Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth Century

In the first two decades of the twentieth century small arms control was regarded as one of the most important sectors for international arms control. The president of the 1925 Geneva Conference on the Control of the International Trade in Arms observed that there had been ‘two currents of opinion regarding the traffic in arms … the first of these movements, which originated in 1887, was towards the establishment of a special supervision over the importation of arms into certain areas, in which serious disturbances might be occasioned by an unrestricted traffic. The second, of a more general nature, aimed at obviating the dangers to the peace of the world’. ¹

As influential representatives of the ‘first movement’ British officials and ministers wanted a multilateral small arms agreement as a means of preventing colonial de-stabilization and preserving British regional control in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. They attempted to secure such a multilateral small arms agreement both before and after the First World War. By 1923, however, the ‘second movement’ had lost interest in small arms. It concentrated instead on constraining the power of the multi-national corporations which produced major weapons systems. Such ‘idealists’, were mainly non-governmental, but included some British politicians and officials who found their way into influential negotiating positions in the early 1920s.

‘Realists’ found that idealist influence in international institutions meant there was little chance of a useful small arms convention emerging. Without the opportunity of an ‘easy win’, an international convention on small arms was no longer worth the effort in pursuing. Small arms control rapidly declined in importance. It was therefore no longer a means of leveraging reform in the international system, decreasing idealist interest even further. The tone and content of discussions about the threat of small arms became quite different from that which had obtained in the trans-First World War period. By the 1930s, and for nearly five decades thereafter, the notion of small arms control as a major force in world politics appeared risible. ²

The historical literature on small arms control is substantial but diffuse. Historians have taken an interest in small arms for varying reasons with limited spill-over between fields. One might propose a three-fold typology: ‘Merchants of Death’ literature, studies of the origins of war and imperial history. The current article stitches together these fields.

‘Merchants of Death’ literature, narrowly defined, concentrates on the Senate munitions enquiry, the Nye Committee, in the USA (1934–5) and the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms in the UK (1935–6). Small arms appear extensively but episodically in these accounts. H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen’s 1934 book The Merchants of Death did, in fact, deal extensively with small arms but it focused on the mid-nineteenth century, especially the American Civil War. ³ In the wider literature on interwar arms control there has, in recent years, been a tendency to see interwar arms control as the foundation of postwar and contemporary arms control. Pride of price goes to ‘big ticket’ items such as warships and aeroplanes. ⁴

There are a number of important scholarly studies of the role of arms in the origins of the First World War. Modern historians have investigated, and largely discredited, the theories of the 1920s and 1930s. David Herrmann, for instance, found ‘no evidence that lobbying by armaments manufacturers for large contracts for, say, artillery or fortress construction played an influential part in the actual spiral of armaments increases … most people still regarded superiority in land warfare primarily as a matter of procuring and training more men’. Since this genre covers much of the same ground as ‘Merchants of Death’ literature per se, small arms also appear frequently but, as the locus of the Herrmann quote suggests, in a minor role. ⁵

Firearms have frequently attracted the attention of imperial historians. In the late 1960s there was an efflorescence of interest in the impact of small arms on African society in the late nineteenth century. Attention was devoted to the original Brussels Convention of 1890. ⁶

A sub-genre of Africanist literature dealt with Abyssinia, the subject of a very specific arms control regime between 1906 and 1935. In December 1906 Britain, France and Italy signed an agreement to tightly regulate the flow of small arms into Abyssinia. Abyssinia’s membership of the League of Nations dissolved the legal basis for the 1906 agreement. It was replaced by a quadripartite agreement, with Abyssinia as a signatory, in August 1930. The Abyssinian literature is notable for teleology, all roads leading to Mussolini’s invasion in October 1935. As a result it is also interesting for its hostility to ‘unfair’ small arms control. ⁷

Finally, and very importantly, smuggling from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan and the north-west frontier was an important issue to the Raj between the late 1890s and 1914. It has attracted a small number of studies by historians of British India. Tim Moreman concluded that, ‘the acquisition of large quantities of modern rifles and ammunition by the trans-border Pathan tribes transformed the strategical position on the North-West Frontier of India.’ British observers argued that the influx of small arms from Europe had two consequences. First, they immediately enabled indigenous populations to step up the violence of their own encounters. Second, they raised the spectre of Islamic revolt against Britain across an arc of crisis stretching from the Red Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The men on the spot were sure of the first consequence, and feared the second. ⁸

Interest in the importance of small arms and their control peaked in Britain in the decade after 1907. On the left, the most articulate voice was that of Walton Newbold, who published How Europe Armed for War in February 1916. ‘In 1912,’ according to his own account, ‘upon leaving the University of Manchester, I took up this study. As member of the Society of Friends, I was concerned to remove the cause of war. As a Socialist propagandist I was interested in presenting a case as strong as possible against private enterprise and private profit.’ ⁹ Newbold had joined the Independent Labour Party in 1910. He was close to campaigning idealist ‘peace radicals’ such as G.H. Perris and the group who had formed the National Peace Council, after the Hague Conference, in 1908. It was Perris, he later said, who had first convinced him to concentrate his fire on the ‘merchants of death’. The publication of How Europe Armed for War was financed by the Quaker philanthropist and businessman, Barrow Cadbury, managing director of the family chocolate business. Even more importantly, Newbold was linked with the German social democrat Karl Liebknecht. How Europe Armed for War was dedicated to ‘to my friend and comrade Dr. Karl Liebknecht at whose instance and in conjunction with whom a more ambitious work was planned in February 1914.’ ¹⁰

