Abstract
Who should have access to weapons and who should be prevented from possessing them? Denying certain social and political groups access to arms while enabling others to purchase them has been an instrument of creating a hierarchical world order since the nineteenth century and even before. However, the historians’ prevalent focus on disarmament and demilitarisation within Europe, concerning especially the defeated belligerents after 1919, has long distracted attention from the fact that policies of arms control had a global dimension and were shaped by policies that the imperial powers implemented in the late nineteenth century.
With a view of examining how arms control regimes shaped an emerging global order, this special issue considers developments from the era of New Imperialism to the inter-war period. The articles look into different European empires and the imperialistic policies of the United States and European powers in Central America and China. The comparative approach is complemented by the study of trans-imperial relations and activities in both international and local arenas. The contributions contrast the views from the metropoles with perspectives from different countries and regions under foreign influence or domination, namely in Eastern Africa, Central America, South and East Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They pay attention to the political, social and cultural significance of imperial arms control and take into account how activities on a local level fed into developments on a larger scale and informed politics of arms control in the metropoles.
By widening the focus to the non-European world, this special issue connects the history of international arms control with the history of imperialism and colonialism between the late nineteenth century and the inter-war period. Historians conventionally treat imperial arms regimes and disarmament policies as two distinct issues with different genealogies. 1 While the former are traced to the imperial expansionism of the nineteenth century and the ‘rage for order’ (Laura Benton/Lisa Ford) 2 of imperial powers, 3 the latter are usually attributed to concerns over the rapid development of armament technology during the industrialisation of European societies and over the devastations of World War I. After a rather timid start in 1899, governments of the North Atlantic states made disarmament an element of their attempts to create a peaceful world order at the conference in 1919. During the following years, they negotiated several treaties banning certain kinds of weapons like poison gas or setting limits for naval armaments, yet failed to agree on general disarmament. 4
Imperial arms control in global perspective
These narratives are not completely wrong but too short-sighted: Applying a global perspective to imperial arms control helps identify relations between the two issues and shows that the respective policies were in fact closely intertwined. As part of the process of colonial expansion, by the mid-nineteenth century imperial states started to introduce prohibitive laws in order to impede the circulation of firearms in their colonies, especially in frontier zones. 5 In an effort to co-ordinate these policies in Africa, they agreed upon the Brussels Conference Act of 1890, banning the sale of modern firearms in large parts of the continent. 6 Simultaneously, arms export controls became an instrument of imperial power politics in the international arena. After World War I, imperial powers successfully pushed to make the established instruments of imperial arms control part of the League of Nation's disarmament projects, thereby integrating them into an agenda that was meant to create a more peaceful international world order. This approach, however, did not remain uncontested. The governments of formally sovereign states like El Salvador and Persia that were exposed to imperial domination used the League of Nation's disarmament project to advance their own anti-imperial agendas. At the same time, German diplomats, military and arms dealers evaded international embargoes of imperial powers to supply Chinese warlords with weapons and re-establish German influence. 7
Disarmament during the inter-war period is therefore as much a part of the history of imperialism as of the attempts to establish peace. This makes it necessary to re-evaluate the meaning of 1919: The Paris Peace Conference was key in merging imperialist and peace agendas. From the perspective of the colonies and states within imperial zones of influence, the conference only set the stage for further internationalisation of imperial instruments and for policies that had been developed and implemented since the second half of the nineteenth century.
By linking arms control to a longer history of imperialism, uneven power relations become visible, but also different strategies to bypass imperial regulations, to oppose colonial rule and to form new alliances. Studies in disarmament and arms control have so far mainly addressed great power relations and negotiations, analysing arms regimes first and foremost as instruments of foreign policy in the relationship between more or less equal parties. 8 The contributions in this special issue, instead of attributing disarmament and arms control primarily to the effort of international peace building, highlight their function in reinforcing or contesting a strongly hierarchical and imperial world order.
