How a Tyneside shipyard helped turn weapon-making into a global trade
In 1884 William Armstrong opened a yard at Elswick that, for a time, was the only factory anywhere able to build a battleship and fit every gun aboard it. Cruisers from that works later helped sink Russia's fleet at Tsushima. Private firms selling to all comers had become the heart of the arms business.
For centuries military technology changed slowly. England, France, Sweden and the Netherlands made their own weapons in the early modern era, while skilled craftsmen drifted outward to places like Portugal and Russia. Then, during the 1800s, four shifts arrived together: rapid invention kept moving the target of what counted as a modern weapon, mass production allowed exports at scale, private companies overtook state arsenals, and long-distance transport and communication made selling abroad practical.
Britain's 1854 contract with the Elswick Ordnance Company for up-to-date artillery jolted private industry into the field, and surplus output went overseas. Armstrong himself sold from Brazil to Japan, and makers such as Krupp, Vickers and Schneider-Creusot were nudged by their governments to export across South America, Asia and Africa during the imperial era. Prussia's wins over Denmark, Austria and France in 1864, 1866 and 1870-71 showed what industrial weaponry could do; machine guns proved themselves in 1899 in the Boer War and 1905 against Russia. France dropped its export ban in 1885.
After the slaughter of the First World War, dealers were branded merchants of death and accused of prolonging the fighting for profit. A British inquiry found nothing to support that charge, yet attitudes had shifted enough that governments took regulation into their own hands. National arms production came to be seen as part of sovereignty, and joint international projects only appeared late in the Cold War, when superpowers also used weapons supplies as a tool to arm proxies.
Small arms remain the most scattered segment, with 1,135 companies in more than 98 countries making them as of 2003. Of the roughly one billion firearms in circulation in 2017, civilians held 857 million, militaries 133 million and police 23 million. Aircraft and missiles sit at the other extreme, dominated by a handful of firms. SIPRI measures transfers in trend-indicator values based on production cost rather than sale price.
Source: Arms industry
