Episode 30: Something Profoundly Wrong

A proud father oversees his handiwork. Englishman Samuel Galton (inset) was a leading firearms manufacturer during the expansion of the British Empire in the early 19th century. Galton was the Birmingham-born son of a gun maker, who took over the family firearms business and built it into a juggernaut in England’s military industrial system. Samuel Galton also happened be a faithful Quaker, a pacifist Christian sect, whose members ultimately questioned his combining arms making with a pacifist commitment, not to mention his family’s slave trading interests in light of a growing Quaker commitment to abolition. Galton saw himself as a man of conscience who was simply in the vanguard of Britain’s historic imperial expansion, which itself he considered to be a blessing of history’s Providence. “And so the centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation, and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how westerners made the modern world,” writes Pankaj Mishra, “and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with.”