Newbold took small arms seriously. He made a special point of stressing that an obsession with Krupp, the manufacturers of heavy weapons and warship steel, was in danger of camouflaging other equally ‘sinister’ interests. ‘Quite on a level with Krupp as an indispensable asset of German militarism, was a firm of whose insidious and far reaching activities we have heard all too little, viz., Ludwig Löwe and Co.’ In the 1880s the Loewes took over other small arms and ammunition producers, most notably Mauser. The key to the power of this new industrial combine was the introduction of ‘smokeless’ propellant. ¹¹ ‘This combination of producers of rifles, munitions, and powder,’ Newbold argued, ‘caused an immense development of the German small arms industry and secured the control of the world market’. ¹² In the 1890s the German small arms complex internationalized itself. It forged a small arms alliance between the Loewes and Vickers. In the 1900s the small arms complex passed on to a new generation. After the death of the Loewe brothers, their successors, led by Paul Gontard, were ‘ubiquitous in the small arms and machine trades of Central Europe’. In Britain, Gontard’s role became public when he persuaded a British business associate to organize industrial espionage aimed at a new rifle factory in Kent. The Loewe companies were the ‘central citadel and strength of German capitalism and German military-economic strength’. ¹³

Newbold was equally scathing about British and American small arms manufacturers, although shorn of Karl Liebknecht’s information, his account of them was much less specific. His main complaint against the British firms was that they had sabotaged the operations of state factories, delivering their country into the hands of American capital. In 1916, however, the issues raised by Newbold were not necessarily confined to left-wing agitators gathered together in the Union of Democratic Control. They found resonance amongst the ‘new men’ Lloyd George gathered into the Ministry of Munitions from 1915. Liberal appointees came to distrust small arms manufacturers and ammunition producers. American manufacturers, in particular, the Ministry of Munitions believed, exploited the desperate British. ¹⁴

The British government assembled information not dissimilar to that of its left-wing critics on the ‘lords of death’. Other parts of state took a parallel interest in the ‘salesmen of death’. Whilst Karl Liebknecht and Walton Newbold were assembling their dossier on small arms manufacturers, there were small arms shipments, literally at sea, that caught the eye of officials.

In September 1913, General Victoriano Huerta’s agents loaded a ship with approximately 75,000 carbines and 20 machine guns to reach Mexico via Odessa and Hamburg. When the weapons arrived on board the SS Ypiranga on 21 April 1914, President Wilson ordered the US Navy to seize the Veracruz customs house to prevent the weapons reaching Huerta. This violent seizure had important consequences for relations between Washington and Berlin. ¹⁵

Four days later, on 25 April 1914, a ship arrived at Larne in Ulster from Hamburg. She unloaded 25,000 rifles for the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, a ‘loyalist’ thorn in the side of the British Liberal government. The deal to supply the weapons had been struck between Major Frederick Crawford of the UVF and the Hamburg arms dealer, Benny Spiro. Spiro had arranged for the Österreichische Waffenfabriks-Gesellschaft in Steyr to pack the weapons and to send them by train to Hamburg. ¹⁶

On 26 July 1914, 1000 Irish Volunteers – violent anti-British nationalists – unloaded 900 Mauser rifles from Erskine Childers’s yacht at Howth. The deal had been brokered by well-connected Republican sympathisers in London with a Hamburg arms dealer. Photographs were taken of Mrs Erskine Childers posing with the rifles and the accompanying ammunition crates, clearly marked, DW&M Hamburg. ¹⁷

The British government took a close interest in the role of Hamburg in the arming of dissident Boers in the run up to the October 1914 ‘Boer Uprising’. We possess a snapshot of a secret service agent despatched from London to Hamburg in June 1906 to investigate a German pro-Boer network responsible for smuggling 3 million cartridges into South Africa. Intelligence interest had been stimulated further by the Ferreira Raid of November 1906, the incursion of Boer ‘freebooters’ from German South-West Africa into South Africa. ¹⁸

In each of these four cases the rifles subsequently entered political folklore. Their military role remains a matter of debate. What was not a matter of debate was the centrality of the Hamburg arm trade for all these shipments.

Any suspicion of Berlin & Hamburg was dwarfed, however, even on the eve of the Great War, by the attention given to Paris and Marseilles. In March 1899 M. Goguyer, a French arms dealer, had arrived in Muscat, with a new business model. Goguyer intended to use French free trade agreements, signed in the 1840s and 1860s, to gain a competitive advantage. He used native vessels flying the French flag to ply a trade in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. In 1907 the Indian government declared that ‘Muscat has now earned the reputation of being the arms depôt of the entire Middle East.’ ¹⁹ This business model worked so well that it soon found imitators. The Goguyer model was taken up with equal vigour in the French colony of Jibuti, already a major arms trading centre. In 1911 the French minister in Addis Ababa calculated that seven million rifles had passed through Jibuti in the previous 10 years. ²⁰ Increasingly, as European armies modernized their own small arms, a mass of older, but still highly effective, weapons was dumped on the market. Many of these shipments included modern smokeless powder types. ²¹

In late 1907, the British government broached a plan to revisit the Brussels Convention of July 1890 on the grounds that ‘the present Regulations governing the traffic in arms in Africa are not sufficiently stringent’. ²² The 1890 Brussels Convention had been an attempt to suppress the African slave trade. Embedded within the treaty, in articles 8 to 14, was an agreement to control the small arms trade. Importation of firearms, especially ‘rifles and improved weapons’, was prohibited between the ‘20th parallel of north latitude and the 22nd parallel of south latitude, and extending westward to the Atlantic Ocean, and eastward to the Indian Ocean … as far as 100 nautical miles from the shore.’ ²³ The outcome of the 1908 Brussels Conference, however, was deadlock. Talks about Red Sea and the Persian Gulf dragged on without success. The conference was reconvened in late 1909 but finally admitted failure in January 1910. ²⁴

