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Cargando... Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolutionpor Priya Satia
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A history broken into three parts: a plethora of evidence that displays how the State's want for more land, the war that came of it, and the need for larger and larger number of guns to wage those wars helped create and drive the industrial revolution; how society historically viewed and used guns; the historic morality of gun ownership. Highly recommended. Satia argues that gun manufacturing was central to England’s rise to dominance, not just or even primarily from the use of the guns but from the development of technologies, administrative procedures, and economic relationships out of government gun procurement practices. The Industrial Revolution thus is not about doux-commerce or private enterprise so much as public-private partnership, with gun manufacture and export sustaining domestic industry through economic hard times. Satia centers her story on a Quaker gun manufacturer who defended his business against accusations of lack of peacefulness; he could see guns as compatible with peace by emphasizing the role of guns in trade with Africa and in protecting property. Satia argues that, for the first guns were unpredictable in performance/aim and that their social meaning was initially about war or defense of property against break-ins, rather than on non-property-based interpersonal violence. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as inextricable from the gun trade "A fascinating and important glimpse into how violence fueled the industrial revolution, Priya Satia's book stuns with deep scholarship and sparkling prose."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham, one of Britain's most prominent gunmakers, has been condemned by his fellow Quakers, who argue that his profession violates the society's pacifist principles. In his fervent self-defense, Galton argues that the state's heavy reliance on industry for all of its war needs means that every member of the British industrial economy is implicated in Britain's near-constant state of war. Empire of Guns uses the story of Galton and the gun trade, from Birmingham to the outermost edges of the British empire, to illuminate the nation's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the state's role in economic development, and the origins of our era's debates about gun control and the "military-industrial complex" -- that thorny partnership of government, the economy, and the military. Through Satia's eyes, we acquire a radically new understanding of this critical historical moment and all that followed from it. Sweeping in its scope and entirely original in its approach, Empire of Guns is a masterful new work of history -- a rigorous historical argument with a human story at its heart. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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There are some interesting sections here, such as Satia's analysis of the roles a number of prominent Quaker families—a denomination known for its pacifism—played in the gun industry and how they rationalised their involvement. But for me, those individual parts didn't quite add up to a convincing whole. I'm not an early modernist, so I don't have any particular horse in the race about the extent of and nature of the British state's entanglement with how the Industrial Revolution unfolded. As an Irish person, I'm pretty amenable to the conception of 18/19th century Britain as a fairly militarised/war-oriented state.
But the most empirically-heavy parts of Satia's study are focused on early modern Britain and its colonising activities, and here there wasn't enough sustained comparison with other early modern European states to convince me of the exceptional nature of British economic activities during this period. And in the last part of the book, Satia spends time looking at, shall we call it America's unique relationship with guns, but doesn't really advance an argument for why it should get primacy in a discussion of the British Empire or why things have turned out so differently there as opposed to the U.K., or Ireland, or elsewhere in the former Empire. I'm sympathetic to most if not all of the arguments Satia puts forward here, but they felt part of a different study.
(The audiobook narrator was poor. I could deal with the leaden, lockjaw reading by listening to it at 2x speed, but that couldn't do away with the narrator's frequent mispronunciations. I get that, for e.g., some English placenames don't sound like how they're spelled, but if you're being paid to read a book aloud I think you should make sure you know how to say Ipswich or Norwich or Southwark. But if you render Māori as "May-OHR-ee", I am going to end up replaying that part of the audiobook to listen again in disbelief.) ( )