Karen Jones is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Kent, and specializes in US and Environmental history. She has published widely on environmental issues and the American West specifically, and is currently completing a manuscript for the University of Colorado Press on hunting, nature and the nineteenth-century American West.
Firearms have been studied by imperial historians mainly as means of human destruction and material production. Yet, as suggested by constructivist approaches to the history of technology, firearms have always been invested with a whole array of additional social meanings. By placing these latter at the centre of analysis, the essays presented in A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire extend the study of guns beyond the confines of military history and the examination of their impact on specific colonial encounters. By bringing cultural perspectives to bear on the subject, the contributors explore the densely interwoven relationships between firearms and broad processes of social change.
'This is a fascinating collection, spanning four continents. It shows how guns are not only for killing with, but also for thinking with, and so for creating identities, often masculine and often ethnic. I congratulate the authors and editors.' Prof. dr. Robert Ross, Leiden University Institute for History
