Sign Massachusetts Banking Memorandum Of Understanding Myself

Industry sign banking massachusetts memorandum of understanding myself

it's been really wonderful to come back to Birmingham I haven't been there since for the last four five years since I finished my research the research that the book is is based on so it feels very good and right to make this my first stop now that the book is out and and to to be part of a local conversation about history so thank you so much for having me and thank you all for coming out tonight and I hope you find the the talk stimulating and worthwhile and I'm looking forward to questions captive and I've noticed I have the wrong title in the first life should be the Galton's of Birmingham I really wanted to call it a shout out to Birmingham business talked and the biggest the biggest gun making firm in the 18th century in Birmingham and in Britain and possibly in the world too was owned by a Quaker family here in Birmingham the Galton's family and they were the biggest suppliers of guns to the slave trade in West Africa there were major suppliers of guns to the East India Company for the youth for use in the conquest of South Asia and they also supplied guns for conquest and trade in North America but they were also the biggest suppliers of guns to the British government and it's almost non-stop wars against Spain and then France in the period 1688 to 1815 sort of a long eighteenth century now the Quaker sect was founded in the midst of the religiously framed political Wars of the 17th century and most of us will know that a core principle of the Quaker faith is belief in the unchristian nature of war Quakers do not participate in war or in war training and they were a persecuted minority for long because they refused to swear loyalty to the king or to arm themselves in the defense of his realm in a time that really was quite right with dynastic conflict and conspiracy against the regime both at home and abroad so how do we explain the Galton's and why did Quakers tolerate them as Quakers given their livelihood the source of their livelihood the the family began working in the gun trade from about 1700 - and they were prominent in the Birmingham Quaker meeting for generations without attracting any critical notice for their family business for almost a century and then suddenly in 1795 the Birmingham Society of Friends threatened to disown Samuel Galton's the second Samuel Gullickson jr. unless he left the arms trade and let me just situate you here this is a portrait you may have seen of Sam engulfed in the second who is the there are three Samuel gulten who sees the middle one was the focus of what I'm going to talk about and it's funny I have this fly for other talks when people don't know where Birmingham is so we can just get I'm gonna remember that's good so what happened in 1795 why did the Quaker community suddenly realize this contradiction in Galton's life as an arms making Quaker you know why was it not a problem for so long and then why does it suddenly become a problem in 1795 did guns suddenly change did Quakerism suddenly change and and what was the result of this controversy was golden actually disowned so these are the questions that I set out to answer in writing this book and they're the questions I'm going to try and answer for you today and I think just to anticipate where we'll end the answers reveal how difficult it was and how difficult it it still is to extricate oneself entirely from participating in warfare regardless of principles and beliefs war was and remains integral to industrial capitalist society so in short our challenge today is to make sense of this phrase of this idea of a Quaker gun maker for this phrase to make sense either our understanding of the word Quaker need to change or our understanding of gun needs to change or our understanding of making leads and then it will no longer be a paradox so let's start with guns don't worry about the - everybody always there's always some smart person says what about the - let's start with guns what did Bolton think he was making when he was making guns so the first thing to keep in mind is that 18th century guns worked very differently from guns today they were perishable and they were unreliable and let me just show you a couple of images this is a still made by Joseph farmer who was the first Samuel Galton's father-in-law okay so this is an early 18th century weapon and then this is the most commonly produced the standard military arm of the 18th century all the way up to the 1830s the brown vest that enabled the British to conquer so much of the world and the Galton's made a lot of these or and a lot of parts for these ok so just just to give you a visual of the objects we're talking about so 18th century guns how were they used in general in this period so I did I'm happy to talk about the sources I used to to arrive at these conclusions but after examining records of gun use in this period in in Britain what I found was that guns were not used in crimes of passion in this time and place most murders took place in heated arguments for brawling circumstances so this is sort of a cartoon that gives you a sense of you know how people will reach for whatever is near at hand right whatever instrument is near at hand and everyday blunt instrument a stick you can see the Canes lying around there the candlestick in the back violence was intimate if it was emotionally motivated it often involved you know blunt instruments or strangling or beating with the hands and feet guns were also not used by rioters in the 18th century and the interesting thing is that dogs are not very readily available to most people in the first half of the century they are somewhat more available in the second half of the century and yet you don't see a change in