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

Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism. By Jonathan A. Grant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. xi + 288 pp. Notes, index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 0-674-02242-7.

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Engel

Arms manufacturers have a public-relations problem. They make money selling violence. They find it difficult to put a positive spin on the sale of weapons, even those made for defensive purposes. Politicians and celebrities in search of global fame conduct public campaigns against their products, rallying to stanch the global flow of arms, to purge the scourge of land mines, and to encourage regimes to spend their limited funds on improving the lives of their citizenry rather than on the means of war. Meanwhile, manufacturers of the world's weapons maintain a low profile while conducting their profitable dealings, continuing to court global buyers whose current spending exceeds a trillion dollars annually.

Arms merchants have earned a poor reputation in history as well. They are the "warhogs," to borrow historian Stuart Brandes's title from his 1997 study of American war profiteers since colonial times, who profit from death. Their reputation reached a low point after World War I, which was blamed by a steady stream of pundits on these manufacturers. If they did not start the conflict, it was argued, then at least their feverish quest for sales in the preceding decades made the war more deadly than it needed to be. This became a fashionable argument, one that was widely adopted, even when proof for such allegations remained elusive. If, by the late summer of 1914, Europe resembled a powder keg that the diplomats traversing the continent were desperately trying to damp down, the arms merchants, according to observers who considered a massive conflagration inevitable, were the ones supplying the powder. Throughout the early 19305, Senator Gerald Nye lambasted munitions manufacturers from his seat on Capitol Hill, assigning to them the responsibility for the Great War, a view that was seconded by many in the international press and by the League of Nations, which came to a similar conclusion in a well-publicized 1921 report. Even famed journalist Walter Lippmann rushed to pin blame on the gunmakers, arguing, "Big warships meant big wars. Smaller warships meant smaller wars. No warships might eventually mean no wars."

In Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism, Jonathan Grant has written an extensive, well-researched, and probing account of the companies that built those warships in the decades before the Great War. He explores both gunmakers and bullet producers, though he does not attempt to evaluate Senator Nye's claim. Nor does he directly address the role arms merchants play in wars, including World War I. Rather, he has written a historical account, in which he is less concerned with debates over events than he is with discerning what happened during the decades at the end of the nineteenth century, a period often overlooked by contemporary scholars. This is not Grant's first foray into the subject, as he (with Donald Stoker) previously edited a collection devoted to the global arms trade before 1940. The literature on cold-war arms sales is vast, forming part of a general discussion of what has been termed the "military-industrial complex." Works on the era before 1914, especially accounts like Grant's that do not seek to tell a story about the Great War to come, are rarer and thus of considerable value. In this book, Grant demonstrates in detail how businesses in the developed world (to the degree that it had become industrialized during this era) sold weapons to clients on the periphery of the global market. His impressive research spanning a number of nations and various national archives reveals in some depth the diplomatic struggles that prompted nations to seek arms and the competition among firms to win contracts. The book will serve readers interested more narrowly in the subject of arms sales and, more broadly, in globalization and business history. As a monograph, it will be useful primarily to scholars, since, while it is wide in scope, the story it tells is narrow. By and large, Grant does not attempt to draw broad lessons from his research, and he makes only cursory attempts to connect his case studies.

Grant's overall contribution offers broader conclusions, in fact, than he offers himself, especially when this book is considered in light of the recent trend in the field of international history to consider the local and human consequences of global affairs and to write diplomatic history from the ground up. His work helps put a human face on history, as authors writing within this trend intend, even though Grant never explicitly states a desire to engage this new current in historical writing. He paints a picture of a global business whose results were less often based on the technological virtues of one weapons system or on the influence of great powers and more often on the particular domestic considerations of individual states. The decisions by small states in Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe to purchase arms from one company rather than from another were driven most often, Grant concludes, by domestic factors. "The greater emphasis should be placed on domestic agency over foreign manipulation as the key to understanding the growth of arms imports," he argues (p. 238). Since his study was designed to demonstrate the seeds of globalization in an industry of contemporary importance, this is indeed a significant statement.

Rulers, Guns, and Money should find a place on the shelves of historians of the period, whether their interests lie in colonialism, international relations, or business. Nevertheless, we will have to wait to discover the answer to the query posed by Nye: Are the merchants of death the cause of war, or do they merely fatten themselves on the suffering of others?

[Author Affiliation]

Jeffrey A. Engel is assistant professor of history and public policy at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is the author of Cold War at Thirty Thousand Feet: The AngloAmerican Fight for Aviation Supremacy (2007) and The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President (2008). At present, he is writing a history of the tendency of American leaders since Thomas Jefferson to personify their foreign threats.