Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism (review)

Jonathan Grant approaches his topic of the late nineteenth-century arms races with a frank admission that he believes such developments are best understood through the particularity of the events, rather than through some theoretical construct. As a consequence of this orientation, he proceeds to study arms races and the arms trade through the examination of a truly impressive array of specific international arms deals from the 1860s through the first decade of the twentieth century.

He delves into the details of arms purchases in the Balkans, Russia, Turkey, Ethiopia, China, Japan, and South America. Indeed, his investigation does show that the determinants at work in these widely disparate cultural situations were not the operation of some model of political behavior, but instead, the result of particulars of time and place. Individual leaders in the buying countries, specific arms manufacturers and ship-builders in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, local and regional armed conflicts, the operation of neutrality laws and arms smuggling all shaped the outcomes. Local arms races accounted for particular phenomena, such as a vast supply of rifles in Ethiopia, or the emergence of Chile as an extremely powerful naval power, outstripping the United States and all the other countries of South America for a period in the 1880s.

The reader more familiar with historical treatments restricted to one period in one country may be stunned to move from intricate discussions of smuggling operations through Djibouti into the heartland of Abyssinia and the details of conflicts among Ethiopian monarchs, to a discussion of the politics of Romania. Only partially recovered from such excursions to exotic lands and perhaps a bit disconcerted by the unexpected juxtapositions, the reader will then move on to a discussion of Chinese warlords, to the twisting pathways of Ottoman politics. Chilean-Argentine tensions, and the Russo-Japanese rivalry in the Far East produce further fascinating details that constitute a Tale of Two Arms Races, that were surprisingly linked by Japanese efforts to acquire Chilean warships.

Even though Grant modestly claims that such an approach reveals that history is best understood through the historicity of each period, polity, and place, the work goes far beyond a catalog of bellicose states and their arms suppliers. Darkly illuminated from the variety of conflicts and arms sales, certain patterns do emerge. First of all, the arms-supplying enterprises in the metropolitan states sought to convince their own governments that supporting arms exports to states in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, or Asia would improve or increase their influence in the buying country and region. Thus, British and Italian companies believed selling arms in Ethiopia would improve their nation's position in the Horn of Africa. Yet, the evidence suggests that the buying countries did not fall under the influence of the selling countries and that, sometimes, the selling enterprises pursued business objectives that ran counter to the interests and diplomatic policy of their own countries. Imperialist dreams were more often than not stymied by the independence of the buying nations. Sometimes that independence was retained by duplicity, but most often, the purchasing countries simply stockpiled or consumed the weapons, ammunition, advice, and technology, without becoming in anyway a satellite, client, or dependency of the metropolitan selling nation.

Despite Grant's preference for explanations based on specifics, rather than theoretical constructs, his impressively wide-ranging exploration of arms races does in fact yield some underlying and repeating patterns, as well as some partial confirmation of theoretical models of the arms trade. Undertaking to test the domestic structure model and the action-reaction model as theoretical constructs, he demonstrates that both models have some application on the buyer side of the arms trade. However, since these models are centered on the state, he points out that they tend to leave out the business and enterprise dimension from the analysis, especially on...