these trends they're still not used by rioters they're still not used in crimes of passion so there's something cultural going on there it's not just about availability so guns were used in conflicts around property and abroad and the 18th century was a period of the rise of private property in England and guns were really essential to that process so you see them you know use some smuggling robbery poaching and then protecting property against smugglers poachers burglars and in such scenarios they were instruments of intimidation right and here is a you know a caricature of a highway robbery and so they were as instruments of intimidation they were paradoxically understood as part of the civilizing process part of an emerging culture of politeness they're a polite counter to the more intimately threatening instruments of violence that others out there might use you know tomahawks or swords therefore violence between people who don't know one another violence between strangers that's impersonal and therefore polite because it's violence that can be perpetrated threatened and perpetrated from a distance and that allows it to be impersonal and in a way that using a blunt instrument would not be and they could be used this way because they were so unreliable right so this you know if I could just posit the thought process of sort of an 18th century individual trying you know thinking about using a gun what they might be thinking would go something like this now I'm pulling a trigger that will unleash a multi-step mechanical process that may or may not result in harm to you right I don't know what should not happen and the multiple steps in that process produce a distance between my intention which is simply to protect my property and the result which could be anything from you know nothing at all or just completely terrifying you Oh or wounding you or actually killing you there was a small chance about two so the outcome is then the the result of an impersonal mechanical process and all this meant that a firearm was not a very three weapon to reach for and a passionate act but it was pretty effective to wave around in intimidation like a loose cannon to stave off conflict because you don't know what's gonna happen so guns were for waving in the face of strangers highwayman trespassers they're an impersonal deterrent so Adam Smith the famous political economic thinker of this time wrote about this aspect of firearms in the wealth of nations and he said that he was confident that although it does at first sight appear to be so pernicious the invention of firearms in fact favored both quote the permanency and extension of civilization now let me just show you a picture that bill is I think kind of illustrate illustrates is this is an advertisement from a gun maker in Bristol and what it shows down at the bottom I hope it's clear there there's merchants supplied with guns and stores but the African West India and Newfoundland trade as cheap as a penny warehouse in England and then you see you know the civilizing kind of properties of a gun that's clutched you know by the European gentleman on that side and the by the native who's been civilized by the fact that he's been provided with this gun and then there's a ship in the back symbol of Commerce and civilization being spread so in short guns were not merely more efficient substitutes for knives or swords they're serving new kinds of violent purposes and making new kinds of violence related to property possible in the 18th century and I should say here that even in warfare they're being used as a terrorizing deterrent muskets like the brown bus did kill obviously and more but the rate of fire was more important than accuracy they were not aimed in the 18th century so soldiers would load their guns and then fire in unison and again Adam Smith recognized this and he also wrote that firearms had read Lucian eyes dwarf heir with the noise and smoke they produced and with quote the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed so that's terrible right that's how they worked they're an instrument of terror so it's not about marksmanship firing would strike the enemy at random and it was the bayonet charge close up that typically decided the outcome in 18th century battles and these military uses were of course also bound up with the question of property on a national scale the French threat that the British encounter was understood as a threat to the nation and the regime of property that had been introduced from 1689 guns were also a currency they're used in trade around the world to cope enough markets and as a currency that you could use to pay for other goods as well as a commodity of trade itself they were literally money in some instances they're valued at home and abroad for their intrinsic metal content and their symbolic value quite apart from what they could do right as as weapons so they were objects of trade and facilitators of trade all this meant that a Quaker in the 18th century could own guns without raising any eyebrows for most of the 18th century and Quakers did own guns for hunting and agricultural purposes like shooting vermin on their lamps so in 1776 an American Quaker came to visit the Galton's and there they're in their home right outside Birmingham and they described Galton's and he described Dalton's life and the lands around this with unadulterated admiration including in that admiration for the very capital manufacturing of muskets so there was nothing strange about this even in 1776 in the eyes of this American Quaker so in thumb guns were a weapon for a new kind of society made up of greater numbers of strangers than determined to defend property as a point of national pride in this particular moment they were not the weapon of the angry and the passionate or the weapon of