version.

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Most of this book focuses on the British gun makers of the 1700's. The last part quickly brings us up to date our modern views on guns.

Kids, don't try this at home.

Enjoy!

[Mehrsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book, which was really hard to do because it is a SLOG! The reason I didn't abandon it is because the promise and the premise of this book are so compelling: how guns and the market for guns related to war and state-making and empire. But unfortunately, the book doesn't deliver. It gets lost in the weeds and tries to tell the story through a family empire and one trial, but it's just not interesting enough. Also, it gets mired in the details of production and trade and there is so much telling and less analyzing and thinking and probing, which is why I came.

[Jenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yet another book that could’ve done with a better editor. The shear amount of information that had nothing to do with the topic at hand took up a large portion of this book, there was a lot of repeat information and repeated quotes, with words that are so archaic (I had to use a dictionary more often than not, which isn’t a problem, but these words weren’t even associated with historical sources or quotes) that I’m fairly sure that they haven’t been used since the Eighteenth Century anywhere other than in this book.

The premise is interesting, but the author could have cut out a third of the text (and therefore a third of its 400 page bibliography) and gotten their point across much better.

[Erik Ronningen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting content that has little to do with the premise of the book. This is a well written and meticulously researched account of British gun manufacturing during the industrial revolution. What the book os not is an account of how guns and violence shaped the British experience of the industrial revolution. The author does not compare gun manufacturing to other manufacturing of the time to show how it drove innovation or changed anything. Also, her argument that gun manufacturing was such an important piece of the economy that it drove many changes is simply never made, she does not compare gun manufacturing to the larger British economy, a crucial step in proving her argument. Overall an interesting look at a slice of the manufacturing economy in Britian during the industrial revolution, but nothing more than that.

[Brook · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute dreck. The premise is sound, and would have been a new focus. However, this is not a book about the Industrial Revolution and how the manufacture of arms relates to it, but rather an treatise on why Britain is so horrible. I completely agree, Britain was a horrible steward of its colonies, and is probably responsible for more murder, rape, pillage and other atrocities in Africa and the sub-continent than anyone else (the sub-continent for sure; with Africa, I think France, Belgium and Britain will have to duke it out for biggest pieces of sh*t, with Italy, the Boers and America waiting to play for the wild card slot). That said, I did not pick this up to read a story of the British imposing their will on colonies with side notes about arms manufacturing (this is not really about the Industrial Revolution, at least the part I made it through). I came to learn more about the role that arms manufacturing played in said revolution, as well as in international trade.

For example, a good portion of the early industrialization in western Massachusetts and Connecticut was arms manufacturing (Colt, Springfield, Smith & Wesson, Marlin, Savage). There were plenty of other manufacturers of muzzle loaders from the Revolutionary and Civil War area up there, too. I would have liked to learn more about the relationship between arms, war, and the IR. This book had that as an aside, as a means to explain how horrible colonialism was.

It is possible that the book eventually got into the subject matter in the title. However, the first 60 pages, as well as the portions I later flipped through, did not contain anything.

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book; hoping it would be a lively and thoughtful discussion of the correlation between Western civilization, the industrial revolution, and how the technological superiority of European arms allowed it to dominate the world for a time.

Instead I read a dull book that seemed to list every small arms contract let by the British government in the 18th and 19th century without any human interest in the proceedings. It finishes with a blast against the U.S. and the American N.R.A. for opposing the ill conceived United Nations small arm treaty.

The only pleasure I realized from this book is that I borrowed it from my local library and didn't spend my money purchasing it.

[Randi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could have done without the first five chapters of this book. I didn’t find lists of quantities of gun parts at all as interesting as the author did. However, starting with chapter six, it becomes a commentary on gun culture and its historical roots. I was fascinated by how the West’s relationship with guns, and the very guns themselves, have evolved over time. This book for me offered a definitive answer as to what the founders of America intended with the second amendment and left no doubt in my mind that it was not easy access to assault rifles that can kill and injure hundreds in minutes. The guns used in the Revolutionary War were unrecognizable to the guns of today and the purpose of guns then was vastly different than today. Reading this book in the aftermath of Parkland was chilling. This is a must read for all Americans, no matter where you fall in the gun debate.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a bit intimidating in length, but my students managed it well. The focus on one family helped hold it together, but it is incredibly thorough in showing both how the industrial revolution occurred through one vital product—guns—and how the moral impact of an industry gets justified. Satia is very effective in showing how implicated the state AND violence were/are in economic expansion and innovation. Not just for the industrial revolution, but continuing to today. I thought the least effective elements were the ones trying to tie the industry and its opposition to the current issues. It just felt too rushed.