Britain’s eventual response was force. The British naval commander in the East Indies, Sir Edmond Slade, drove forward an aggressive unilateral approach. He insisted that a naval blockade must also involve aggressive inland operations. This stress on military action culminated in the Battle of Dubai on Christmas Eve, 1910. Five members of a Royal Navy landing party were killed fighting Islamist tribesmen for their arms. The battle was a turning point. Slade’s success created the pre-conditions for an eventual deal with France. ²⁵ Once Muscat was effectively blockaded the Sultan had little choice but to agree to the creation of a bonded warehouse. With Muscat closed to profitable high volume business it became, for the French, a case of getting a pay off. At first, French diplomats tried ambitiously to extract a colony. Thwarted, they settled for financial compensation for their arms dealers in 1914. ²⁶

The Committee of Imperial Defence’s Sub-Committee on the Arms Traffic convened at the beginning of 1917, as soon as the Lloyd George coalition had established itself in power. Chaired by the Liberal politician Lord Islington, its most notable members were Sir Edmond Slade and Sir Henry MacMahon. MacMahon too had been involved in the Persian Gulf issue, as agent for Baluchistan. His main importance to the Committee, however, was as a last-minute addition ‘by direction of the Prime Minister’. ²⁷

The committee had before them an analysis of the failed 1908 Brussels Conference. The second model it examined was unilateral military action, as pioneered by Slade in the Gulf of Oman. The Islington Committee noted, however, that unilateral operations, even when successful, incurred heavy costs, political as well as financial. In Muscat, for instance, Islamist sheikhs had denounced the Sultan. Their revolt had been fuelled by the Sultan’s previous collusion with the arms trade, for they armed themselves from his arms dumps in the interior. The Islington Committee drew attention to the fact that the ongoing revolt against the Sultan’s successor was so strong, that he had lost control of all territory apart from the town of Muscat itself. ²⁸

The Islington Committee’s most notable outside witness was Sir Mark Sykes who urged them not to rely too heavily on their pre-war experiences. Sykes was briefly in London between postings to the Middle East. As a semi-offical ‘fixer’ for the previous coalition government, he had negotiated the May 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement on the postwar territorial settlement of the region. Sykes started from the point that the committee was interested in ‘the general problem arising out of decent weapons getting into the hands of inferior races’. This was fine as far as it went, he suggested, but they needed to think beyond that problem. Pre-1914 efforts had concentrated on denying indigenous peoples modern ‘arms of precision’. In the late nineteenth century these weapons had been a marvel. But ‘smokeless magazine rifles are now in the hands of all European armies and form the staple commodity (if released) of the arms trafficker.’ In any case, ‘whether we control the arms traffic or no, it must be remembered that immense masses of modern arms have already been issued to natives in Persia, Arabia and Turkey, and these will spread in all directions … enough to arm every black man who wants a rifle.’ ²⁹

Sykes thought overemphasis on rifles was mistaken. The threat to British power, as opposed to a problem for British governance, would come from a different type of modern small arm altogether: the automatic pistol. The Broomhandle Mauser of 1896, made in Germany by a Loewe company, was the world’s first technically and commercially-successful self-loading pistol: it fired 10 high-velocity jacketed bullets in a matter of seconds. It had come to prominence during the siege of Sidney Street in 1910. The Browning of 1900, made in Belgium by FN, had been used to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand. ³⁰ ‘These devilish inventions,’ as Sykes described them, ‘are cheap, accurate, small and easy to smuggle … these weapons have revolutionised street fighting’. ‘When the war is over we shall,’ he predicted, ‘suffer from a great deal of social and political unrest, and this will, I believe, bank on terrorism rather than revolution proper … I suggest that the disaffected intellectuals of Cairo and the Indian towns, plus magazine pistols, will be a greater danger [than armed insurrection by forces fighting like regular soldiers]’. ‘Any fool,’ he concluded, ‘can shoot a Viceroy or a police inspector; and an anaemic student of 17 years of age can easily knock out a police patrol of five men. Ten or twelve desperadoes can hold a street for hours and three or four hundred spread panic through a city.’ ³¹

The Islington Committee concluded that Britain should renew its effort to create a workable international agreement on the arms trade. Much of their report, and its wording, was imported wholesale into the deliberations of Sir Ernley Blackwell of the Home Office in recasting Britain’s own gun laws into the restrictive form they took in 1920. The Islington Committee argued that the starting point for any international arms control was tight control of the domestic market. Beyond the UK, Islington urged that the, ‘whole question of the future control of the arms traffic should be raised by HMG at the Peace Conference as a high moral issue’. The Committee outlined Britain’s future negotiating position: to persuade other powers, ‘(i) not to dispose, by sale or otherwise in any circumstances whatever of the surplus stocks of arms and ammunition … (ii) to regulate the sale and manufacture of … automatic pistols … under a system of rigid State control and prohibit the export of these articles to any destination except under Government licence’. ³²