the mob they were the weapon a man of property might legally used to fend off an angry mob or the weapon a highwayman a highwayman might he legally use to snatch that property but all of this was changing in the 1790s when the scandal erupted around the Galton's up to the 1790s a Quaker gun maker could reasonably tell himself that he was making an object that promoted civilization and a more polite form of violence but then gun started to earn a new reputation in British society during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars at the end of the century from 1793 to 1815 this was a period of mass arming on an unprecedented scale and really long exposure to firearms amongst ordinary Britons and this is when the British shift to effective aimed fire in battle begins Amy becomes a new and particularly British practice guns made the mass casualties of those wars possible not because of their technological superiority to pipes or swords but because of the impersonal 'ti with which they allowed impromptu soldiers volunteer soldiers to dispense death right these are not trained warriors these are just ordinary people who have to shoot to kill someone and it's easier to do that with this impersonal weapon than a post so an entire generation was now shaped by mass warfare dependence on any individual emotional investment in this new context guns sound uses and new kinds of interpersonal violence that was unrelated to property and not seem as civilizing so guns now began to appear in reports of new kinds of untimely death for instance in 1802 in Gloucester you there's news of a fifteen-year-old discharged soldier waving his musket that people threatening to fire and intimidating them and then he gets up on bristol bridge and without giving any warning he the paper reported he wanted lee drew the trigger and killed a man this was something a very new type of report about gun violence so these wars produced a generation capable of a new kind of impersonal and casual violence with guns that was unrelated to property and also still unrelated to passionately but before this shift in the 1790s the gun in Quaker gun maker was more complicated than we might have thought okay so that's part one now we go to part two the word maker did Galton actually think he made guns so gulten actually made a lot of things he made guns but he also made swords and bayonets and knives and forks and cutlasses and harpoons and Lance's and grievers and lots and lots of metal goods and gun makers in general are often also known as toy makers they also made other toys like buckles rings gilt rings of various sorts bells for various purposes buttons curry combs so I'm sure you all know this figure here Matthew Boulton he's the illustrious toymaker of running and he produced everything from steam engines to coins to buttons and in a similar way you know Dalton is a similar type of industrialist and that he's also he's making guns but also buckles and nails and selling them to customers everywhere so Dalton also made iron he was a big investor in the canals that you have around Birmingham that have recently been I think renovated or there's more access to them now I understand he engage in various kinds of global trade and he later ran a bank and I'll tell you more about that later so that's Dalton and gun making in general was a very highly divided industry so Galton was assembling parts for guns that were made by a whole range of specialists known as known by their the processes that they specialized it so they were filers there were stock makers welders borers grinders polishers and grievers and so on and on so Galton's felt that his contribution to the manufacture of guns was merely incremental moreover those other specialists the polishers and welders and engravers and so on were also applying their skills to other goods not just guns right so how do we say then looking back who made guns and who did not make guns gun makers like the Galton's were also drawing a lot of other people into an investment in their gun business so Dalton's brass suppliers because there's brass furniture on a lot of these guns so he's buying graphs from these suppliers but those suppliers are also buying guns from him and they're using them in the African trade and the Atlantic trade and at a point he also had drawn major Manchester textile dealers into his business as his creditors as well and even commissioned agents so a lot of people were invested in making guns and the British state particularly we're talking about the office of Ordnance really work to diffuse to keep the gun industry and gun making skills defuse on purpose because of political concerns that emerged after the Revolution of 1689 which led to the establishment of the cons itutional monarchy under William and Mary and these are again things that I need to say to American audiences that I may not need to remind you of but in any case no one else 16 is not Miss Reiko but the government was worried basically about Jacobite rebels right people who would overturn the new monarchy and restore the ousted Stuart's who had fled to the continent and the fear was that an overly concentrated gun making industry might weren't easily be captured by rebels right and so the object was to ensure that there were multiple centers of gun production in the country to avoid that risk so Birmingham was made sort of encouraged that gun industry it was sort of nurtured by the office of ordnance from the beginning and it and London were both important centers of gun making but they also depended on expertise and materials coming from other places from Bristol from Liverpool from the villages surrounding Birmingham they got wood from bust from Gloucester for the stocks for the guns so there are wide networks involved here and to keep this widespread talent