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Trade Paperback
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9781503610484
Overview
Overview
A rich and ambitious history reframing the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the British empire, and the emergence of industrial capitalism as inextricable from the gun trade.
Long before the Glock or AK-47, guns were rather dainty tools for impersonal, even polite, intimidation. In eighteenth-century Britain's increasingly mobile society of strangers, guns protected private property and facilitated foreign trade and conquest. They were material goods not unlike coins or buckles--a bit unreliable and unwieldy, prone to rot and rust, and malleable sources of cash when needed.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. In Empire of Guns, Priya Satia argues that--rather than the bucolic image of cotton mills in popular perception--the true root of economic and imperial expansion was the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war.
A pre-industrial history of the gun from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 through the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, this book traces the social and material life of the gun over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and on the periphery. Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral viability of producing guns as more modern uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with the pragmatism of the times, Galton argued that the inescapable profitability of conflict meant all members of an industrialized economy were irrefutably complicit in war. Through this story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's rationalizations and debates about gun control.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Satia, Priya
- ISBN: 9781503610484
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 9.20 x 1.50
- Number Of Pages: 544
- Publication Year: 2019
Language:
English