Both of these books can be located in the historiographical traditions of several disciplines in the social sciences and humanities that have become increasingly concerned to explore, analyze, and, if possible, accord degrees of significance to connections between warfare and the long-term development of European economies during the era of mercantilism. For this theme—that era punctuated by intervals of warfare—from the times of Charlemagne to Britain’s victories over France at Trafalgar and Waterloo, has been selected by the authors of From Warfare to Wealth: The Military Origins of Urban Prosperity in Europe, as relevant and necessary for the analyzes of long-term economic growth.

The book is predicated on the assumption (congenial to, if not mandatory, for economists) that a range of connections can be parsimoniously modelled and tested cliometrically. For their purposes, both Mark Dincecco and Massimiliano Onorata possess all the credentials required—including advanced skills in econometrics and records of publications displaying scholarly familiarity with the languages and primary statistical sources required to construct databases for research in medieval and early modern European history. Dincecco’s record of publications in European fiscal history is long and widely appreciated by historians with recognized expertise in that period.

After obtaining her Masters degree in Development studies at the LSE, Priya Satia completed a doctorate at Berkeley and published an acclaimed study of Spies in Arabia. The Great War and the Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East. She is currently Professor of History at Stanford. Her second book, Empire of Guns has for readers of this journal a provocative sub-title: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

In an eloquent and moving Preface, she explains why she became personally and intellectually involved with the history of guns and the mercantilist and violent origins of the First Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire into India, Africa, and the Americas. Of Punjabi origin, Priya Satia tells us that she has roots in a family who remained in a province of India that has been seriously afflicted by outbreaks of violence and conflict since the partition of the sub-continent in 1947. As a citizen of the United States she is not only concerned with modern tragedies and debates over gun control in America, but remains emotionally linked to kin who resorted to guns in a conflict over land ownership in the Punjab.

Her excellent and morally uplifting history is probably more likely to attract a readership among those whose interests are with the history of violence and whose concerns will be with Parts 2 and 3. The book is based upon English primary sources from an industry of family firms and artisans who manufactured ever-increasing quantities of guns for the British state before, but particularly during the long eighteenth-century interlude of intensified and persistent geopolitical warfare 1689–1815.

Before 1850 the dramatic expansion of that industry did not, however, depend in any marked degree on the mechanization of production. Over time incremental improvements to the techniques of production and to the range and quality of the industry’s output certainly occurred. Fundamentally, however, its expansion to reach levels of output during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (when England became Europe’s leading manufacturer and exporter of weapons for war) rested upon several inter-related developments that could be classified as a Smithian form of growth. They included first and foremost the formation of a workforce with the range of skills required to transform metals into distinctive parts of weapons that could be assembled into operationally effective muskets, carbines, pistols, bayonets, swords, and daggers. Secondly, the emergence of Birmingham and the West Midlands to rival London as a region in which the production of multiple commodities (including weapons) manufactured from metals became concentrated enough to allow for refined divisions of labor and the horizontal diversification of commodities produced by firms with access to labor whose skills could be reallocated to take advantage of fluctuations in levels of demand for weapons from the state that coincided with interludes of warfare and peace.

Thirdly, the metallurgical industry became horizontally and vertically integrated into a coordinated structure of small and larger firms working in partnership with an efficient department of state (the Ordnance) to produce a range of essential and ever-increasing quantities of weapons required by the army, the navy, local militias, chartered companies engaged in transcontinental trades with Africa, India, China, as well as Britain’s wartime allies on the mainland of Europe and colonial settlers in America, India, and elsewhere. Over more than a century of persistent warfare demand—expanded for defense, coercion, and aggression against foreign foes abroad and for the protection of property rights within the less than united Kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but effectively monitored by a centralized state, coordinated by entrepreneurial merchants and gunmakers, stabilized by horizontal integration, mobilizing artisanal skills in metallurgy—increased the output of weapons manufactured in England at a truly extraordinary rate over the long eighteenth century.

My sense is that in writing her history of The Social and Moral Life of Guns, Priya Satia became interested enough in the historiography of a much wider metanarrative of literature addressing connections between the British states protracted engagement in warfare with European rivals for the gains from trade and imperial expansion in Africa, India, and the Americas and the British economy’s precocious transition to become the world’s first industrial market economy.

