Empire of Guns

February 5, 2018
Stanford history professor Satia (Spies in Arabia) hastily probes the relationship between war and industrialization in 18th-century Britain using the story of Samuel Galton Jr., a prominent Birmingham gun manufacturer. In 1795, Galton was accused by his fellow Quakers of promoting an immoral trade in the manufacturing of guns. In response, Galton claimed that gun-making could not be isolated from the British industrial economy of the time—which had grown out of Britain’s nearly continuous state of war over the past century. Satia uses Galton’s defense as a window into the central role of the arms industry in precipitating the Industrial Revolution. She goes on to argue that indeed it was changes in the nature of violence and the social role of guns in the age of British imperialism that provided the impetus for state-driven industrialization. Yet she provides little evidence for her sweeping claims, failing to address the fact that perpetual warfare was a reality for all European states during the era, not just Britain, and paying scant attention to shifts in agricultural production and demography that were critical to industrial takeoff. Nor does she engage with scholars who argue that the state served as a barrier, rather than an impetus, to industrialization. This book eschews the big picture for a series of stylized historical set pieces.