Guns were not necessary for industrialization and whaling did not account for 11% of GDP in 1850

See ‘The Killing Age’ Review: Born in Bullets: The modern world has been transformed by inventions from the electric motor to penicillin. Is the mass-produced gun the most important among them? by Kyle Harper, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Excerpts: 

"Alas, “The Killing Age” is too marred by error and exaggeration to fulfill its promise. Take the chapter on American whaling. Mr. Crais wants to portray the global whale hunt as a massacre integral to America’s economic modernization (“The U.S. industrial revolution began at sea with killing”). He claims that at “around its height, in 1850, whaling accounted for something like 11% of GDP.” This claim (which features a footnote that does nothing to support the allegation) isn’t only wrong but outlandishly so; it betrays not only a tendency to embellish but a near-total lack of economic understanding: Peak annual production in the whaling industry was roughly $9 million in the early 1850s, when GDP was around $3 billion, so whaling accounted for closer to 0.3% of the economy. Ultimately, the huge numbers adduced to support this and other assertions throughout the book seem intended to shock rather than to support serious causal argumentation."

"the history of whaling on its own disproves the central point of “The Killing Age,” that guns were a sine qua non for the making of the modern world. Before the Norwegian magnate Svend Foyn patented the grenade harpoon in 1870 (which goes unmentioned), the whalers Mr. Crais describes found ways to slaughter uncounted marine giants with ancient technologies—thrown harpoons and lances. He repeatedly invokes counterfactual arguments to insist that without guns there would have been no Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, despite the absence of gunpowder, mass slaughter proceeded throughout the world’s oceans."

"Mr. Crais argues that fossil-fuel emissions had already begun to force global warming in the 19th century, triggering drought, famine and mass death. This isn’t a universally or even widely accepted position. While it fits his narrative, the overbold assertion does a disservice to serious science, and its lack of nuance gives fuel to those who would say that climate-change discourse is mere ideology."

"The primary contribution of Mr. Crais’s book to a rapidly growing literature is its hyperbole"