healthy and prosperous the government was supporting gun making even in peacetime I'll give you some examples of the ways that it did that one way was that the office of ordnance would issue contracts for guns even in peacetime which was not too difficult given that even in so-called peacetime they're usually was some kind of conflict going on at the margins of this ever expanding Empire another thing it did was it would employ out-of-work gun making artisans in government armory shops in the Tower of London and they would also sell old military muskets from the tower back to the gun making trade so that they could sell those on in Africa the second hand guns basically they would be sell them in Africa and other markets around the world just to keep them in business during peacetime the government also allowed private gun manufacturers to use government proofing facilities for the proof is what ensures the safety of the barrel and a proof marked gun was considered safer and better quality to be sold in any market right so when there were struggling up-and-coming gun makers in London who said that they couldn't afford the proof charges in in the in the private proof house that they had access to the government said that's fine you can use the king's proof house so that and this was all in the interest of keeping that industry populous and diffuse and not very very concentrated and and the concern here by the state is to ensure that individual gun makers don't get too much power by currying favor with the state because they don't want any small set of guns or individual small set of gun makers are an individual gun maker to have too much access to or too much control of the became the kingdom's arms so they're not trying to create a military-industrial complex which is something very concentrated they're trying to create something much more diffuse than that so the Ordnance Office which is the main office interacting with gun makers the staff there were warned not to quote give any favorite artificers as much work as they please though the office may have no occasion for their service right so the warning against that kind of corruption instead the government made possible the expansion of annual production guns from tens of thousands at the start of the century to millions by the end of the century by drawing greater and greater numbers of workers into this task of arms production so this shift in the magnitude of production from tens of thousands to millions was not the result of the introduction of machinery into the process but of expansion of the number of people involved in gun making and many small adaptations of the industrial organization in the gun industry so during the Napoleonic Wars at the end of this period even birmingham's carpenters and cabinet makers were helping make guns by ruff stocking them and the pen the office of ordnance was providing funds to train lock makers the lock makers were the most skilled workers in the manufacture of guns the locks are the most difficult part of the gun to make and so the state is providing funds to train more of them so that more people could do it and there wouldn't be a bottleneck in lock makings and they also choose a musket design that's simple enough to mass-produce buy more buy more workers by copying the design that's used by the East India Company and the East India Company and others of course part of the state and has kind of a complicated relationship to it which we can talk more about later the office of ordnance is also employing inspectors to check on the uniformity of parts to ease past production of guns it's also forcing gun makers at times to manufacture their arms in collective factory style warehouses rather in their separate workshops to create some efficiencies of scale so factory organization grows out of this government led effort to increase productivity well before the era of machine production that began in the mid 19th century and the state of course also builds its own factory to expand gun making even further and to again deny any group of gun makers too much political power and that was eventually the factory at Enfield that opens up in the early 19th century now beyond gun making everyone that got to knew including most of the people in his Quaker networks was making something used by the state for some kind of war related purpose so if they weren't making guns they were supplying iron that was used in the making of guns and other military material war material or they were supplying finance or they're supplying copper so these are you know if you think of Quakers in particular the the the Lloyd family the ham breeze the plump stood these are families that the Galton's were tied to by marriage and by business more generally the West Midlands industrial economy was built up significantly by war-related contracting you had thousands of skilled artisans manipulating metal into everything from buttons to pistol Springs for the King's Men other industries were filling demand war demand for things like copper sheets rivets nails paper wheelbarrows rope bores canvas chain bar iron pencils textiles for uniforms and much much more not to mention food bedding barracks medicines specie to pay the soldiers and so on and so on and so on and this whole network of industrialists providing all these materials supported one another on government work so gun makers helped Matthew Boulton with his copper contracts for the government and Bolton in turn secured gun contracts for them often through his people he knew or even with the East India Company so Galton's whole business and family network was involved in war related contracting or finance and at the end of the ANU poliana quorus in 1815 really brought ruin to the Midlands iron industry what half of the blast furnaces in the area