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Thom DeLair]

Like a lot of other history books that focus on private and public institutions, the book covers the interdependent nature of institutions with the public and by the end take dead aim at Libertarian ambivalence. One thing I learned was Adam Smith's statement that if investors understood the broader implications, it would stymie Capitalist growth. Compared to some other books I've read about British institutions in the 18th century, this books provides an interlocking component of economic and military institutions.

In the first couple of chapters going through the Quaker business network of gun manufacturers I found a little jarring, but that comes with any book that has a lot of unfamiliar names. Chapter 6 and onward will probably be more engaging to most general readers like me, such as the impersonalization of firearms due to technological advances in guns beginning around the 1790s.

Because I live in the U.S., of course reading a book about the history of firearms is semi-automatically going to lead me to think about gun control and the second amendment, which the book does deliver in the last two chapters. One interesting fact I didn't know is that during the colonial period and early republic, is that firearms for militias were stored in a civic center. Also, not that I'm unsurprised, but I also didn't know that the NRA also blocks any regulation on foreign arms sales, not just domestic.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dense, fact-rich book which took me a couple of attempts to finish (partly because I didn't have some of the contextual knowledge of the history of the period). Worth the work, though; the argument is strong and the striking conclusions about the role of war in the creation of what we now think of as "the economy" and the intertwined nature of the private sector, banking, the state, military, and industry are important.

[Sarah W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using deep research into Quaker gun manufacturers, Satia illuminates the complexity of early industrialization. Mass production preceding mechanization; state contracts were critical to capital formation; banking, the state, joint-stock companies, and manufacturers were completely interwoven; and, most pointedly, Britain spent more than a century at war which contributed to the growth of industrial society.

[Dylan]

DNF.

The introduction was fascinating, with some very bold claims that I was very interested to see backed up, but then the book comes to a screeching halt to tell the utterly dull story of a gunmaking family that the author claims is essential to support the thesis, but I just couldn't bring myself to dig on. Hopefully I'll give it another try someday.

[Jyotsna]

DNF!!

Reads like a textbook in a really boring history class.

No storytelling, no interesting facts. Nothing that makes this book stand out except for copy-paste facts and figures

[Stephen Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empire of Guns is an odd book. Its main argument, that the firearm industry drove the industrial revolution, is pretty weak. While it was clearly contributed to industrialization in Britain, she is not even close to proving it was the driving factor.

On the other hand, some of her smaller claims are very convincing and interesting. She does show that the British government's reliance on maintaining supply of guns provided a good foundation for the industry to grow. She also shows that guns were a very clumsy way to kill people for private citizens. Until the 19th century, they were mainly status symbols used for shock and awe. She makes a very interesting claim that their main use was to protect property. As guns required only limited skill to use, rich commoners could use one easily, so they used it to protect what they valued - their property. This contrasts to swords. Only the nobility could use swords effectively because of the training and practice involve and they used them to protect what they most valued - their honor. As such, guns became much more of a middle class weapon. However, as guns became more reliable and cheaper in the late 18th and early 19th century, they were more often used be private citizens for violence.

Satia almost makes a good case that the British government was always worried about firearms being in private possession because of the possibility of rebellion, so it tried to limit access to them. This was essentially a fighting retreat as guns became more and more common in Britain, although never as common as they were in its American colonies. The government's fear were well-founded in those colonies as rebellion eventually broke out, with the spark being the British attempt to disarm the colonists.

There is one other way this book is odd. It feels like it is written for a popular audience, but there are large sections that are very difficult to get through. It's like she wants to put in colorful anecdotes to entertain while she informs, but the anecdotes made me want to stop reading.