Clearly without access to developments in fiscal and financial means as well as the organizational capacities required to mobilize the manpower, weapons, ships, food, clothing, shelter, and other resources required to wage war, Britain could not have emerged in 1815 as Europe’s leading imperial power and in a position of hegemonic command over the oceans of the world—a status which its state maintained and retained until 1941.

Given that historians have now constructed a more or less plausible narrative to explain Britain’s geopolitical rise, the more complex range of connections between that achievement and the early emergence of an enlightened modern economy on the offshore island has recently moved to a position of prominence in debates about the origins of the First Industrial Revolution. Clearly Priya Satia ran into this historiography in the course of her research into the “social and moral life of guns” in English history. She has understandably, but provocatively, widened and lengthened her narrative to embrace an altogether more contentious historiography and to stake her claims (for a place of significance) in that debate by writing a macro-economic introductory survey for Part 1 of a book that has more interesting and original things to say about the history and organization of gun manufacturing in England and the moral and intellectual discourse within and among leading Quaker families who paradoxically made fortunes from investments of money and entrepreneurial skills in the development of an industry supplying states and its wealthy aristocratic elites with weapons of aggression, defense, and protection for their rights to property.

As I will endeavor to argue in the closing section of this review, the multiplicity of connections between warfare and the consolidation of an accumulation of economic gains derived from Britain’s engagement in a “Second Hundred Years of warfare with France and her allies” are difficult to evade even by liberal economists and economic historians who, until recently, have been reluctant (if not ideologically resistant) to admitting violence and coercion into their models designed to explain transitions to modern economic growth. Nevertheless, it will come as no surprise to them to read that after more than a century of more or less unavoidable and profitable public investment in naval and military power, the British economy emerged with the largest and most efficient organizational capacities for the manufacture of weapons and the construction of warships in Europe.

They might, however, be more surprised to note how limited and restricted is the range of examples of technological innovation cited by Priya Satia in her account of factors behind the rise of the Kingdom’s armaments and shipbuilding industries. Of course, guns (but let us add warships for the Royal Navy) were necessary for the preservation of internal order, the security of private property, and the protection of British trade in goods and services with and for markets overseas. Nevertheless, and before the mid-nineteenth century, the albeit rapid increases in the output of warships and weapons was to a large extent based on traditional labor-intensive techniques and modes of production, producing a familiar range of weapons and ships, with modest rates of improvements to their designs and qualities for war after war. Changes in the factor productivities of resources and energy deployed where and when they occurred/emanated from familiar refinements to the division of labor, the dilution of skills, the coordination, organization, and standardization of production. Their expansion was not marked by much that most economic historians would now represent as key factors of early industrial revolutions, namely, accelerated and sustained growth in total factor productivity derived from the deployment of machines powered by steam.

Growth was impressive but also cyclical and highly dependent on naval and military demands for ships and weapons for persistent engagements in warfare. Access by their state to increasing supplies of warships and weapons certainly improved the context and reduced the risks for investment by British capitalists in fixed, circulating, and human capital formation, as well as the process and product innovations behind Britain’s precocious transition to a successful industrial market economy. Nevertheless, the historiography which the author cites, but is inclined to dismiss as mere “nods” from a virtual library of publications on the Industrial Revolution, has, she claims, not “explained” how constant war impinged on the grand narrative of the time.

Evidently she has not read or is not convinced by an array of publications correlating industrialization and warfare to the emergence, after a serious civil war of a political consensus among the elite to establish a well funded naval state in command of fiscal and financial institutions, maintained to fund engagements in geopolitical conflicts with rival powers and with imperialism overseas. Of course, some spinoffs and externalities also occurred from the mobilization of resources for strategic purposes, particularly for the shipbuilding and shipping industries, but little it seems of substantial or enduring significance for the conjunctures that we analyze as Industrial Revolutions. Thus, the empire of guns has not as the author asserts, “assembled a new common sense” about that revolution. Yes, arms “helped” to create “the great divergence between east and west” but only (as we read the literature on that heuristic debate) to a small degree. After the decades of controversy, it has become clear that the weight accorded to factors behind that famous conjuncture resides far more with developments that were endogenous to retardation of the east rather than peculiar to the rise of the west.

