In this book, Andrew Nahum offers a very different and unconventional history of technology of the gun. Instead of crafting some kind of seamless lineage from muskets to Kalashnikovs, he presents a series of snapshots showing how guns and gunnery have influenced our world and our culture from establishing the study of ballistics, to stimulating the computer, to determining the style of manufacturing. Although there is no explicitly stated thesis, the goal is to show how arms development has a continuing effect on technological development and social change in unexpected cross-connections and contingencies. The gun has wrought “immense effects: on manufacture, on computing and artificial intelligence, and on geopolitics” (p. 222).
The chapters are organized around different aspects of gun technology and use, although they are generally chronological. The first chapter, “Geometry of War,” is about demonstrating how gunnery and ballistics led to Newtonian physics and the modern study of motion, and in the process overturned Aristotelian and Renaissance theories of motion. This is followed by “The Gun and The Ford” where the story starts in the late eighteenth century with Honoré Blanc’s efforts to move from craft production to machine production by manufacturing thousands of gunlocks made from identical interchangeable parts. This story then shifts to the Birmingham gun trade circa the Crimean War and its seeming obsolescence compared to American system of mass production of interchangeable parts. Nahum points out that the gun was the driving force behind the American production system which developed whole sets of special single-purpose tools each making only one subcomponent or doing only one job, marshalled in factories designed to make only one type of product. He then links the American gun production system to Ford’s Model T, and further connects Fordism to Fiat, and then Japanese flexible and just in time production and lean production. The third chapter, “The Godfather of Oil,” uses the Anglo-German naval race as the catalyst for the drive for bigger naval guns, which in turn led to the need for bigger ships. This brought the dreadnought and the parsons steam turbine to the fore, and also fostered Britain’s interest in Middle Eastern oil. Moving from the sea to the air, chapter four, “High Pheasants in Theory and Practice,” details the role of anti-aircraft and air defense fire control systems played in launching cybernetics. In the penultimate chapter, “Cowboys, Colts and Kalashnikovs,” the author draws the line from the Colt revolver to Gatling gun and Gardner gun to Maxim gun and ultimately to Kalashnikov and Armalite assault rifles. The final chapter, “From Death Rays to Star Wars,” tells the story of lasers and beam weapons through the quest for President Ronald Reagan’s star anti-missile nuclear defense system.
The book is an entertaining and fun read with many vignettes and colorful anecdotes. However, there are some frustrating omissions as well. For example, the author makes no mention of the important role of the slave-gun trade to West Africa for the Birmingham gun trade and how that shaped the modern world. Nor does the boom in Belgian gun-making in the late nineteenth century receive attention although it continued the craft production tradition well into the twentieth century.
The biggest omission involves passing over the transitions to repeater rifles and the tremendous technological instability and changes from the 1850s to the 1870s. Undoubtedly, quick and dramatic changes in technology played a driving role in firearms production between 1856 and the 1890s. During the 1860s the manufacture of breech-loading rifles using steel barrels advanced and superseded muzzle-loaded smoothbores possessing iron barrels. Initially, governments sought to convert old smoothbores into breech-loaders. Other interim solutions involved adding breechblock mechanisms to transform muzzle-loaders into breech-loaders. In addition, metallic cartridges replaced conical bullets. Eventually, the conversion models went by the wayside and governments adopted true breech-loaders. Within a decade these breech-loaders had themselves been replaced by repeating or magazine rifles.
The book is not meant to be a business history. It is a history of technology. The value of the book to business historians is limited. Most readers of this journal will already be very familiar with the development stories of entities such as the Springfield Armory or Vickers, or Ford, and those who lack familiarity with these enterprises will not gain more than a cursory version in this book. As a popular history the book succeeds in making some of the complicated technical issues comprehensible and digestible. For example, the explanation of the Parsons steam turbine or the difficulties of anti-aircraft fire rendered succinctly and in fine detail.
Professor Grant is the author or coeditor of several works including Rulers, Guns and Money (2007), Between Depression and Disarmament (2018) and The Oxford Handbook of the Second World War (2023).
