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- Title
A 'Special Relationship'--Government, Rearmament, and the Cordite Firms.
- Authors
Trebilcock, R. C.
- Abstract
This article examines the British munitions industry in the period 1890-1914. Rearmament in the nineties was as much an industrial as a political or military phenomenon and one in which the government was vitally interested. Many industries and technologies were involved in the effort to provide the armed forces with a complete range of modern war equipment. But all the firms making munitions had one thing in common they were selling government-approved designs to a government buyer in competition with government factories. This situation created special problems for both vendor and purchaser. Because of the range of industries involved, it is more convenient in the space available to study these problems as they arose in a representative industry, one of the families of firms, which the government grouped around itself, the high explosives manufacturers. Often the government found that a small family was an intractable one with an inherent tendency to brandish the weapon of enhanced prices and was faced with the problem of control. Thus the government had three kinds of needs to preserve a tightly grouped reserve of private manufacturing capacity to do this without sacrificing competition entirely and to provide itself with some instruments of control to ensure that it did not do so.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; WEAPONS industry; MILITARY supplies; MILITARY markets; MANUFACTURING processes; REARMAMENT
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1966, Vol 19, Issue 2, p364
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2592257