As predicted, the Paris Peace Conference did indeed provide an opening to insert the British point of view. ³³ British negotiators, however, had to use some fancy footwork to get what they wanted. They felt that they were tripped up by their American colleagues. First, President Wilson took an ‘idealist’ position against the ‘evil effects’ of private manufacture. The Islington Committee had been aware of the difficulties the Ministry of Munitions was having in controlling the domestic and international private small arms industries. It raised the possibility of imposing a state monopoly on arms sales, noting that ‘much has happened in the last nine years to modify public opinion in regard to State control over industry, and the objections raised in 1908 would not necessarily be of equal force at the present day.’ It had, however, opposed any such state monopoly on the realist grounds that it would disrupt British imperial governance, advising that there was, ‘no necessity to revive this proposal.’ In the recollection of the Secretary of the Cabinet, President Wilson ‘sprung’ this issue on his colleagues and would not take no for an answer. ³⁴ Second, the Americans were unwilling to concentrate solely on small arms. The ‘original intention’, the Foreign Office noted, ‘was to confine the scope of the convention to small arms … the inclusion of artillery was adopted on the suggestion of the American experts in Paris.’ ³⁵ As a result, the convention of St. Germain-en-Laye, signed in September 1919, sought to prevent the export of, ‘artillery of all kinds, apparatus for the discharge of all kinds of projectiles, explosive or gas-diffusing, flame-throwers, bombs, grenades, machine guns and rifled small-bore breech loading weapons of all kinds’. ³⁶

Despite the diffusion of the original intent, however, it was clear that the main focus of the agreement was small arms. The concept of an enlarged ‘prohibited zone’ was imported from the Brussels negotiations. This focus became even clearer in the Protocol appended to the Convention. The Convention depended on a process of ratification. The Protocol was an agreement between certain powers to adhere to its clauses immediately. The British negotiators regarded the Protocol as much more important than the Convention. The goal of the Protocol was to immediately ‘prevent, as far as possible, the uncontrolled dispersal of the large stocks of arms then existing in numerous countries.’ ³⁷ The Protocol was governed by a series of intergovernmental agreements by which various powers promised to apply its provisions to the prohibited zone. In other words, the public face of St-Germain was a multilateral agreement to control a wide range of weapons. The ‘real’ St-Germain was a number of bilateral agreements, ‘that, as originally proposed … should be held to apply only to small-bore arms, ammunition and bombs … by this means the chief obstacles to legitimate trade with civilised countries would be removed, while retaining the most important feature of the convention, viz. the prohibition of export of arms to prohibited zones.’ ³⁸ The signatories of the protocol were Britain, France, Belgium, Italy and Japan.

The St. Germain Protocol was thus representative of an approach that stressed a small number of powers bound together by norms rather than institutions. By 1919 this kind of agreement already appeared less prestigious in the eyes of commentators because they did not involve the ‘enormous investment in time and diplomatic capital’ of the ‘drafting and ratification process’ necessary for complex multilateral treaties. As Christine Jojarth has recently argued, however, there is no logical reason why a protocol, with which the signatories wish to comply, should be less effective than a convention. Andrew Webster likewise drew the lesson from his study of interwar arms control that, ‘more limited efforts, focusing on specific weapons or problems, are likely to be more successful than over-ambitious and unfocused approaches.’ ³⁹

In one sense, British negotiators had requited the recommendations of the Islington Committee very well. As that group had pointed out, any agreement would probably be breached by most signatories at various points. The best that could be achieved was a cap on the overall scale of the problem. The old Adam of Jibuti was still a threat. In November 1922, Ras Taffari of Abyssinia visited Jibuti in person to pick up rifles. ⁴⁰ More generally, the French, Belgians, Italians and Japanese chose to view ‘most firearms and ammunition’ as not being ‘arms and munitions of war’: therefore they granted export licences for such items heading for the prohibited zone. ⁴¹ Despite such irritations, there was a grudging acceptance that none of these problems was a major threat. The Persian Gulf issue was now ‘trivial’. ⁴² On the whole, ‘the informality of the arrangements on which its present enforcement is based’ seemed satisfactory. ‘The convention may not be perfect,’ everyone acknowledged, ‘but it does at least check the supply of arms to turbulent races in Africa and the Middle East, and this was precisely the object HMG had in view when they initiated the negotiations leading up to the Convention.’ ⁴³

The real problem for the Protocol was that the United States of America refused to sign up to a deal. As a result, the St-Germain Convention looked like a messy failure. Idealists poured into this perceived vacuum, undeterred by realist attempts to stop them. Like President Wilson the idealists were marked by a fascination with the private manufacture of advanced weapons. ⁴⁴

The process began in February 1921 with the first meeting of the League of Nations’ Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments (TMC). The leading lights of the TMC from its chairman, René Viviani, down were convinced idealists. France was represented by the trade unionist, Léon Jouhaux. Britain’s spokesman, Lord Robert Cecil, the architect of the League of Nations, was not necessarily bound by the realist caution of his colleagues in London. ⁴⁵ The TMC produced its report in September 1921. In formal terms it was unable to reach formal conclusions, merely producing a discussion paper on the relative merits of the prohibition of private manufacture and the regulation of the arms trade. ‘I was,’ said H.A.L. Fisher, the British socialist politician, ‘largely responsible for the report. It is correct to say that statements in the report were propositions pro and con which in fact had been urged and did not represent any findings of the Committee as to their validity.’ ⁴⁶

This formal position was, however, barely noticed because the ‘con’ side produced a series of propositions that rapidly achieved canonical status. There were five main allegations against ‘armament firms’: bribery of government officials; distribution of false reports about the military programmes of other powers; influencing public opinion through control of newspapers; creation of ‘international armament rings’ to play off one country against another; and construction of international armament trusts to drive up prices. These allegations were drawn directly from the discourse of the left in the pre-war period, articulated with regard to small arms by Liebknecht and Newbold. Few discussions of disarmament were subsequently possible without reference to this ‘League of Nations’ view. ⁴⁷