or shut down pretty soon after so in short government gun purchases were the tip of an iceberg the state was a bulk purchaser that brought the bounty of mass demand that made industrial trades worth the enormous risk the entailed and that made mass production of objects both necessary and possible so this word maker is more complicated than it seems everyone was a gun maker in some fashion and gun makers were much more than just gun makers they were not only gun makers so now let's take that last word Quaker so Quakers were not supposed to be involved in war and they evolved mechanisms for self policing to ensure to ensure that everyone is following this principle in the 18th century and you really start to see this happening in 1742 during the War of the Austrian succession at that point the central yearly meeting of the sect in London begins to check in with local groups with an explicit query about whether friends were participating in warlike activities and this queries was suddenly necessary in 1742 because it was becoming increasingly evident that a lot of Quakers were becoming quite invested in the war economy at that time many of them have by then become established as successful bankers or traders or industrialists who had prospered thanks to the wars and and the state itself was actively tapping these Quaker networks it was drawn to those networks just like other merchants and traders and customers were because of their collective reputation for honesty and reliable so the opportunity to profit from Mora was very great by the 1740s and many Quakers were profiting and so it suddenly becomes a concern and there's more policing of this now Quakers were strained from principle not only because they were greedy for profit but also because of a genuine sense of patriotism some participated in the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 by giving gifts to soldiers or even bearing arms Dalton the second uncle Joseph farmer the second don't worry I mean just it's another member of the family he invoked patriotism to explain why he joined the forces to that put down that rebellion then he remained the soldier in the Seven Years War and I mean he didn't seem to feel this was a contradiction with the fact that he was part of a Quaker family in 1748 to give you another example dr. John Fothergill in London said he welcomed the end of the War of the Austrian succession he was welcoming peace as a Quaker but quote as an Englishman he hoped that war would be pursued with vigor until a solid piece was secured these conflicting commitments right so the community had become invested enough in the regime that the hold of those Quaker principles had loosened and during the Seven Years War it was even harder for socially established Quakers to stand aloof from war as war was becoming obviously the central and defining fact of 18th century British life and national identity so financial stall stalwarts like the Barclays were critical to the government's ability to fight these wars in the latter half of the century now in 1776 Thomas Paine who was the son of an English Cruiser started pointed his finger at Quaker hypocrisy at the commonsense and he noted that quote the general tenor of your actions wants uniformity he refused to credit the pretended scruples of Quakers because he said we see them made by the same men who in the very instant that they are exclaiming it against the Mammon of this world are nevertheless hunting after it with a step as steady as time and an appetite as keen as death so quite an indictment in 1776 so so the sect is increasing its self policing right he's speaking almost as as one of that community right but still no one is saying anything about golf in the 17 in 1776 and the golden family business and that could be I think partly because guns themselves still have not acquired a very scandalous reputation in the 1770s perhaps war finance may have looked worse at that point then gun making how does that start to change well the British have won defeats in the 18th century which is the defeat against the Americans in 1783 and that defeat really kind of raised the moral stakes for Britain on the global stage and the slave trade in particular began to look like a moral liability for the nation and Quakers of course became critical to the launch of the movement to abolish the slave trade in the years that followed the end of that war and the wool of guns in the slave trade and in the summary punishments that were used on slave plantations became part of the critique of the slave trade so earlier the Quaker sex emphasis had always been on sort of staying separate that pure itself whatever the rest of society was doing right they're not trying to reform anyone else but now there's a sort of moment where you see the sect break with that tradition and take up a political crusade on behalf of the entire nation right so Galton's kinsman was David Barclay and he was a leader of this movement to abolish the slave trade an abolition was also partly about and of reviving the sect as discipline was withering within it right it's an opportunity to strengthen commitment within it and it's also part of this wider British search for redemption after defeat against the American colonies in 1783 so the stakes are really high and with such stakes ethical consistency on the national stage became critical to the Quakers in a new way so the central meeting group the the yearly meeting group in London now starts to assert its influence on those regional branches much more and deliberately tries to impose greater conformity so an epistle of 79 he goes out to those local meetings which reads like this we have been publicly charged with some under our name fabricating or selling instruments of war and the Epistle calls for an inquiry into this accusation