My ECONS101 class discussed the Industrial Revolution in class last week, focusing on why it happened first in England, rather than France or China or elsewhere. By coincidence, I was just finishing up reading the book Empire of Guns by Priya Satia. A conventional view of factors underlying the Industrial Revolution in England, such as the explanation by the economic historian Bob Allen, focuses on the role of changes in wages and coal prices, and individual entrepreneurship and invention. Satia instead focuses on the role of government in driving investment in manufacturing, and in particular the manufacturing of guns. As Satia explains:
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.
The book moves through four sections, motivated by a story of Samuel Galton Jr. (grandfather of the statistician and eugenicist Francis Galton), and a disagreement with his fellow Quakers over his gun-making business (which was inconsistent with the Quakers' ethic of nonviolence). In the first section, Satia tells the story of the British gun trade from 1688 to 1815. The second section then discusses how guns "migrated from being an instrument of terror specifically relevant to contests over property to a weapon for new kinds of impersonal violence on the battlefield and in the streets". The third section takes the story up to the present, looking at how failures to regulate gun manufacture and trade has "distorted the theory and practice of economic development".
The book is exhaustively researched, with 67 pages of endnotes and an extensive bibliography. However, with so much material at hand, it can be difficult to keep the narrative flowing. Satia falls into this trap, with the same ground covered from multiple angles in several sections of the book. It is difficult to see how this could be avoided, but I found it distracting. The text is also quite dense and at times overly descriptive, again as can be expected given the large amount of source material. This is definitely not a lightweight and breezy treatment of its topic.
I did learn some interesting things from the book. For example, 'trade guns' were a common form of 'money', when coins and other mediums of exchange were scarce. However, guns were not a perfect form of money, as:
...guns' market value and metallic content made them a practical monetary instrument, but their perishability undermined both those sources of value, reducing them to mere commodities after all.
Given the focus on the (British) trade in guns, I was also disappointed to see only a single mention of the musket wars in New Zealand. Satia notes that it:
...consumed large quantities of British guns, killing a third to a half the Maori population.
That aspect of the story is left at that. I may be biased, but that sentence alone screams for some further exposition. I wasn't really convinced by the last section of the book either. Like the earlier sections, it was interesting, but in my view, it lacked a strong narrative thread and seemed more like a collection of related anecdotes.
Overall, this book would be a good read for a student of history, particularly those interested in a broader understanding of the context of the Industrial Revolution. But for others with a more general interest in history or economic history, there are better and more readable book-length treatments available.