Many British delegates were themselves keen to pursue the whole question of private manufacture. The liberal social reformer, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, formerly the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Munitions, and now the British government’s chief economic adviser, was particularly vocal. The inability of the British government to speak with a united voice led its officials to the conclusion that the web of informal arrangements designed to keep the protocol going would probably dissolve under scrutiny. Therefore, it would be ‘desirable that the Arms Traffic Convention should be revised so that its effects may be restricted to checking the supply of arms to native and specified disturbed districts, and the general question of private manufactures of arms should be dealt with as a distinct subject’. ⁴⁸

Unsurprisingly, the idealists associated with the TMC were unwilling to accept the narrow focus of the realists. Matters came to a head in July 1923. Attention definitively shifted to the insistence that the way forward was multilateral agreement through the League, that private manufacture was of intrinsically more interest than arms traffic, that the main focus of attention should be aeroplanes and warships. Above all there was the clear belief that St-Germain had failed and the way forward was a new Convention. ⁴⁹ The British task became to stymie any such ‘meddlesome restrictions’ on private manufacture whilst attempting to salvage the St-Germain regime in a new form. ⁵⁰

The compromise agreement to attempt a new convention on the arms trade represented a significant failure for both idealists and realists. The idealist bid for a far-reaching treaty that would alter the structure of international relations had been blocked. The realists had been placed on the defensive. They had been forced to discuss a broad convention, albeit limited to the arms trade, rather than the limited and practical agreement on small arms in certain parts of the world they had originally sought. ⁵¹ The oxygen of publicity generated by a grand gathering of all interested nations opened up the discussion to countries who wished for neither realist nor idealist arms control. As David Stone and Andrew Webster have argued in their studies of the overall League of Nations process, ‘it was the non-producing states, the “purchasers of death”, who brought crippling objections to Geneva … when faced with League action that might erode their defences, smaller states rose to defend their sovereignty.’ ⁵²

In all of these manoeuvres the issue of small arms played little part. Implicitly, of course, British policy was all about their control in certain areas. Rhetorically, neither side gave the issue much attention. Accordingly, small arms played a subsidiary but revealing role in the Conference for the Control of the International Trade in Arms, Munitions, and Implements of War that opened at Geneva in May 1925. St-Germain had been a small arms treaty, expanded to other weapons, then contracted by its protocol back to small arms. From the outset Geneva was designed to cover all weapons, small arms being a minor part of the whole. They were, nevertheless, propelled into the limelight twice: first by Belgium, then by Persia.

Although the Conference was chaired by a Belgian, Count Henry Carton de Wiart, the Belgian delegate, Léon Dupriez, Professor of Comparative Constitutional Government at Louvain, a member of the TMC, was the most vocal opponent of any limitation of the small arms trade. Such limitation, he argued, would disproportionately affect Belgium, for: ‘Belgium produces practically speaking only small arms, rifles, carbines, revolvers and automatic pistols … Belgium is a country that exports arms, but practically it only exports to those who use them for sporting purposes or for personal defence.’ This was, of course, special pleading. In 1922 Herstal had started to produce exact replicas of the Imperial German army’s Mauser. In 1924 it launched its own modified version: the rifle was an immediate success in export markets. There was no difference between a ‘military’ and a ‘sporting’ Mauser from FN. ‘You will understand,’ Dupriez nevertheless implored his fellow delegates, ‘it is necessary that the manufacturers of weapons for sporting purposes or for personal defence should be able to despatch their goods with confidence without fear that they would be held up … That is why Belgium attaches great importance to article 1 in the draft convention.’ Article 1 defined ‘arms, munitions and implements of war’. ⁵³

Dupriez popped up throughout the Conference to insist that small arms were not implements of war. ‘If it is desired’, Lord Onslow, Britain’s delegate, demanded of Dupriez, ‘to place a really effective control over the illicit traffic in arms, how can we do it if we exclude arms that have a potential military value from the system of licences?’ ⁵⁴ As rapporteur for the Conference, Dupriez was in a good position to get his way. He included in the definition of Category I weapons in Article 1 the phrase, ‘exclusively designed and intended for warfare’ to prevent the inclusion of ‘sporting weapons’. He removed pistols and revolvers ‘never intended and designed for military purposes’ from Category I. He tried to have any pistol with a calibre of less than 8.5 mm removed from Category II as having ‘no military value’. He even attempted to have sub-machine guns declared non-military weapons. ⁵⁵

At this point the British explicitly objected. In the end it was agreed that sub-machine guns had to be Category I weapons. Pistols with a calibre greater than 6.5 mm did have military value and should be in Category II. ⁵⁶ Dupriez was so unhappy with this compromise that he tried to argue his own report down when it reached the floor of the conference. Despite rebukes from other delegates, idealist and realist, Dupriez persisted, proposing an amendment to remove any mandatory requirement for countries to impose export licences on Category II weapons. Dupriez tied the conference down for two days on one sentence, referring to mandatory export licences, in order to emasculate Category II. ⁵⁷

The Anglo–Belgian dispute was succeeded by an Anglo–Persian dispute. The latter dispute looked both backwards and forwards. It centred on the suppression of the Persian Gulf small arms trade, and the determination of the government of Reza Shah to prevent a repeat for small, or any other type, of arms. ⁵⁸ The argument was personalized because India was represented, with an always colourful turn of phrase, by Sir Percy Cox.