So it was a good book overall. Even though its main thesis was not convincing and the writing could use work, it made a lot of interesting points and makes a good contribution to the understanding of the development of the gun industry.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a member of the very same Quaker meeting which disowned weapons producer Samuel Galton in 1796, I really wanted to like this book. And it does reveal the widespread greed, hypocrisy and lack of moral compass of many Birmingham Quakers in the 18th century, who happily produced weapons on a large scale and founded banks to keep the arms trade going. But this is only a very small part of an over-long book which sees the reader drowning in excessive detail - long lists of weapons and their parts, more long lists of Quaker friendships, marriages, relationships and so on - and the typical academic's belief that the "ordinary" reader, having managed to get past those lists, will recognise one of the characters who pops up randomly 40 pages later without an explanation. So as far as the premise of the book goes (that the industrial revolution was advanced by war, not by textiles and consumerism), it's difficult to make a judgement because there are far too many trees and not enough wood. Although I did like the author's description of war as "the nation's main cultural pastime" in the 18th century.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A look at the interconnection between the industrial revolution in Britain and the gun industry using the lens of the story of Samuel Galton of Birmingham, a prominent gun maker and Quaker who found his trade suddenly condemned by his religion. The interconnection between the government and the gun trade, as well as almost all other trades, due to England's near constant state of war during the 18th and early 19th century gave rise to much of the innovation that we associate with the industrial revolution. The changing perceptions of guns and how innovations spurred on by war in the gun trade spread to other industries and diplomacy was interesting. Well researched and easy to read this book was informative and made you think about the changing views of guns. I would rate this book 3.5 stars if Goodreads allowed half stars. I received a free ARC of this book through Goodreads First Reads Giveaways.

[Ailith Twinning · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more a history than an analysis or political essay. I'd have preferred more politics, because history is inherently political, but it begins with a strong effort at framing and that suffices for context.

I don't recommend anyone who wouldn't read a undergrad history book for fun, because this is very much in the class of undergrad history books.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of detail about 18th-century English gunsmiths, their business, relatives, and government contracts. Interesting insights in how firearm technology changed the nature of interpersonal violence, and the place of firearms in international trade, especially with Africa.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this is the least biased review of humanity's history of constant war that I've ever read. I really appreciated how she exposed the myth of "peace being the norm, and war being the exception." When has there not been war in the world?

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting book that changes the usual history of the industrial revolution.

[David Akeroyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

dry and repetitive. There might have been an interesting book in here but it was buried under the hundreds of pages of telling the reader the same things over and over again.

[Theresa Wade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book that show Priya has done a lot of research. It would have been more interesting if it had covered a variety of guns.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that does not quite succeed at what it sets out to do. The author adopts a somewhat Marxist approach to the industrial revolution by pointing to the centrality of the arms manufacturing and trade to the industrial revolution and thinks that this discredits the effort and makes the UK and other nations look bad for industrializing in a way that was so heavily dependent on warfare and imperialism. On the contrary, though, this vindicates at least some degree of military preparedness and imperialism as a defense for nations against others. After all, if we can rely on other nations engaging in efforts to increase their own military capacity and their economic capacity in such a way that it serves military ends, how can we avoid matching suit, lest we become prey as India did and as it is likely to do again against China unless it improves itself dramatically. The author seems not to realize the implications of the work, thinking mainly to defend one Quaker who had run afoul of his brethren as they decreased their interest in pragmatic arguments and thought of themselves as more idealistic, not realizing the complicity that society had in general for supporting imperialism and militarism in the 17th century state. But what if one need not necessarily oppose those things at all, but accepted them as part of the price for living in a dangerous world full of threats? In that case, one need not attack imperialism or militarism or the arms manufacturing trade at all. One could merely accept such things as necessary in a fallen world and be done with it.

This book is a bit more than 400 pages and is divided into ten chapters and three parts, of considerable size. The book begins with a preface and an introduction. After that the author explores the industrial life of guns (I) with a look at the state and the gun industry between 1688 and 1756 (1) as well as between 1756 and 1815 (3), looks at who made guns (2), and also discusses the relationship between the state, war, and the industrial revolution (4). After that the author discusses the social life of guns (II), with a look at guns and money, including guns as money (5), guns in arms both at home in the UK (6) and abroad (7), where the author connects the desire to limit gun manufacturing in India and other places to increase profit for arms manufacturers and to decrease their ability to resist imperialism as being related to each other. The author then turns to look at the moral life of guns (III), with a discussion of Galton's disownment by idealistic Quakers in 1795 (8), the gun trade after 1815 (9), and the opposition to the gun trade as being based on selective memory and ignorance (10), after which the book ends with acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