Parts 2 and 3 of Priya Satia’s book are, however, eloquently communicated and imaginative historical research into the “social and moral life of guns.” Part 1 is an evocative preface that has added something but nothing definitive to our understanding of the complex and multifaceted connexions between mercantilist warfare and the Industrial Revolution or to the related narratives focussed on the Great Divergence.

For enlightenment social scientists will turn to the “Military Origins of Urban Prosperity” where readers of this journal will find a rigorously specified and tested model which claims to provide an explanation for Europe’s puzzling path from warfare to wealth. Although historians will be impressed by the endeavor to test methodologies and insights derived from textbooks in economic theory to investigate these connexions, for several reasons they will, I predict, find the conclusions less than convincing.

The example that they cite of positive correlations between the growth of national economies and regions is Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in Europe and China, published in 2011 by Jean-Laurent, Rosenthal, and Bin Wong, in a book that is almost bereft of data and short on references to an extensive historical scholarship in European and Chinese urban histories.

This commendably short book by Dinececco and Onorato take their hypotheses into the facts by assembling and calibrating a database in order to demonstrate that the connections between European warfare and the growth of European cities were indeed positively and perhaps significantly connected in ways that led to early and sustained transitions to modern economic growth across the regions and polities of western Europe.

Libraries of books and articles from historical demography, historical geography, economic and urban history could be referenced to support several inter-related hypothesis analyzed econometrically by the Military Origins of Urban Prosperity in Europe. The historiographies of these sub-disciplines of historical scholarship have laid the foundations for the construction of textbooks that have exposed several uncontentious generalizations about connexions between urbanization and economic growth. For example, they all accept a basic fact, namely that urban populations were afflicted by higher rates of mortality than families living, working, and dying in villages and that for centuries the growth of urban settlements depended upon net migration from the countryside. Over roughly the same centuries the protracted interludes and incidence of warfare on the residents of villages and their property probably became more malign than it did for residents of towns whose persons and property were (probably but not measurably) better protected against the violence, diseases, and predation of both enemy and national armies. Furthermore, these ravages of warfare that afflicted Europe’s agrarian and village populations was a factor of unknown (and probably unknowable) significance behind their decisions to migrate and settle in towns despite the higher risks associated with known urban conditions that promoted poor health, disease, and premature death.

Finally, the ensuing concentration and agglomeration in towns among regional and national workforces may be mentioned. They included rising shares of younger, better educated and more entrepreneurial people who enjoyed sufficient surplus incomes to comply with demands for taxes to fund protection while continuing to invest in: human capital formation, the development of institutions, diffuse entrepreneurial cultures, regimes to discover, and the development of the technologies for production and trade, all of which placed European economies on trajectories leading to early transitions to modern economic growth.

Dissatisfied with historical evidence and narratives that simply list and analyze the increasing and relatively malign influence of warfare on the propensities of Europe’s rural populations to migrate and promote the growth to towns, the authors of this book have commendably endeavored to quantify its significance among the multiplicity of “push” and “pull” factors analyzed by students of intra-European internal migration over chronologies that run from circa 1000 to circa 1800. For that purpose they have culled statistics from “canonical” data sources in order to measure:

1. (a) Changes in the size of populations resident in a large sample of European towns at century-long interludes from 800–1750 and 50-year interludes from 1750 to 1800.

2. (b) A sub-sample of that data set consisting of towns likely to have attracted migrants from their rural hinterlands that a single and dated book in military history has recorded as afflicted by exposure to episodes of warfare and violence that occurred up to 150 km from a “town.”

With data sets in place “exposure to warfare” becomes a variable in regressions designed to quantify long-run changes in the populations of European towns attributable to the actual or potential incidence of warfare on the decisions of migrants from rural hinterlands to resettle themselves and their families in the safety of “nearby” towns.