Cox was the official who had had most to do with suppressing the Gulf arms trade before the War. He did not hesitate to draw on the experience. ‘I speak,’ he declared, ‘with lively personal recollections of a period of some eleven years’ struggle … to cope with a violent traffic in arms to the north-west frontiers of India, passing through small ports of the Gulf of Oman’. The trade had, ‘now happily been reduced to exiguous proportions.’ The risk of recrudescence and the need for vigilance, however, was ever present. ⁵⁹ The Persian delegation, by contrast, responded with a demand that the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman should be immediately removed from the ‘prohibited zone’. Cox replied that if that was done Britain and India had no interest in signing any convention. ‘One of the main objects of the convention is to suppress or control the illicit traffic in arms, especially rifles and revolvers, in those parts of the world where their possession by local inhabitants constitute a menace to peace and order.’ Persian recalcitrance was, ‘based mainly on sentiment … even today, not only traffic in arms, but piracy and traffic in slaves, intermittently occur in the water which we are discussing … They flit across the Gulf to the Arab side, sell their human freight and bring back arms.’ Faced with Cox’s démarche, the Persians walked out of the Conference. ⁶⁰

Thanks to the Persians, the Belgians need not have expended so much effort on their filibuster. Although the remaining delegations signed the Convention, it was a dead letter. Powers signed on the basis that they would only ratify if other powers ratified, creating a circle of non-ratification. Geneva was supposed to cover for the failure of St-Germain, but St-Germain had had a back up plan in the form of the Protocol. Geneva really marked the end of the ‘Brussels’ process. For other weapons systems there were other processes, such as that begun at Washington for warships. Small arms, on the other hand, were consigned to the world of local policing initiatives. This was not what the British realists had wanted. Their preferred model had been a system of international enforcement along the lines of the 1919 Protocol. The evolution from Brussels to St-Germain to Geneva had introduced so many other issues that the desired multi-lateral deal had disappeared. The only option was to rely on the residue of practice that had been built up since the 1890s. ⁶¹ Small arms played no significant part in the World Disarmament Conferences of the early 1930s.

The ‘fag-end’ nature of the small arms issue was amply confirmed by its next major appearance in a British public forum, the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms. The Commission did not ignore small arms, but discussed them in a quite different context from its main business. Both the idealist NGOs who addressed the enquiry, and the British government itself, wished to concentrate on the question of the private manufacture of major weapons systems and the role of private combines, either as promoters of war or as bulwarks of defence.

Although the papers submitted to the Committee threw up some interesting old names and faces, they were almost entirely ignored by participants from both camps. ⁶² Philip Noel-Baker, the star ‘expert witness’ for the opponents of private manufacture as a result his book The Private Manufacture and Trade in Arms, did mention the Loewe companies. ⁶³ He dwelt at much greater length, however, on his personal experience of disruptive ‘air interests’ at the 1932–3 Disarmament Conference. ⁶⁴ Robert Cecil made reference to the Liebknecht allegations but made no comment on the nature of the weapons the Loewe firms produced. ⁶⁵

There was a telling incident at the enquiry involving a familiar commentator, Walton Newbold. Newbold had been on a long journey since How Europe Armed, from founder-member of the CPGB, to Communist MP for Motherwell, to the fringes of the Politburo, to being purged by the Party, to the Labour Party, to National Labour, to Churchill supporter. He denounced the campaign against the arms trade as nothing more than Soviet agitprop. When asked whether a ‘considerable part of your statement is [a] denial really of a good deal of your life’s work,’ he replied: ‘Exactly’. Newbold did not mention small arms at all in his testimony. ⁶⁶ He did, however, retain enough of his old interest to intervene when the managing director of Vickers, Sir Charles Craven, tried to deny his company had ever been linked with the Loewes. ⁶⁷

The Royal Commission devoted significant time to only one ‘merchant of death’. It did so mainly to demonstrate that he was a tawdry and insignificant ‘lone wolf’. Captain John Ball was first ‘outed’ by the Nye Committee in the USA. In September 1934 the Committee had investigated arms deals in South America. There was a particular focus on light weapons in the region because of the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay. The League of Nations Chaco Commission had reported in May 1934 that, ‘the armies engaged are using up-to-date material – aeroplanes, armoured cars, flame projectors, quick-firing guns, machine-guns and automatic rifles: the automatic weapons are available in great quantities, but the other arms are few. ⁶⁸ As British intelligence confirmed Bolivia was importing startling quantities of small arms’. ⁶⁹

During its investigation the Nye Committee had turned the spotlight on the little known American Armament Corporation and its president, A.J. Miranda. Miranda’s correspondence came into the hands of the committee investigators. Some of the letters came from Captain Ball of the Soley Armament Company. He claimed to be the sole ‘selling channel’ for small arms belonging to the British War Office. He boasted that he controlled stocks ‘of such magnitude that the sale of a big block of them could alter the balance of power of the smaller states’. Those stocks amounted to ‘a million rifles and a hundred and twenty million rounds of ammunition for rifles and machine guns, and many tens of thousands of machine guns of various types’. Ball proposed to his American correspondents that it was time to move on from South America to the Chinese Nationalists. ‘As you are no doubt aware,’ he wrote, ‘China consumes a vast quantity of small arms per year, and they have bought large quantities of rifles from us, mainly Mausers (over 100,000 in 1931/2) but have slacked off lately owing to the loss of Manchuria, and the shortage of ready money in the South’. He asked Miranda to lobby the US State and War Departments to buy weapons for the Chinese. British diplomats were surprised to learn upon investigation that ‘the figures given in the evidence for the quantities of arms at the disposal of the Soley Company are large, but they are understood to approximate the truth.’ ⁷⁰ OPEN IN VIEWER

