A revolutionary new understanding of how the gun trade facilitated the expansion of the British Empire and changed the course of world history.

History teaches that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural economy to one dominated by industry and machine, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the centre of the world.

In Empire of Guns, prize-winning historian Priya Satia argues that – far from the bucolic image of cotton mills that define popular perception – the true root of economic and imperial expansion was the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war. Through in-depth research, Satia journeys into the past by exploring the life of prominent Birmingham gun-maker and Quaker, Samuel Galton. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with the pragmatism of the times, he argued that the inescapable profitability of conflict meant all members of an industrialised economy were irrefutably complicit in war.

Empire of Guns expertly brings to life a bustling industrial society with a human story at its heart to offer a radical new understanding of a critical historical moment and all that followed from it.