Priya Satia

Empire of Guns posits that firearms manufacturing was central to the Industrial Revolution and to the rise of the British Empire. Priya Satia argues that it was so as a result of what we would today term a public-private partnership, with the government much more heavily involved in gun manufacturing and by extension the history of the Industrial Revolution than has hitherto been appreciated.

There are some interesting sections here, such as Satia's analysis of the roles a number of prominent Quaker families—a denomination known for its pacifism—played in the gun industry and how they rationalised their involvement. But for me, those individual parts didn't quite add up to a convincing whole. I'm not an early modernist, so I don't have any particular horse in the race about the extent of and nature of the British state's entanglement with how the Industrial Revolution unfolded. As an Irish person, I'm pretty amenable to the conception of 18/19th century Britain as a fairly militarised/war-oriented state.

But the most empirically-heavy parts of Satia's study are focused on early modern Britain and its colonising activities, and here there wasn't enough sustained comparison with other early modern European states to convince me of the exceptional nature of British economic activities during this period. And in the last part of the book, Satia spends time looking at, shall we call it America's unique relationship with guns, but doesn't really advance an argument for why it should get primacy in a discussion of the British Empire or why things have turned out so differently there as opposed to the U.K., or Ireland, or elsewhere in the former Empire. I'm sympathetic to most if not all of the arguments Satia puts forward here, but they felt part of a different study.

(The audiobook narrator was poor. I could deal with the leaden, lockjaw reading by listening to it at 2x speed, but that couldn't do away with the narrator's frequent mispronunciations. I get that, for e.g., some English placenames don't sound like how they're spelled, but if you're being paid to read a book aloud I think you should make sure you know how to say Ipswich or Norwich or Southwark. But if you render Māori as "May-OHR-ee", I am going to end up replaying that part of the audiobook to listen again in disbelief.)… (altro)

Satia 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.… (altro)