Empire of Guns is already necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand industrialization, global trade, and the historical origins of gun culture. While most scholarship on the Industrial Revolution tends to view war as an aberration to industrial development, Priya Satia argues that it played the central role. Satia's introduction immediately makes this role clear by highlighting the connection between Quakerism and the military economy and highlighting the year 1795, when Quaker gunmaker and government gun supplier Samuel Galton Jr. suddenly had to defend his actions. Quakers had long contributed to Britain's war industry, but the scope and scale of violence in the late eighteenth century prompted a moral reckoning. Satia persuasively interprets the Quaker critique of Galton's gunmaking, and his continued participation in the trade, as emblematic of the rise of industrial capitalism and its connection with imperialism. It was the result of incremental human choices and moral sacrifices; the Galton family was but one subunit of the British imperial state in which these sacrifices around gunmaking, slave trading, and warfare became normalized. The introduction also illustrates Satia's contribution to scholarship on the history of capitalism. Although she does not engage explicitly with recent scholarship, she points out shortcomings of both Adam Smith's advocation for the role of self-interest in economic growth and J. A. Hobson's critique of the state's privileging of sectional over national interest in imperial capitalism. Smith lamented the cost of war; Hobson ignored its generative function. Capitalism, however, made possible, and was made possible by, the global gun trade.
Empire of Guns is divided into sections on the industrial, social, and moral lives of guns. Chapter 1 begins in 1688, just before Galton's ancestors started manufacturing guns. The Glorious Revolution cemented the military revolution's relationship between government and society. England's new Protestant king depended on private finance to fuel the violent expansion of Protestantism and wage a global war against Catholic France. As William III responded to Parliament's desires to challenge monopolies, the state cultivated ties to new manufacturers. In response to Ordnance Office trials, “the Company of Gunmakers in Birmingham” was established and Birmingham, long a hub of metalworking, replaced London as England's premier arms-making city. Galton's grandfather Joseph Farmer, a Quaker ironmonger from Bristol, moved to Birmingham in 1702 to participate in the growing gun trade, which supplied England's imperial ventures, including Native American warfare and the transatlantic slave trade. It mattered little that Farmer was not an established gunmaker because, as Satia notes in her second chapter (titled “Who Makes Guns?”), there was no such thing as “an identifiable ‘gunmaker’ until gunmaking had long been established among the town's many varieties of metal manufacturing” (p. 68). The gun industry relied on an extensive network of craftsmen, laborers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and materials. Like the slave trade, it functioned because so many individuals were complicit.
The firm Farmer & Galton allows us to understand this complicity. Satia tracks their activities through more than a hundred years of England's wars and colonial settlements, international commerce, and banking to reveal the who, where, and how of the gun trade. Her impressive source base of parliamentary papers, trade statistics, family papers, Ordnance records, business correspondence, and travel accounts allows her to identify with precision the forward and backward linkages of the trade, such as the metal industries and naval yards, and to offer specific business details about particular firms, such as the Crowley family's decision to keep their nail manufactory's economy of scale small and the Ordnance Office's decision to trade standardization for mass supply. These sources also fill out the social, cultural, and personal contexts of the gun trade, such as Samuel Galton Sr.'s inability to travel to London for business because of his wife's postpartum depression, Galton Jr.'s marriage to the daughter of banker David Barclay and involvement in the Lunar Society, and Quaker opposition to hunting. This context is especially instructive for the use of guns themselves. Satia excels at explaining how guns functioned not only as weapons but as money, property, and symbols. In one of the book's “interludes,” she pieces together “uncertain and fragmentary evidence” to explore why Britons were so confounded by the “mystery” of guns in Africa, which included their use as tools of ritual (p. 187).
While the book revolves around the Galton family and firearms, chapter 4 (“The State, War, and Industrial Revolution”) widens the lens and most fully explicates Satia's argument about the centrality of war for industrialization. War against France, for example, not only eased Galton Sr.'s anxieties over his brother's reckless business decisions by generating new demand but also generated the major developments of the Industrial Revolution: puddling, the steam engine, and copper sheathing. The state subsidized scientific inquiry and industrial experimentation as it cooperated and competed with private producers to fuel violent imperial expansion. Britain was not exceptional in its drive for industrialization, Satia argues, but it surpassed other nations in its imperial ambition and industrial capability. The responsibility of war-making imperialism for Britain's industrial advantage might have been even clearer if Satia had done a little more to theorize “empire,” but even still, she ultimately demonstrates that Britain excelled in cultivating networks of personal and family connections, finance, and industrial and scientific resources to “quash industrial advance elsewhere” (p. 179).
The last two chapters take us well beyond Galton Jr.'s death in 1832. Britain lost some of its control of the international gun trade as it had to contend with the American system of manufactures. Preeminent American arms maker Samuel Colt opened a factory in London, and British producers exported gun parts to the United States. Satia draws parallels to present-day gun rights advocates and Galton's defense of the “innocence of the gun” in comparison to other social ills such as mental health (p. 407). She ends with a reference to Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Arms Company fortunes and one of the subjects of Pamela Haag's The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (2016). Winchester was haunted by the deaths caused by the Winchester rifle, “yet invested” in its ubiquity, much like our current gun culture (p. 410).
It is impossible to do justice to such a comprehensive and thought-provoking book that will appeal to general readers and scholars alike. It is a welcome companion to recent works that connect imperialism, industry, and morality. Satia's analysis of the relationships between warfare and industrial capitalism complements Sven Beckert's “war capitalism” (Empire of Cotton: A Global History [2014]), while her examination of the uses, meanings, and production of firearms contributes to the growing canon of critical scholarship on firearms, such as David Silverman's Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (2016), Haag's The Gunning of America, and Ken Alder's Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (2010). The influence of Empire of Guns on the scholarship of industrialization is sure to rival that of the firearms’ on global capitalism.