The letters ensured that both investigators for, and witnesses before, the Royal Commission would revisit them. The investigation brought them to the door of the Birmingham Small Arms Company, or BSA. Before and during the First World War BSA had been largest private manufacturer of military small arms in the UK. With the end of War, and with massive stockpiles of small arms in existence, the bottom fell out of their market. BSA’s response was to diversify to other products: cars, bicycles, machine tools and steel. By 1930 they were almost out of the small arms business. But one of the ‘lessons learnt’ from the post-First World War analysis of the Ministry of Munitions was that it was particularly hard to expand small arms production in a crisis. ⁷¹

In an effort to persuade BSA to retain some residual capacity the War Office had offered them a deal. BSA would be appointed sole selling agent around the world for the surplus stocks of Lewis LMGs and the Enfield P1914 rifles. BSA would not actually have to sell the weapons themselves: they hired, as their agent, the man with the widest experience of selling British surplus small arms worldwide, John Ball. ⁷²

Thus Captain Ball found himself before the Commission. His performance was memorable both for what he said, and the reaction he provoked. ‘The captain was easily the most pugnacious of the armament dealers who have been questioned by the commission so far,’ wrote the correspondent of the New York Times. ‘Short and thickset, with supreme self-confidence, he answered every question as if he took pride in his work and did not mind if the commission knew it.’ ⁷³ Ball explained that he was a former officer in the Royal Flying Corps, who had ‘travelled a lot to foreign countries both before and after the war in regard to small arms’. He had started his business in 1918, dealing first with the Disposals Board and then the War Office. That business was selling off the surplus stocks of small arms that the Islington Committee had identified as a threat, and the St-Germain protocol had been designed to control.

British policy, the War Office testified, ‘has always been largely influenced by a desire to prevent armaments, accumulated as the result of the War, from falling into improper hands.’ The practical question of what to do with British army surplus had, however, caused some uncertainty. In April 1924 the disposal of government stocks, directly or through a contractor, had been banned. Less than a year later that decision was reversed. In 1929 the ban was re-instated. The next year ‘it was decided to cancel the previous decision’. ⁷⁴ Ball had created the Soley Armament Co. Ltd. in 1927, ‘I am the Soley Armament Company,’ he confessed. He established a factory in Liège to ‘take an unsaleable rifle and make it into a saleable one.’ His deal with BSA and the War Office was relatively small beer: he estimated that he handled 1000 Mausers for every British rifle. The rifles were sourced from the stocks of continental governments, who were only too eager to sell – he named Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The response that Ball provoked from members of the Commission was one of near apoplexy. ⁷⁵

Particularly irked was Dame Rachel Crowdy, doughty founder of the wartime VADS, and long-term League of Nations official. As observers noted, whereas other witnesses of the day, the representatives of the big chemical companies, were treated with customary politeness, Ball was viewed with obvious contempt, an adversarial approach that he seemed to enjoy. The Commissioners’ anger at having failed to humiliate Ball was turned on officials of the War Office. The atmosphere was not helped by the willingness of War Office representatives to defend Ball: they made it plain that he was their man. They liked him personally; and he made a tidy profit for them. They defended the quality of his products, ‘first-class rifles in good condition … used with marked success last year at Bisley.’ They knew, but failed to mention, that Ball helped them to monitor the global small arms trade. ⁷⁶

None of this went down well. The international lawyer Harold Gutteridge declared that, ‘your statement of the advantage to these transactions has left me quite cold … Do you not think the [the risks of] peddling about of these – I will not say tinpot, but more or less worn out rifles … infinitely outbalanced any niggardly profit that might accrue from the sale of these stores?’. He turned the usual realist British government argument against itself, ‘I have in mind a vision of streams of second-hand rifles going across Europe and finishing up in, say, Afghanistan, where they might be used against this country’. Dame Rachel said that, ‘as a person who travels a great deal, I should think it must be very bad to the prestige of Britain for a person like Captain John Ball to be looked upon as the sole seller of British rifles. It cannot do our prestige any good.’ Gutteridge concluded that, ‘this is really the rag and bone trade and it is undignified for this country to engage in it. It is all right when you deal with tentage … but with regard to arms it is running the risk of bringing our good name into disrepute, and it is not worth it.’ They made it clear that the ‘rag and bone trade’ would get special treatment in their report. ⁷⁷

The response of the Baldwin government was illuminating. The Royal Commission recommended ‘the complete cessation of the private export trade in surplus and second-hand arms and munitions of war.’ This was in contrast to their ‘very satisfactory’ conclusion, in the British government’s view, ‘that the State monopoly of arms manufacture … is highly undesirable from the point of view of Imperial Defence’. When senior figures discussed the issue, Sir Maurice Hankey concluded that on ‘tentage’ it might be possible to throw the Commissioners a bone, as long any ban of the sale of second-hand weapons did not extend to providing accessories for important systems such as warships. ⁷⁸ The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, thought the Commission was merely being tiresome. Having accepted the government view on the main issue they were trying to find other ‘alleged objections’ to justify their existence. He agreed that they could have their way on arms traffickers but not with ‘proper’ companies. Lord Swinton, the Secretary of State for Air, concluded the discussion by saying that ‘this recommendation should only apply to a trading company who bought and sold arms, and not to manufacturers who might be holding surplus stocks.’ ⁷⁹ Ball was allowed to disappear from the scene, dying in 1939 in the middle of a fraud case in which a Chinese confederate tried to sell scrap metal to a Paris arms dealer. ⁸⁰ It was 30 years before the issue surfaced again in serious political discourse. ⁸¹

