Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution

540 Pages·2018·13.87 MB·English

by  Priya Satia

PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2018 by Priya Satia
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes
free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this
book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any
part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to
continue to publish books for every reader.
Image credits appear here.
ISBN: 9780735221864 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780735221871 (ebook)
Version_1
For Kabir and Amann
So she followed her red-coats, whatever they did,
From the heights of Quebec to the plains of Assaye,
From Gibraltar to Acre, Cape Town and Madrid,
And nothing about her was changed on the way;
(But most of the Empire which we now possess
Was won through those years by old-fashioned Brown Bess.)
RUDYARD KIPLING, “Brown Bess: The Army Musket, 1700–1815” (1911)
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
Part One
THE INDUSTRIAL LIFE OF GUNS
1. The State and the Gun Industry, Part 1: 1688–1756
2. Who Made Guns?
3. The State and the Gun Industry, Part 2: 1756–1815
4. The State, War, and Industrial Revolution
Part Two
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF GUNS
Interlude: A Brief Lesson from African History
5. Guns and Money
6. Guns in Arms, Part 1: Home
7. Guns in Arms, Part 2: Abroad
Part Three
THE MORAL LIFE OF GUNS
Interlude: A Brief Account of the Society of Friends
8. Galton’s Disownment
9. The Gun Trade after 1815
10. Opposition to the Gun Trade after 1815
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index
About the Author
Preface
M
y father is from Muktsar, Punjab, a town just on the Indian side
of the border with Pakistan. That border was drawn in 1947,
when he was four years old, as part of the subcontinent’s
independence from British rule. Through various commercial, industrial,
and agricultural pursuits, his father, Des Raj Satia, slowly acquired a
great deal of land in and around Muktsar. Indian Punjab was itself
divided in 1967 according to new state lines, and Des Raj—“Baoji,” we
called him—was unsure what would ensue, going by his experience of the
Partition of 1947. So, partly to insure against the risk of displacement, he
sent one of his five sons to the new state of Haryana, one to neighboring
Rajasthan, one to Delhi, and one to the United States: my father. One
son, Bharat, stayed in Muktsar, along with Baoji’s younger brother Balraj
and Balraj’s two sons. (This schematic narration condenses into two
sentences a host of accidents, acts of personal courage, ambition, and
confusions. It also writes out of the story Baoji’s two daughters. But in the
manner of a fable, we will allow it.)
My brother recently attended the latest court hearing about our family
property in Muktsar. He brought back for me a copy of Baoji’s will, dated
1970 and signed by Baoji, my grandmother Shanti Devi, and Balraj, each
in a different script (Persian, Devanagari, and Roman). Despite this
document, upon Baoji’s death in 1983, the family fought over the
disposition of his property. Bharat claimed everything in and around
Muktsar on the basis of having been the only one who had stayed and
endured Punjab’s descent into nightmarish political and military conflict
during the late seventies and eighties. Bharat’s brothers, Balraj, and
Balraj’s sons challenged his claim. As the struggle over hundreds of acres
unfolded, the strip of land dividing Bharat’s and Balraj’s homes in
Muktsar became a daily irritant between the households. Guns were part
of the martial frontier culture encouraged in this region during British
rule, and Bharat had always talked and acted tough as a youth. As
tempers boiled, finally, in 1991, he stood in the contested garden and
aimed his revolver at Balraj, threatening to shoot. Exactly what followed
remains obscure. Certainly, he fired several shots, and Balraj fought for
his life for three months in hospital. I have seen photos my father later
took of bullet marks in the garden wall. A cold war between the
neighboring families unfolded thereafter as a property settlement
continued to elude the family.
Bharat’s wife and son were at his side when he pulled the trigger. His
wife later described to me how he shook as he pointed the gun, insisting
that he meant only to intimidate his uncle. To her, he had shot his uncle
despite himself. But her own and their son’s presence at Bharat’s side
during the standoff also raises questions: If he was shaking, did they goad
him? Or restrain him? I know that my uncle Bharat alone was responsible
for nearly killing his uncle, but from what I recall of his temperament, I
cannot shake the feeling that he would not have physically assaulted his
uncle had he had recourse only to a knife. He was too afraid; he was all
bluster, without the malignant emotional energy required for such an
intimate attack. But pulling a trigger was thinkable in a different manner.
The gun changed what he was capable of; he meant it to terrorize his
uncle and keep him off his property. I can imagine him that day, against
the backdrop of an increasingly militant Punjab, casting himself in a
script in which the gun was a prop that he waved to instantly cast his
uncle in the role of common trespasser, alienating their familial bond into
a contest between strangers. (In court, to protect his wayward nephew,
Balraj said he had shot himself accidentally while cleaning his gun,
reaffirming the severed bond.) By shaping his actions, the gun made
Bharat, just as someone had made the gun. As I wrote this book, I
recalled this scene in the garden time and again. The script by which
Bharat’s revolver figured in our family land dispute came to him through
culture. Through this book, I have found one of its origins in the
eighteenth century, when, in some places in the world, guns found their
first role in interpersonal violence through contests over property in
societies of strangers. This incident, its backdrop of provincial turmoil, its
lasting legacy, the cotton industry that produced much of Baoji’s wealth—
this family history has shaped my investigation of the British gun trade
and the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.
Perhaps my memory of the shooting in the Muktsar garden was
subconsciously at play when I stumbled on the curious story of a Quaker
arms-making family in the eighteenth century, the Galtons. As I looked
through the Galton records in the Birmingham City Archive, I discovered
a point of view that seemed to me to upend received wisdom about the
industrial revolution, and so, partly by accident and partly by will, I
hunkered down for a long spell in the eighteenth century and communion
with the troubles of another extended family—every unhappy family
being unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy tells us.
But I have also written this book in a time of mass shootings in the
United States. My daughter was in first grade when the Sandy Hook
shooting happened, in December 2012. My heart broke like everyone
else’s, five years into my study of guns in the eighteenth-century British
Empire. My investigation into the place of guns in that world showed me
that their uses are not fixed, but change with time and place. There were
no casual shootings in Britain until suddenly, because of cultural shifts
inaugurated by the Napoleonic Wars, there were. Likewise, the shooting
in my family was not unrelated to the violence that tore up Punjab in the
1980s, and the mass shootings of our time are not unrelated to the war on
terror. Culture and technology produce each other. Like all my work on
empire and technologies of violence, this book is against militarism and
imperialism. Some might be tempted to take its conclusion—that war was
foundational to modern industrial life—as approbation of war, but my
point is rather that this finding should give us pause in our embrace of
that life and in our tolerance for the vast international trade in arms
today.
It raises the question of how far complicity in war stretches in
different times and places. When guns became central to eighteenth-
century violence in a new way in the 1790s, the Quaker church demanded
that the Galtons abandon their century-long investment in the gun trade.
Samuel Galton Jr. went to great lengths to explain that it was not so easy
to distance oneself from investment in war; apart from the difficulty of
passing on his business, almost any other industrial activity he might
pursue in its place would be similarly, if less directly, complicit in war.
We continue to face such dilemmas. After Sandy Hook, the investment
firm Cerberus Capital Management publicly pledged to sell Remington
Outdoor, the company that made the Bushmaster rifle that the shooter