How the gun industry shaped Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and what it means for the gun debate today
By Irene Kim, Stanford undergraduate student studying International Relations
In Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, Priya Satia, professor of British history at Stanford, tells the story of a Quaker gunmaking family, the Galtons, to explore the British empire’s emergence as a global power, the origins of the state’s economic growth, and the roots of the current debates on gun control and the military-industrial complex. Below, Professor Satia, answers a few questions about her new book.
What sparked your interest in this subject about the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution? What inspired you to write this book?
I was already working on the British Empire, but I had not planned to write a book on the Industrial Revolution. I was planning on writing a book on arms trading and then, I went through the records of early gun makers and traders that took me to Birmingham- an important center of gun making in England in the 18th century. That’s where I found the story of the Galton family — the single biggest gun making firm in that period. They were Quakers and that was interesting to me. To my understanding, their profession went against Quaker principle, and sure enough, there was a controversy about this at the time. I found a printed defense that Samuel Galton II wrote about why it was alright, according to his conscience, that he was involved in this industry. What he said made me think about how we need to revise our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. According to Galton, anything he did as a participant in Birmingham’s regional economy would also contribute to war. He thought that war was driving the economy, and that whatever else he did might be less directly related to war, but ultimately, would still be related. I began to wonder — what if he was right? Britain was constantly at war during this period, and the industrial revolution happens at the same time. People don’t see these phenomena as related. But what if Galton was right and we need to tell a different story?
Why did you choose to use the personal anecdote of Samuel Galton to illustrate this story?
It is interesting to think about a Quaker arms maker. To make sense of that was really intriguing and a scholarly challenge for me. But also, we have a habit when we talk about the arms industry to pin it all on these villainous figures, the arms makers who make deals in dark rooms with politicians — and sometimes these people are truly villainous. But what Galton is saying is that everyone is complicit. Maybe he’s more complicit in making things that propagate violence, but in other ways, many other people are also complicit. So, it’s easier to point fingers at villains and say that the rest of industrial capitalism is okay and morally sound, but Galton is saying something a little more challenging to think through. If it’s true that industrialism has always been about war, and we are all participating in that, then what do we do? That’s an open question that I hope the story illustrates.
Do you believe the success of the Industrial Revolution could have occurred without the prosperous gun trade?
In that time, people did think that there was a connection between arms manufacturing and industrialism. So, Galton perceived that connection and I found that British officials in the East India Company also thought that there was a connection between arms making and industrialism. There were arms making traditions within India at the time, and these East India Company officials worked really hard to smother and suppress those traditions, out of a fear that if they didn’t, India might undergo an industrial transformation that would make it difficult for British manufactured products there and jeopardize the colonial relationship. So, I certainly think that without those wars driving industrial change at that period, maybe there would have been more industrialism in more parts of the world at the same time. The fact that it’s only in Britain that this revolution happened has a lot to do with the fact that it was tied up with wars of colonial conflict. So, I would say that there probably would have been less dramatic change in Britain, maybe not a revolution but a more gradual introduction of industrialism, and that it would have been more evenly spread in other parts of the world.
Did a similar relationship between the gun trade and the Industrial Revolution occur on a global scale?
The Industrial Revolution was exclusively a British phenomenon. Now, in many parts of the world, there is a belief that arms industries are good for “development.” Right now, the Indian government is really earnestly trying to create a fully-fledged Indian defense industry and reaching out to American companies to partner with them on the understanding that it’ll be really good for India’s economic development. President Trump boasts about arms deals and how good they can be for particular economies in certain states, like Michigan. You hear similar rhetoric in the UK and other places.
In what ways does this story relate to the current gun control debate in the United States? How has this influenced your thinking on the current debate?
In quite a few ways. In one way, I think understanding what 18th century guns were like is important for understanding the 2nd Amendment and what arms existed at the time that it was trying to regulate. When we see how different firearms are now and the different ways we use them, it becomes clear that we need different kinds of regulations than what 18th century people needed. Firearms in England during that period were not used for crimes of passion — they were too slow and unreliable for that. It would take a long time to load and fire up the gun, and you wouldn’t know what would happen if you fired it. We do use firearms for crimes of passion now. Since guns were made and used differently back then, we should have different regulations for them now.
The second thing is that there has been a lot of misinformation about the extent of gun ownership in Britain in the 18th century. Because of the way our debate has been set up since 2008 (the Heller Supreme Court decision), if we can show that gun regulation has roots in the common law (18th century British law), then it is deemed constitutional. But there has been misinformation out there saying that there was little regulation of gun ownership in 18th century Britain. This is simply not true. Something my book tries to do is show that there was a lot of regulation of who could own a gun in the 18th century. This is not a society in which everyone was armed; it was an entitlement of the rich to own guns. Rioters, for example, were never armed with guns — they used rocks and torches.
The third thing is the point about complicity. The gun control movement is struggling with this right now by boycotting different businesses that have relationships with the National Rifle Association (NRA). But there are so many businesses and sectors of the economy that are complicit in what firearms manufacturers do: banks, media companies, insurance companies, retailers… How much do we have to boycott to be effective in achieving the goal of limiting the influence of firearms companies in our society, culture and politics? The story about the 18th century guns industry makes it clear that widespread complicity is historical. From the beginning, arms making has been at the core of our modern economy.
The last thing is that from the beginning, the problem for arms makers has been that they depend on government contracts. What we’ve seen historically is that governments like the British government would find ways to support firearms makers in peacetime, so that they wouldn’t disappear when the government did need them again in the next war. The British government helped firearms makers sell guns abroad in India, Africa, America, and so on. I think even today, that’s important to the survival of firearms makers. One reason why the American civilian market became so important for today’s gun industry is that there are tighter gun control markets in other parts of the world, creating fewer and fewer places where gunmakers can sell their goods. Therefore, the American market is important for arms makers, which makes it even harder to create better gun control regulation in America. There is a global story here that this book can help us understand and give us the early roots of that dynamic.
How does this book inform the way we think about the current relationship between the government and the military and the lucrative defense industry?
From the beginning, industrialism has been about war. Galton perceived a military-industrial society, in which everyone in some small way contributed to this — even by paying taxes. In the late 19th century, with the rise of corporations and concentration of industries, it becomes more concentrated and you see something like a military industrial complex — what President Eisenhower identified during the Cold War. I think that’s what we still have. But, in some ways it’s helpful to think about something more diffuse — a military industrial society, as well as a military-industrial complex. We are all co-opted into that work. The rise of Silicon Valley, for example, depended on defense needs generated during the Cold War. There is a “complex,” but it’s also much wider than that and we are playing some role in it.
How did you approach your research for the book? What kinds of sources did you use — archival, primary?
I went to lots of archives: the Birmingham City Archives, which have the Galton family archives and the archives of Matthew Boulton and other gun makers and industrialists; the National Archives of Britain for government office papers; East India Company records in New Delhi.
I also used many published primary sources, looking at different travel accounts and fictional and nonfictional accounts from the period of how guns were used and how they fit into British culture at the time. Also, I looked at the archives of the Birmingham Friends House, the Religious Society of Friends in Birmingham, and Friends House in London. I looked at the records of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers, the organized guild of gunmakers around the Tower of London, and their papers in the Guildhall Library in London. Also, lot of pamphlets at the Huntington Library, commenting on disarmament policies, as well as the huge secondary literature on the Industrial Revolution.
