Stahl D (2024)
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2024
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Edited Volumes: Instruments of international order: Internationalism and diplomacy, 1900-50
ISBN: 9781526172570
This chapter analyses how instruments of imperial arms control were adapted to the international system of the interwar period and what their role was in maintaining racialised global hierarchies. The focus is on the question of how British authorities tried to categorise different kinds of weapons so that arms trade regulations could function as effective instruments of imperial control. First, I will show that colonial powers drew on colonial laws and practices from the pre-war era and inscribed them into the new international order with the aim of creating not only a European peace but a global one – yet a peace that meant to create and to reinforce the hierarchies between imperial powers and their colonial subjects. To reach this goal, the British government used race as a determining factor to categorise arms by linking them to spatial concepts. Second, I will argue that it was not so much the governments of the colonial powers who pushed for the integration of these instruments into the League of Nations agenda, but primarily liberal internationalists whose goal was the creation of internationally binding disarmament instruments.
APA:
Stahl, D. (2024). 'Weapons misused by barbarous races': Disarmament, imperialism and race in the interwar period. In Th. W. Bottelier, Jan Stöckmann (Eds.), Instruments of international order: Internationalism and diplomacy, 1900-50. Manchester University Press.
MLA:
Stahl, Daniel. "'Weapons misused by barbarous races': Disarmament, imperialism and race in the interwar period." Instruments of international order: Internationalism and diplomacy, 1900-50. Ed. Th. W. Bottelier, Jan Stöckmann, Manchester University Press, 2024.
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