Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
Narrated by Kirsten Potter
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About this audiobook
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
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.
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Reviews for Empire of Guns
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Satia 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 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.