PublishedDuckworth, August 2018 |
ISBN9780715653043 |
FormatHardcover, 544 pages |
Dimensions24.2cm × 16cm |
The revolutionary new understanding of how the gun trade facilitated the expansion of the British Empire and changed the course of world history. History teaches that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry and machine, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the centre of the world.
In Empire of Guns, prize-winning historian Priya Satia argues that far from the bucolic image of cotton mills that define 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. Through in-depth research, Satia elucidates this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker, Samuel Galton. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with the pragmatism of the times, he argued that the inescapable profitability of conflict meant all members of an industrialised economy were irrefutably complicit in war. Through his story, and a detailed study of the British gun trade, Satia illuminates the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control. Empire of Guns expertly brings to life a bustling industrial society with a human story at its heart to offer a radically new understanding of a critical historical moment and all that followed from it. AUTHOR: Priya Satia is a Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East, and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, The Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She received a MSc in Development Studies (Economics) at the London School of Economics and a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Stanford, California with her family.