This book tells a sprawling tale of the development of the relationship between the government of the UK and its arms manufacturers, in which dispersion to pit various manufacturers against each other to increase flexibility and control was also matched by an understanding of the limited profits involved in the trade and the ensuring that the government benefited from high quality weapons while preserving its security at the same time. The author also spends some useful time discussing the culture of guns and the fear of having an armed populace that was largely politically powerless. The contrast between the UK and the US in this regard is immensely instructive, given that America's republican experiment has largely been preserved to this point because of its armed populace and that a populace concerned about protecting dignity and property is one that is willing to use guns not only to kill but also to intimidate. And, again, this is not a bad thing. In seeking to make an anti-gun and anti-imperial book, the author managed, by being true to the historical record, to make a book that encourages both. If this is not exactly a success as the author may view it, it does make for an interesting and very worthwhile read.

[AndPeggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well written book that I’m not sure lived up to its promise of directly examining the role of state and trade-company armament needs to the technological advances of the industrial revolution. The book spends a great deal of time examining the changing views of guns, their uses, and their value; and early examinations of what might constitute participation in the military-industrial complex in an increasingly interlinked and global economy that depended on part in subcontracting for individual items and in which military might was used to secure European trading, banking, and colonial interests.

At points the book becomes tedious with long lists of names, marriages between gun and metal producing families, and repetition of various gun parts that were subcontracted for separately. The book jumps back and forth in time sometimes and focuses largely on the work of a few families and the development of their businesses over time as the needs of the British Empire for weapons changed. The examination of changing Quaker views on gun production and being enriched as a result of warfare and imperialism. Of great interest were the passages regarding how guns were used in the colonies and the way they shaped colonial culture.

[Patrick Moloney · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a good book. The beginning is the best part: Starts with the Galton family to make the debate personal, then moves to broader context w/ the Ordnance Office as a behemoth. Great use of Adam Smith as critic to remind us his ideas were in the minority. First section of the book was pretty impressive and well argued. You get the sense that an economic history of Britain is incomplete without war, even if it isn't clear that anyone is arguing that within the discipline. This is how I recall the section being taught in classes though so I learned a lot.

Second and third sections break the mold that made the first section so good. It is not always chronological, it jumps around a lot and it doesn't have this vice grip that the first section did. The data isn't as concrete in the second section (discusses how violence is experienced) and it left me wanting to read more about British crime before guns to learn about the culture there.

Third section was a race to a modern political argument. It was missing the stuff I liked and was really fast compared to the Galton part. It felt like two separate books, and based on the stuff in here it seems like you either like Part 1 or Parts 2/3.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the years 1973-1974 I read, side by side, William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. They weren't exactly about the same thing, but their stories meshed in such a way that I felt as if one elucidated the other and vice versa. Although I did not read Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle side by side with Empire of Guns, it was still fresh enough in my mind to provide some crossover insights into the particular time spanned by both works.
It has long been obvious that many, especially politicians of certain stripes, see the modern nation-state of the United States of America as heir to the British Empire of which it was once a part and all but duty bound to repeat each and every mistake that precursor made. Books such as this one, Jill Lepore's These Truths, and Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States bring that connection further into the spotlight.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read this year. This is a big reframing of the industrial revolution, arguing that gun manufacturing (backed by massive state demand and support) led led the way for most of the social and financial processes that we typically associate with industrialization and other industries such as textiles that we often associate with the origins of the industrial revolution followed afterwards. It also provides an interesting commodity history of the early gun industry as their wares flowed throughout the British empire, and intellectual history of what kind of thing a gun was thought to be in the 17th and 18th centuries and how their proliferation changed the ways that Europeans thought about and practiced violence

[Ron Nurmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author makes the claim and backs it up with evidence that gun making was a major component of the development of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It is a story that needs to have been told and aids in our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. She uses the Galton family of Birmingham as a case study in how gun-making helped develop the industrialization of Britain.

In the last chapter "Opposition to the Gun Trade after 1815," she shows her anti-gun views and I think it detracts from the book as to me does not add to the story of how guns aided in the industrialization of Britain.

This is a book well worth reading!