so that anyone found to be involved with a practice so inconsistent might be reclaimed and failing that disowned so this is the first allusion to arms making as a particular problem so finally at this point a Quaker in Birmingham complains about the Galton's and they and they complained because of the golden family's role in the slave trade you know providing guns that are used in the slave trade and and this Quaker says we should not accept his donation to enlarge the Bull Street meeting house but still nothing sort of formal transpires to do anything with the Galton's for a couple more years and then in 1795 the double the birmingham meeting finally objects to the military purposes that Galton's guns are used for and then they take up this matter of asking him to leave that business or be disowned by the sect and Galton's was painfully aware that many of his accusers were as invested in war as he was he can see that so note the tiny here this is just when guns are also beginning to earn a new reputation as instruments of wanton violence mid 1790s and right in 1795 in fact the Society of Friends also explicitly proclaims itself against hunting and shooting pastimes that require guns so guns became scandalous in a new way at precisely the moment at which Quakers become much more concerned about scandal really they really want to avoid that so 1795 becomes the year of reckoning forgotten and here we see them that the sword Quaker it is complicated to Quakers were not always Quakers they were also sometimes Britain's first to the 18th century so in the end once we understand the 18th century culture of violence and patriotism the political context of that Jacobite threat and the complicated modes of manufacture at stake here there is not so much of a paradox in this phrase Quaker gun maker so now let's look at what Dalton did in this face of this threat of dissonant when new understandings of guns and when Quaker obligations suddenly made this idea of a Quaker gun maker appear paradoxical so he was a very self-consciously modern man besides being a gun maker he was also the scientist he was a fellow of the Royal Society like his friends Matthew Boulton and James Watt he was a member of Birmingham's Lunar Society and he refused to simply comply with the wish that he abandon his gun trade then instead he decided to publicly defend himself and defend his position so he printed and circulated in early 1796 he prints and circulates this defense in the form of a letter to the Birmingham meeting and I think the fact that he printed and circulated this means that he had a great deal of confidence in what he was saying this was not just a flimsy rationalization he was really in earnest whatever we may look back and think of it right he really intended later generations to consider his arguments seriously for the life that they could shed on the real life limits to living a life disconnected from war in his time so his first main argument was that everyone including his fellow Quakers participated in war almost ineluctably and that his own role was merely incremental and there was some truth in this as we have seen he also argued he argued that the production of commodities prone to abuse it's so complex that it's it's it's it's actually impossible to assign moral responsibility for them so I suppose it's hard to read this but I'll read you one of the quotes on this page he asks is the farmer who sews barley the brewer who makes it into beverage the merchant who imports rum or the distiller who makes spirits responsibl for the intemperate the diseased device and misery which may ensue from their abuse so he perceived economic actors so interdependent and so tied to the state that they collectively formed a kind of military industrial society the extreme division of labour with each gun passing through hundreds of highly skilled hands before it's complete and the intermittent nature of manufacturer's relationship with the state made it difficult for him to concede any particular responsibility for participating in war particular complicity and warmth as far as he could see everyone who has anyone in Midland suspend us triol society was in some way complicit in the production of war material or financing of war so samson lloyd of the lloyd family was one of the friends appointed to sort of visit him as part of this reclamation process and he was a scion of a family that had long supplied iron for the dalton gun manufacturing so you know looking at this from Dalton's point of view the gun was a really collectively even socially produced object and why was Lloyd off the hook and and he not right so one lesson here is to think about the Industrial Revolution differently to think about the extent to which it depended on war and on government demand for war material Gulf Dalton lamented to his judges in this document the practice of your principles is not compatible with the situation in which Providence has placed us so he saw himself as part of a wider military-industrial society in which there was little if any political economic space outside the wormhole the other main strand of Dalton's defense was that guns were not instruments of violence but tools of civilization like door knobs and hinges protecting property right so he invoked the 18th century understanding of guns as deterrence to more horrific and unruly forms of violence and as instruments for the entirely justified purpose of defending property and we know that up to that moment in which he was writing this was how guns weren't generally understood in Britain but that view was just beginning to look out of date at that point and Quakers in particular had already begun to see guns as unequivocally violent just instruments of violence so Galton's argument was an early articulation of the way that the