Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

*Empire of Guns*

by Tyler Cowen June 19, 2018 at 7:22 am in Books Economics History Law Political Science

The author is Priya Satia, and the subtitle is The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

In fact, there were so many transitions between peace and war that it is difficult to establish what “normal” economic conditions were. Eighteenth-century Europeans accepted war as “inevitable, an ordinary fact of human existence.” It was an utterly unexceptional state of affairs. For Britons in particular, war was something that happened abroad and that kept truly damaging disruption — invasion or rebellion — at bay. Wars that were disruptive elsewhere were understood as preservationist in Britain…Adam Smith’s complaints about the costs of war, about the “ruinous expedient” of perpetual funding and high public debt in peacetime, staked out a contrarian position; The Wealth of Nations (1776) was a work of persuasion. His and other voices in favor of pacific development grew louder from the margins. By denormalizing war, liberal political economy raised the stakes of the century’s long final wars from 1793 to 1815, which could be stomached only as an exceptional, apocalyptic stage on the way to permanent peace.

In their wake, nineteenth-century Britain packaged their empire as a primarily civilian enterprise focused on liberty, forgetting the earlier collective investment in and profit from the wars that had produced it..

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Um.

1) Lets just recall that the Gunpowder Empires of Islam: the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, predate British Expansionism. Britain just used Sail not Horses, and gave us science, accounting, rule of law, and the industrial revolution rather than Islamic illiteracy and despotism.

2) There cultural, institutional, and religious reasons that India was conquered by every passing band of malcontents with little more effort than jumping up and down like the opening scenes of 2001 a Space Odyssey.

3) That the Indian Academy blames everything on the English without consideration that there is an equally high chance India would be second between Africa and Arabia, has failed to keep pace with China, and appears to be regressing politically.

4) That the Indian Academy has nearly as big a problem with historical pseudoscience as Russians do with Conspiracy, the Chinese do with edibles, and the Africans do with Magic.

5) Mishra is as much of an anti-western Propagandist as were Derrida, Freud, Boaz, and Marx.