people sitting in audience listening to lecture

2018 Walter A. Strauss Lecture Series—“Pacifists Making Guns: The Galton Family and Britain’s Industrial Revolution”

Priya Satia, professor of modern English history at Stanford University, will give three lectures at Case Western Reserve University for the 2018 Walter A. Strauss Lecture Series, hosted by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

In each of her three lectures, Satia will explore how people with conscience have committed unconscionable acts in the modern period.

Her first lecture, titled “Pacifists Making Guns: The Galton Family and Britain’s Industrial Revolution,” will be held Monday, Sept. 17, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A.

About the talk

A Quaker family, the Galtons of Birmingham, owned the biggest gun-making firm in 18th-century Britain. They were major suppliers of guns to the slave trade in West Africa, the East India Company, settlers and trading companies in North America, and the British government, which was at war almost constantly from 1688 to 1815.

But a core principle of the Quaker faith is belief in the un-Christian nature of war. How, then, do we explain the Galtons? And how do we explain why the Galton family business attracted no critical notice in the Quaker community until, suddenly, in 1795, Samuel Galton Jr. was threatened with disownment. Why did the Galtons’ gun-manufacturing suddenly become a scandal? And what was the result?

In probing Galton’s conscience and the Quaker community’s shifting judgment, Satia will assess the difficulty of avoiding participation in war in 18th-century British industrial society, whatever one’s principles.

The Galton story reveals a hidden truth about the role of war in the Industrial Revolution.

About the series

In some ways, the “modernity” of the modern period lies precisely in the growing awareness of conscience as an ethical rather than religious quality—a new self-consciousness about conscience. This understanding of conscience was tied to the modern historical sensibility; it depended on a sense of how much agency, and thus responsibility, humans have in shaping their world and their lives.

Satia will examine this phenomenon in three lectures covering key moments in the history of the British Empire:

  • The question of a Quaker gun-maker’s conscience in the period of the Industrial Revolution;
  • The way British officials professing deep understanding and love for the Middle East invented a violent regime of aerial policing there during World War I; and
  • How the violence among neighbors during decolonization in postwar South Asia weighed on the conscience of all those involved.

Together these case studies enable exploration of the well-meaning yet destructive nature of modern imperialism itself.

As part of the series, Satia will present:

  • “Pacifists Making Guns: The Galton Family and Britain’s Industrial Revolution”Monday, Sept. 17, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A;
  • “The Defense of Inhumanity: Interwar Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia” Wednesday, Sept. 19, from 5 to 5:45 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A; and
  • “The Self Divided: The Partition of 1947” Friday, Sept. 21, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A.

This lecture series, in memory of Walter A. Strauss (1923-2008), who was the Elizabeth and William T. Treuhaft Professor of Humanities, is generously supported by funds provided by the Paul Wurzburger Endowment.

All three events are free and open to the public. Learn more about and register for the events.