Banning the sale of modern firearms in Africa: On the origins of the Brussels Conference Act of 1890

The Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference in 1889–1890 agreed upon a sales ban of modern firearms for large parts of the African continent, a covenant that served joint imperial interests amid the ‘Scramble for Africa’. This article reconstructs the historical context in which the Brussels provisions came into being and explores the inter-imperial co-operation that paved the way for the agreement. To understand its origins, special attention must be paid to local events in East Africa and to a naval blockade that was executed here in 1888–1889. It was against this background that the German government, navigating between commercial and security interests, drafted the international control scheme that was later in large part adopted by the Brussels Conference. The article also demonstrates how in this context the issue of arms control was bound up with anti-slavery politics, thereby linking it to the imperial ‘civilising mission’.

Confronting US imperialism with international law. Central America and the arms trade of the inter-war period

This article analyses attempts to regulate the access to arms in Central America from the beginning of the World War I to the end of the 1920s. During these years, the USA was not only the politically and economically dominant force in the region – they were also the main provider of weapons. In a region where societies were reshaped by the integration into a global economy, political groups depended on the access to weapons to enforce their claims for power. This gave the US government the possibility to use arms exports as well as arms embargos to shape politics in the region. Within this setting, arms control through international law became a contested subject. The First World War boosted international debates about disarmament. The Wilson administration joined these debates with proposals, which would have enabled Washington to better control the flow of arms into the Western Hemisphere. Central American governments, on the other hand, joined disarmament negotiations in Geneva to shape international law in a way to restrict Washington’s influence in the region and to ensure equal treatment at the international level. The impact of this conflict was not limited to the Western Hemisphere, and it left its imprint on European disarmament policies. Thus, this article reveals how international arms control was inscribed at the same time in imperial and anti-imperial agendas in a region with formally sovereign states.

Arms intervention: Weimar Germany, post-imperial influence and weapons trafficking in warlord China

The Treaty of Versailles aimed to strip Germany of both its colonial empire and the global reach of its arms industry. Yet the conflicts in warlord-era China led to the reestablishment of German influence on the other side of the world via the arms trade. Weimar Germany had declared a policy of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Chinese civil war in an effort to demonstrate that as a post-colonial power, it could now act as an honest broker. From below, however, traffickers based in Germany and German merchants in China worked to evade Versailles restrictions and an international arms embargo to supply warlords with weapons of war. Although the German state officially aimed to remain neutral, criminal elements, rogue diplomats, black marketeers and eventually military adventurers re-established German influence in the region by becoming key advisors and suppliers to the victorious Guomindang. Illicit actors in Germany and China proved to be crucial in linking the two countries and in eventually overturning the arms control regimes that were imposed in the wake of World War I.

Guns in the Hills: Firearms Circulation along the North-East Frontier of British India, 1860s–1910s

This article seeks to examine the significance of firearms in the making of the frontier and the ways in which societies on the North-East Frontier of British India encountered and adapted firearms between the 1860s and 1910s. It will study the complex ways in which the entry of firearms was mediated and galvanised by a range of processes such as imperial expansion, the intrusion of capital, access to resources, the role of violence, and the drawing of new borders. In turn, the circulation and diffusion of firearms also engendered a range of other practices and experiences among the societies on the frontier. Moving along various land and river routes, a range of individuals and traders were involved in circulating arms and ammunition into the imperial margins. They, in turn, linked the frontier geographies to markets, ports, and other larger oceanic networks. A focus on the flow of firearms as such illustrates a web of interconnections that straddled multiple scales and relations. As firearms circulated and gradually made their way into the periphery, various measures were initiated by the colonial state, such as enforcing prohibitive laws and instituting surveillance structures to control and block the flow of firearms along the North-East Frontier. This article examines some of these complex processes, dynamics, and experiences that ensued through the circulation and diffusion of firearms on the North-East Frontier of British India.

Imperial legality through ‘Exception’: Gun control in the Russian Empire

Several days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Russian Tsar on 2 April 1879, a new regime of ‘permission to exercise the right to purchase and carry weapons’ was introduced in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that the first attempt on Alexander II's life occurred in 1866 (also in St. Petersburg), it took 13 years to make a radical departure from the previously unrestricted regime of access to arms in the capital of the Russian Empire. In this article, I analyse archival materials documenting how this new regime of weapons ownership was implemented. In particular, I am interested in the dimensions of locality and temporality in the practices by which imperial legislation introduced gun control in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, the Russian Empire's most cosmopolitan cities. The archival documents that I rely on show that the gun control regulations that were intended to be a repressive act of the authorities in reality unfolded as a process of negotiations and merciful exclusions. The intermediaries of the imperial legal order reacted to the international challenges that were posed by emergent revolutionary movements, including the negotiation of the permissible restriction of subjects’ rights. As a result, new practices of ‘public safety’ were implemented as exceptional measures – both locally and temporally. This article sheds light on the imperial legal regime of gun control as a practice of ‘exception’.