We can suggest two reasons why realist ministers and civil servants were willing to downgrade small arms to ‘tentage’. A consideration, applied particularly to Britain, was the absence of a focusing issue such as Muscat. In the pre-war period very considerable effort, military and diplomatic, had been expended on suppressing the Gulf of Oman trade. This effort touched on a key security issue for the British Empire, the defence of India. It involved the major departments of state at the highest level. In the postwar period, the possible revival of the trade was a live issue but, in the end, did not amount to much. In 1935 the subsidy paid to Sultan of Muscat since 1912, in recompense for not supporting the arms trade, was withdrawn with very little fuss. Bushire reported that, ‘there is little doubt that arms do find their way from Muscat to Iranian Mekran but only in small numbers and irregularly. Such smuggling can hardly be termed “arms traffic”.’ ⁸²

Secondly, twentieth-century small arms remained an essentially nineteenth-century technology. What made modern small arms possible was the metallic cartridge perfected in the 1870s. The key scientific advance was the invention of smokeless powder in the 1880s. Despite appearances to the contrary, there were arguably few subsequent significant advances in small arms. ⁸³ Fully automatic weapons were a product of the 1880s; self-loading weapons of the 1890s. This did not mean that small arms were insignificant on the battlefield. In the Second World War small arms fire accounted for between 14 and 31 per cent of the total casualties, the proportion depending upon the theatre of action. The big threat, however, came from heavier weapons. ⁸⁴ Small arms ceased to be the ‘decisive’ weapons that some imagined they would be in the late nineteenth century. ⁸⁵ Realist policy-makers were thus able to see past a cultural bias that tended to overrate the importance of small arms. ⁸⁶ Wilfred Owen had put the ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ on a par with ‘the monstrous anger of the guns’ in Anthem for Doomed Youth.

In contrast to its attitude in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British state ceased to believe that the design of small arms held significant strategic interest. ⁸⁷ In 1934 the War Office bought in a Czech design for the Army’s new light machine gun. Vigorous protests from British firms such as Vickers and BSA were ignored. Indeed, small arms manufacturers had little influence on the state during the interwar period. This conclusion was fully manifested after the Second World War. ⁸⁸ Eventually the Ministry of Defence concluded that it was ‘impracticable and uneconomical to maintain a R&D team capable of designing major modern small arms.’ BSA, the main British private manufacturer, ‘closed down completely as a result of a deliberate government decision to let them go’. ⁸⁹

Idealists were willing to regard small arms as ‘tentage’ because the story told about them by left-wing propagandists such as Liebknecht and Newbold now seemed overblown. In retrospect some idealists concluded that private manufacture did not manipulate states: aggressive states dominated private manufacture. ⁹⁰ This contention could be readily illustrated by reference to small arms manufacture. The German company that appeared repeatedly in public analysis was Rheinmetall, one of the leading concerns engaged in ‘secret rearmament’. In June 1938, the ownership of Rheinmetall was transferred to the Reichswerke Hermann Goering and thus the Nazi state. ⁹¹ Interwar idealists who had failed to focus on the threat of totalitarian dictatorships could be ruthlessly guyed by realists. ⁹² In a grudging admission of the prevailing trend the Nobel Committee awarded its 1959 Peace Prize to Philip Noel-Baker with the remark that ‘then, as now, it was the policy of the state that proved decisive.’ ⁹³

The decline of interest in an international control regime becomes an even more important story because of a rise of interest in the same idea during the twenty-first century. In July 2006 the UN Review Conference on the Illicit Small Arms Trade, convened to give legal force to a programme of action initiated in 2001, ‘ended without agreement on a formal outcome document, thus failing to provide the General Assembly with either a mandate to conduct a further review in five years, or guidance on future implementation.’ ⁹⁴

The re-born interest in small arms control mirrors elements of its demise in the mid-twentieth century. There has not been any significant technical advance in small arms. There has, however, been a renewed insistence on their likely effectiveness. For realists there is now a focusing issue: the kinds of terrorism and insurgency that the Islington Committee discussed in 1917. ⁹⁵ For idealists, small arms now have a resurgent value for a critique of the system of states. The Cold War ‘military-industrial complex’ movement, just as its predecessors in the 1920s, focused on ‘big ticket’ items. ⁹⁶ It was the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of a different type of warfare, that prompted a shift in attention to other types of arms manufacturer. The Russian state arms industry, for instance, was privatized, whist retaining its close links to former party organs. The most recognisable poster-child of the new industry is the Kalashnikov assault rifle. ⁹⁷

There was, and is, a real world interaction between realists and idealists. When ‘realists’ take small arms control seriously, so too do ‘idealists’. When realists regard small arms as a serious threat to national security, they become interested in international small arms control. That very interest makes small arms a useful lever for idealists wishing to argue for a fundamental change in the international system, such as ‘global governance’. ⁹⁸ When idealists become a powerful force in small arms negotiations they insist on concentrating on these broader issues rather than the specific problems that had first attracted realist interest. This idealist approach causes realist arms controllers to lose interest in international agreements. Once the realists have downgraded small arms control as a useful tool in the arsenal of diplomacy its importance as a lever for broader reform lessens. In the past idealists tended to abandon the issue at this stage.

The 2006 UN Conference had a historical analogue in the 1908 Brussels Conference. Brussels was far from marking the end of a process. Indeed, for Britain, the issue of small arms became more acute in the decade and a half after Brussels. The UN will gather for another small arms conference in 2012: the current cycle is still in progress. One entirely possible outcome, however, is an eventual loss of interest in the issue, despite the zeal of idealist commentators and activists. As past experience has shown there is a fragile middle ground in which compromise can occur. Indeed the issue is now even more daunting because there are many more small arms producing nations than in the earlier period. ⁹⁹