From JSTOR Daily, December 16:
In the late nineteenth century, fed by the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the European arms race created a global military surplus.
Think the global arms trade is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century and the present? Think again: a world flush with weapons, sold legally and on the black market, fueled violence and conflict in the late nineteenth century as well. Historian Ramazan Hakki Öztan explores how that era’s European arms race created a global military surplus. These “tools of revolution” were then funneled, often illicitly, into the cauldron of a disintegrating Ottoman Empire.
“The Ottoman Empire descended into an era of systemic political violence marked by an endless cycle of popular uprisings, rural irregular conflicts and urban guerrilla warfare,” Öztan writes.
There were plenty of other states, arms merchants, and weapons manufacturers eager to profit off this endless cycle. What Öztan calls the “global marketplace of revolution” was the flip side of the Ottoman incorporation into the world economic system. Weapons were commodities, too, and “Ottoman revolutionary actors enjoyed increasingly easier access to a range of tools of revolution thanks to globally expanding circuits of illicit exchange.”
The Balkans in particular were a hotbed of nationalism, independence movements, and great-power competition. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which ended the Russo-Turkish War, had attempted to stabilize this mountainous, multi-ethnic region south of the Danube. But the treaty also increased the regional number of “customers for second-hand weapons.”
The empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans still controlled portions of the region around the newly independent or semi-independent states of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria. All of these new states or principalities spent their first decades “modernizing their bureaucratic apparatus and building up their military capacity.”
In addition to jockeying for influence and control over the region, the Ottomans, Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were all engaged in an intense arms race. The European balance of power minimized “the number and extent of military conflict on the European continent” for much of the century. Yet efforts to increase the size and capabilities of national militaries kept increasing. National budgets became dominated by military spending. Germany was the fastest-growing; Austria-Hungary fell behind; Britain concentrated on seapower; France could not compete with Germany.
What all the competitive innovation and industrial production resulted in was a lot of “obsolete” but still deadly weaponry. The tumultuous Balkan market clamored for it—sometimes at the urging of the dealers themselves, only too happy to gin up sales....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also 2012's:
"The Mysterious Mr. Zedzed: The Wickedest Man in the World"
Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, better known as Sir Basil Zaharoff: arsonist, bigamist and pimp, arms dealer, honorary knight of the British Empire, confidant of kings, and all-round international man of mystery.
Another guy who made a fortune, though not as large as Zaharoff's, was 'Sidney Reilly' who put together a swell income from finders fees, commissions and other agency-type affairs.
Of course the biggest of big money was made by the manufacturers, the Krupps and the DuPonts, the Lucifers at the tippy-top of the blowing-people-up-racket.
