Related to the post about the history of the arms trade:
Aim at Empire: American Revolutions through the Barrel of a Gun, 1750-1825 by Brian DeLay. The book explains how the international arms trade made anticolonial rebellion a practical possibility in British North America; how arms dealers from the newly-independent United States equipped the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American Wars for Independence; and how privileged control over war material empowered U.S. empire in the trans-Mississippi West. Aim at Empire will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024.