How a Quaker gunmaker shaped Britain's gun industry.
We are proud to present an excerpt from the paperback edition of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia.
For more than 125 years, between 1688 and 1815, Britain was in a state of more or less constant war. The British gun industry was vital to the kingdom’s survival. In 1795, however, during war with revolutionary France, one of the British government’s regular gun suppliers, Samuel Galton Jr. of Birmingham, became the subject of scandal. Galton was a Quaker and a prominent, if not the prominent, gunmaker in England. The Quaker church, the Religious Society of Friends, had silently accepted his family business for nearly a century, but now suddenly demanded he abandon it. Their censure forced Galton to defend himself publicly. At the core of his defense were two related claims: first, that everyone in the Midlands, including fellow Quakers, in some way contributed to the state’s war-making powers; he was no worse than the copper supplier, the taxpayer, or the thousands of skilled workmen manipulating metal into everything from buttons to pistol springs for the king’s men. Second, like other metalware, guns were instruments of civilization as much as war, as essential to preserving private property in a society of increasingly mobile strangers as doorknobs and hinges. Galton saw himself as part of a military-industrial society in which there was little, if any, economic space outside the war machine and in which the paraphernalia of war doubled as the paraphernalia of civilization based on property. He took the Society of Friends’s easy tolerance of his family business up to 1795 as evidence in support of his case. Was there any merit in Galton’s view? Was Britain’s emerging industrial economy actually a military economy? And if it was, why did the Society of Friends suddenly find that reality intolerable in 1795?
The backdrop of the industrial revolution as told here is not the whims of calico fashion but the Nine Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The story of Britain’s transformation from a predominantly agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture—the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution—is typically anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses. The British state has little to do in this version of the story. For more than two hundred years, that image has powerfully shaped how we think about stimulating sustained economic growth—development—the world over. But it is wrong: state institutions drove Britain’s industrial revolution in crucial ways. Galton was right: war made the industrial revolution.
Britain was involved in major military operations for eighty-seven of the years between 1688 and 1815, declaring war against foreign powers no fewer than eight times. At any given time, Britain was either at war, making preparations for war, or recovering from war. Even in peacetime, contemporaries assumed war was imminent, or at least that government should act as if it were so. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and subsequent conflicts took place on a vastly expanded scale, too, involving entire societies and economies and posing unprecedented logistical problems that utterly dwarfed civilian enterprise. With British troops mobilized for most of the century, Parliament’s famed antipathy to a standing army was more or less incidental. War was the norm in this period. And it shaped the economy; that’s why radical Britons called military contracting and its system of parasitical elite partnerships with the state “Old Corruption.” The state was the single most important factor in the economy, the largest borrower and spender and employer. Its minions advanced into civil society to clothe, feed, and arm the expanding army, stimulating domestic output and innovation. Contractors supplied ships, powder, arms, shot, foodstuffs, uniforms, beer, drivers, horses, and more. The state was a consuming entity, supporting private industry through bulk purchases at critical times. It cut a wide swath as a consumer, literally investing Britons in its war making.
And yet no one has explained how constant war impinged on the grand economic narrative of the time, the industrial revolution. The backdrop of the industrial revolution as told here is not the whims of calico fashion but the Nine Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In the foreground are the members of the Galton family, proprietors of the single biggest gun-manufacturing firm in Britain, the largest suppliers of guns to the British state and major suppliers of the East India Company and the commercial arms trade to West Africa, North America, and other parts of the growing empire.
The Quaker church, known for its belief in the un-Christian nature of war, said nothing about these mammoth pursuits until the sudden rebuke of 1795. This long silence says something about the common sense about guns and gun manufacture up to that year, encapsulated in Galton’s public defense of his life as a Quaker gunmaker: in the emerging industrial economy, there was no way to avoid contributing to the state’s war-making powers. He was part of an economic universe devoted to war making, in which guns were also essential to the spread of a civilization based on property. But by 1795, that common sense was shifting: guns suddenly had become objectionable commodities to Quakers. This was partly because just then, during Britain’s long wars against France between 1793 and 1815, they were acquiring a new role in interpersonal violence that was no longer defensible as preservation of property. Suddenly, guns looked bad, and gunmaking worse. Galton tried in vain to remind fellow Quakers of wider investments in war and of guns’ centrality to the rule of property. But there was too much at stake in industrial capitalism by then for him to win the argument about its collectively scandalous nature. The arms maker morphed from a morally unremarkable participant in industrialization to a uniquely villainous merchant of death. And our memory of industrial revolution became one of pacific genius unbound. But Galton’s defense opens a window onto past convictions, and looking through it helps us understand that the British state’s colossal demand for war matériel made it a major driving force of the industrial revolution and helped guns find a central place in modern violence.
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