The Arms Trade and American Revolutions

Abstract

This essay argues that the international arms trade bound the revolutions in British North America, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America in dependent relationships. Throughout the colonial era, an informal arms control regime made it impossible for Europe's American subjects to mass-produce war material or buy enough on the open market to equip independence through war. As became clear by late 1776, even the hemisphere's best-connected colonists could not overcome this obstacle. Only the decisions of France and Spain to secretly arm and then openly support the British North Americans made their revolution a success. But as France and Spain would soon come to realize, US independence fatally undermined the early modern arms control regime that had kept independence a practical impossibility in their own colonies. North American merchants became the indispensable arms dealers to the hemisphere's later revolutionaries, first in Saint-Domingue and then across mainland Spanish America. Crucially, though, the United States never offered terms remotely as generous as those it had enjoyed during its own independence struggle. Rather than rely on imperial patronage or republican solidarity, Haitians and Spanish Americans had to navigate a cutthroat market to obtain the tools of independence. That comparative disadvantage would haunt their postcolonial histories.