Girding for Battle: The Arms Trade in a Global Perspective, 1815-1940 (review)

This book comprises ten case studies in the history of the international arms trade, dealing mainly with the later nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The topics included range from Egypt under Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismail to the U.S. Navy after the Civil War; the Balkans and Latin America between 1870 and 1914; Latvia in the 1920s; German clandestine submarine exports in the same decade; and (during the 1930s) Japanese and German military sales to Ethiopia and Italian and American policy towards arms sales to Soviet Russia. All the studies (several by younger historians) are of good scholarly standard, and many draw on extensive and multi-lingual research in archival and little known published sources.

The essays provide substantial amounts of new and interesting information. Among the insights they provide into the workings of armaments diplomacy are the importance of American firms (notably Remington) in assisting Egypt's efforts at military modernization before it fell under a British protectorate; the dependence of the U.S. Navy on European technology transfer as late as the 1880s; and the gamut of techniques used by a firm such as Krupp to capture and maintain its artillery export markets before 1914. As the long case study of Chile shows, these included wholesale bribery, collusion with German officers in the local military, threats of lawsuits against competitors, and collusion with German banks and diplomats. Similar techniques were used between the wars, as evidenced by French success in defeating the British in contracts for the embryonic Latvian navy. In contrast, the Western Powers proved remarkably supine when the German navy circumvented the Versailles disarmament clauses by building and exporting submarines through a subsidiary company based in Holland, even when revelations in the Reichstag brought the enterprise into the open. In the 1930s, much sympathy existed in Japan for Ethiopia as a fellow rebel state against European imperialism, but few arms sales resulted. Paradoxically, Hitler was Ethiopia's main supplier during the war of 1935-36, in part to pressure Mussolini into accepting German friendship. Finally, Fascist Italy had no ideological compunction about supplying hardware and know-how to Stalin's navy, whereas in the U.S.A., although President Roosevelt and the State Department favoured constructing a monster battleship and two destroyers for the Soviet Union in American yards, anticommunist naval officers were able to stall such projects until the Nazi-Soviet Pact scuppered them.

The most striking trend to emerge from the studies is the contrast between the independent role of the commercial arms firms before 1914, and the government-led armaments diplomacy of the interwar period, in which private enterprise was subsidiary. After 1945 this trend probably intensified. However, although there is a good deal here for specialists, the editors' introduction acknowledges that they do not offer a wider overview of the general evolution of the arms trade. The title therefore somewhat oversells the book's contents. All the same, it will be of considerable value both to military and to diplomatic historians for its pioneering contribution to an unjustly neglected field.