In some cases, imperial powers formed alliances and negotiated treaties to enforce arms control measures in their colonies. In other cases, such as Britain in the Gulf, they negotiated unequal treaties with authorities in areas they considered vital to their imperial interests. Yet overall a high degree of co-operation can be observed between imperial powers in the field of arms control from the era of high imperialism well into the inter-war period. A thread of co-operation runs from the joint blockade of the East African coast against the importation of arms and ammunition between Britain, Germany, Italy and Portugal to the Brussels Act of 1890 to the agreement between imperial powers that they would informally honour the provisions of the Convention of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. 9 This observation corresponds with recent research in empire history emphasising that trans-imperial collaboration and exchange shaped imperial relations as much as rivalry and conflict. 10 In the case of arms control, co-operation was based on common security interests but facilitated through integration into the ‘civilising mission’, especially through linking efforts of arms control with anti-slavery measures. 11
Arms control and imperial/colonial rule
By looking beyond the diplomatic parquets, the contributions of this special issue explore how arms control became an instrument of imperial and colonial rule on the ground. Weapons were ‘tools of empire’, to use Daniel Headrick's famous term, 12 but not only in the sense of military strength provided through advantages in technology, production and logistics. Control over the dissemination of arms was also an effective resource for diplomacy on the ground, for forging local alliances and for consolidating governmental power. Part of this was a politics of privilege yielded through arms control that served to uphold social and racist hierarchies. Within the Russian Empire, authorities followed a ‘class-related approach to permission of guns ownership’, restricting the lower classes’ and privileging the upper classes’ access to guns. Whereas the Russian Empire implemented similar control instruments in the metropole and the periphery as a measure of public safety, 13 Western European powers followed a far more racialized approach in their colonies. They designed practices of arms control and international treaties that made hierarchical and discriminatory gun laws an active part of a racialized order. 14
At the same time, the contributions covering East Africa, South Asia and the Middle East within this thematic issue also show that imperial governments faced severe problems in establishing and maintaining arms control. These problems resulted from structural factors as well as from active resistance against imperial and colonial arms regimes. Imperial and colonial governments faced highly globalised networks of arms trade that had partly been established along with imperial structures but were also flexible in order to avoid regulation, for instance in shifting trade routes, changing flags or replacing contractors. 15 Weak infrastructure and porous borders facilitated smuggling, and limits to arms control become particularly obvious in frontier zones such as the hilly region of North-East British India. 16 Here, as well as in East Africa and other regions, imperial arms regimes also met with resilience and opposition. The reason was not only that foreign arms control meant a loss of privilege for elites and threatened communities with disempowerment, but also that weapons had been integrated into highly relevant economic sectors, such as the hunting sector, and had become important instruments of self-defence and environmental control. 17
Colonial governments developed a whole repertoire of measures to enforce arms control and to counter resistance, from employing networks of secret agents to controlling ‘native vessels’ to punitive expeditions – with differing, but overall limited success. The problems colonial empires faced in respect to arms control on the ground resonated on the inter-imperial and international level and were reflected in the definition of ‘danger zones’ or ‘special zones’, a concept that was first applied to Africa and then geographically extended to the Middle East after World War I. 18
The ability to produce armaments and to roughly channel their dissemination on a larger scale was key to create and uphold a global hierarchical order and to control who was having access to weapons. Furthermore, imperial arms control instruments served governments of formally sovereign states in order to consolidate their power against insurgents in places such as China, the Gulf and Central America. 19 Yet, as the contributions also make clear, there was always opposition against, and limitations to, imperial arms control on a local level, and the disarmament debates in Geneva became fora where less powerful states tried to challenge global hierarchies and to enforce the principle of equality between producing and non-producing states. 20 Arms controls, therefore, adopted ambiguous meanings in an imperial world order: They were instruments of oppression and exploitation as much as of anti-imperial resistance and emancipation.