How did a family of ardent pacifists become Britain’s leading gun manufacturers? How did conscientious British officials convince themselve...
How did a family of ardent pacifists become Britain’s leading gun manufacturers? How did conscientious British officials convince themselves that they had to stand by and let millions of Indians die of hunger, in famines that were largely caused by colonial policies?
Questions of this kind recur often in the work of Priya Satia. In her seminal 2019 book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, Satia, who is a professor of British and International History at Stanford, addressed them by focusing on a single family, the Galtons of Birmingham. Through the eighteenth century and a part of the nineteenth, the Galtons were England’s most successful gun manufacturers and a major presence in Britain’s economy, and in its intellectual life, being closely connected, for example, with the Darwins. The family was also one of the driving forces of the Industrial Revolution because of its close connections with the British state, for which it served as a major provider of arms.
From the late seventeenth century onwards Britain was almost continuously engaged in wars in North America and Asia, in many of which it was pitted against other European powers. The British government’s insatiable appetite for military matériel, and pressure from its European...
