Military-lindustrial Interaction, 1884–1914 277
in office from 1904 to 1910. He reacted to demands for economy by
reforming personnel policies at home while closing down naval sta
tions overseas and ruthlessly retiring obsolescent warships.^27 At the
same time, he concentrated much of his enormous energy on building
a new super battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. This formidable vessel,
launched in 1906, made it necessary for rival navies—the German
above all—to suspend building programs until vessels comparable to
the Dreadnought could be designed. Liberal politicians believed that
this would allow the government to cut back the pace of naval
building. Only so could projected reductions in the naval estimates
be sustained.
But such a policy meant unemployment and loss of business for
shipbuilders and other contractors who had become dependent on
naval construction. It was one thing when naval cutbacks worked harm
to overseas communities like Halifax, Nova Scotia, or the Bahamas,
which lacked parliamentary representation; it was quite another when
British constituencies were about to be affected.^28 Conservatives
seized upon the issue fervently and launched a noisy agitation for
more, not fewer, warships. The Germans tipped the balance decisively
by announcing a new and enlarged building program in 1908; and as a
result, the Liberal government, which had proposed to build only four
dreadnought-type ships in 1909, ended by authorizing the construc
tion of eight such ships. In Winston Churchill’s words: “In the end a
curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had
demanded six ships: the economists [of whom he was one] offered
four: and we finally compromised on eight.”^29
This long series of political decisions, trending always towards
larger naval expenditures, was fueled by a runaway technological rev
olution as well as by international rivalries and the changed structure
of Great Britain’s domestic politics. A powerful feedback loop estab
lished itself, for technological transformations could not have pro
ceeded nearly so rapidly if economic interest groups favoring enlarged
public expenditure had not come into existence to facilitate the pas
- Naval appropriations were substantially cut back from £36.8 million in 1905 to
£31.1 million in 1908. B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971),
pp. 397–98.
- Cf. Philip Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments (London, 1936),
1:449–51 for details of how threatened idleness at Coventry Ordnance Works pro
voked the manager to launch a campaign of scare publicity and political wire-pulling
with the result that the eight-dreadnought program did indeed provide his company
with the new business it needed.
- Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, abridged and rev. ed. (London, 1931),
p. 39.