division of labor that care characterizes modern forms of industrial production tends to alienate the manufacturer from his product and release him or her from any sense of responsibility for what that product is going to be used for right or what it even is and it's this alienation that made possible the mass production necessary for the mass violence of modern warfare so paradoxically at the very moment in which lethal mechanic's lethal mechanical violence came to pervade modern existence it became invisible to those responsible for its spread Dalton argued that by singling him out and singling him and gun making out the the Quaker society was denying wider quaker and even societal participation in an economic system that was based on war he lost the debates the yearly meeting was not persuaded by his argument and this disarmament process proceeded but despite the disarmament Galton sort of defiantly continued to attend the worship invisible Street meeting house and he participated in its philanthropic activities perhaps because of his standing in Birmingham he was allowed to do this and perhaps maybe because other friends in Birmingham recognized some of the truth in his arguments whatever the the London meeting judged and meanwhile as this controversy was unfolding his gun profits really went through the roof just at that moment and in 1804 he did pass the business on to his son who was Samuel tertius Colton but his own money still remained in the partnership so it's not like it's you know completely disengaged from it also in bad near 1804 the family launched a bank and they did that in partnership with Joseph Gibbons who was a another Quaker and who was also one of those three friends involved in in the process of reclaiming and disowning Galt in the second so clearly Givens had no problem working with this man despite having you know taken that morally condescending position of reclaiming him so Samuel tertius then was a banker and a gun contractor from 1804 to 1815 and it was in 1815 that the gun business the Dalton done business was finally wound up and that final closure was the result of the collapse of state demand at the end of the wars not because he had a moral dilemma about what he was doing and in any that's partly because by then charity has had less the Quaker fold he married outside of it he married violet at Darwin the daughter of Erasmus Darwin and his son was Francis Galton the father of eugenics and there's a sort of interesting story to think about there now in 1831 the golden bank merged with what became Midland Bank which was my bank in the 1990s when I lived in London and when when when Dalton the second died in 1832 he was worth three hundred thousand pounds so very very wealthy he was the wealthiest member of the Lunar Society I think we can read Dalton the second failure to win over the Society of Friends you know with his arguments in 1795 and ninety-six as a key moment in which war driven industrial capitalism was normalized by its critics focused on particular scandals like the slave trade or the arms trade by insisting on the particular pernicious nosov his trade gun-making and evading the questions he was trying to raise about wider collective complicity the Quaker society became blind to the reality that the modern life emerging around them was to a very significant significant extent founded on militarism so Midland Bank which is now part of HSBC that happened in the 1990s so when if we know that Midland Bank was founded on the wealth of the country that's but interesting but sort of an an interesting piece of trivia but I think it's more provocative to think about the fact that in some measure the the fortunes that went into the banks founded by Galton's relatives the Lloyds in the Berkeley Berkeley who were in various kind of more oblique ways also involved in the gun business as merchants pannon war business generally as bankers as iron mongers as merchants those those banks are also founded on this same gun business or related to that gun business it's a much wider impact than just Midland itself but in 1795 the scandal was Galton's arms making manufacturing not the Midland economy's general dependence on government contracts or other Quakers investment in war and so by criticizing gun manufacturing the Society of Friends avoided having to criticize war in conquest and other forms of participation in it and I think this has really remained our way of dealing critically with industrial capitalism we focus on the problem of particular bad commodities like drugs or slaves or arms that seem to implicate only a few and a knife in the 19th century of course Marx tried to reopen the question of systemic wrong right and then we had Henry David Thoreau with it advocating tax resistance as another way of recognizing that this is a much wider phenomenon but the targeted tactic of consumer boycott you know boycotting these bad words as I think endured much better than systemic critiques that require much more what shall we say revolutionary action and I think that's testimony to the success of industrial capitalism mode of self critique and normalization so to conclude I've tried to resurrect golden juniors critique of the wholesale dependence of industrial capitalists life on warfare not so much because I want to exonerate him or vindicate him but more to implicate us as he was trying to do with his fellow Quakers in the 18th century military industrial society that he described lay the origins of Britain's emergence as a global superpower and a cautionary tale about the place of violence in modern industrial and commercial life a place that would where it was so central and yet so hidden that even a sincere Quaker might have easily participated in its propagation while maintaining a truly clear conscience thank you so much