The authors’ skills in econometrics, together with caution in conducting tests for the robustness of their results should inspire nothing but praise for a heroic cliometric endeavor to quantify the relative significance of warfare in promoting or retarding the economic development of a cluster of western European economies. Their methods could certainly be taken forward to allow for the conduct of reciprocal comparisons across western economies, as well as a contribution to more systematic comparisons with levels of urbanization achieved by other sub-continents (including Africa, Russia, India, the Middle East, and above all, China) where the authors presume connections with warfare were of an altogether different order of magnitude than those that their data and regressions have generated for western Europe.

For Europe their claims are not only that the growth of GDP per capita was highly and causally connected to the sub-continent’s relatively high and sustained rates of urbanization, but those rates could be causally and measurably connected to the incidence of pre-modern warfare on its rural populations.

Historians who prefer to explore “ways of knowing” about long-run economic growth by analyzing that complex process along Schumpeterian lines country by country and cycle by cycle, will view the authors’ graph which displays a high degree of correlation among a large sample of countries between their urbanization ratios and GDP’s per capita—reported in that recently exposed ambiguous and contentious numeraire of 2005 international collars for that same year, may well regard it as an impression of linearity and simplicity that is best not conveyed to students.

Perhaps comparable scepticism also holds water for the second more ambitious claim that exposure (or, to be clear, geographical proximity together with immediate experience and/or knowledge of local warfare accounted for approximately 15–20 percent of average per century city population growth in western Europe over the centuries from 1000–1800.

No historian could wish to deny that both the immediate experience or awareness of the risks associated with warfare (particularly the former) formed part of the conditions promoting urbanization over these centuries. But is the evidence assembled and calibrated by Dinececco and Onorato compelling enough to convince us that warfare—via the safe harbor life—was a “main driver” of economic transformation in Europe, the world region in which the process of modern economic development first began? Do their enticing estimates add anything more to the discourse about this connection than an invitation to engage in potentially enlightening historical controversy based upon critiques of this pioneering attempt to measure its significance?

My own scepticism is, however, more widely directed towards reductionist, parsimonious, and linear style of cliometrics that they and other economists are currently deploying to account for the complexities and variance in the range of scholarly case studies and analytical narratives now in print. For reciprocal comparisons of long-term growth contrasts and divergences cannot, however, be encapsulated in the analysis of a single variable ostensibly defined and quantified and labelled as urbanization ratios. Otherwise economic history may well simply concentrate on analyzing factors behind the growth of towns. Among which are, of course, included internal and, presumably, external migrations of people from the countryside. Students of migration who may well have neglected to emphasize the role of warfare in their analyzes of the multiplicity of variables that operated historically on the decisions of people to reside and work in towns will reply that this book’s methodology and model can be read as seriously underspecified in failing to place the experience, knowledge, and apprehensions of risks from warfare among a small number of other variables that does not include differentials in relative real wages, land-labor ratios, prospects for employment and upward mobility, tenurial institutions, provisions for social welfare, and other push and pull factors on the list.

Warfare has a place but its precise significance for purposes of comparison across the regional and national economies of western Europe and for comparisons between Europe and other sub-continents has not been established. The isolation and weighing of variables determining trends in the size of towns depends for large part on proxies and interpolations for urban censuses of population, benchmarked for intervals of a century apart, refers to places with less than 10,000 inhabitants, classified as towns or cities by political and administrative authorities on the basis of designations that varied across space and time. Bairoch et al.’s text is not canonical and could generate numbers, for rates and levels of urbanization that could cross the red line towards an implausible conjecture.

As one would expect this book is an imaginative and heuristic exercise in cliometrics that strains the credibility of the data and methods it deploys to address the most interesting of questions about the economic role of warfare. Whether this turns out to be a heuristic and settled way to providing an answer to such questions as was China too peaceable for its own material welfare remains an open question. How much attention should be paid to the economic impact of warfare on the accelerated growth of towns in Britain during that Kingdom’s prolonged and intense engagement in conflicts with rival powers during the period 1689–1815? Can we explain the retardation of France or the de-industrialization of Italy with this model? Above all, is it not the case that older and less ambitious approaches that depend on the construction of analytical narratives, cost benefit analyzes, war by war, country by country will ultimate expose all that might be plausibly concluded about the impact of warfare on economic growth?