The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 285

establish an appropriate path through the water after being dropped
from the air were not entirely solved when the war began.^42
As of 1914, the British Admiralty had developed no technical
riposte to these new underwater and airborne challenges to capital
ships. The fears that had been played upon in 1884 to mobilize sup­
port for the technical modernization of the Royal Navy were as lively
as ever and rather better based in technical fact. Like the Red Queen
in Through the Looking Glass Britain and all the other naval powers had
to run ever faster just to stay in the same place. Indeed, thanks to the
German naval building program, after 1898 the Royal Navy faced a
more serious challenge at sea than at any time since the 1770s. But
before considering this vindication of Admiral Sir Astley Cooper
Key’s foresight concerning the consequences of Fisher’s initiative of
1884, it seems well to consider how the naval race affected British soci­
ety in the decades before World War I, for this was the time when the
modern military-industrial complex suddenly came of age and began,
in the very citadel of European liberalism, to exhibit a wayward will of
its own.

Naval Armament and the Politicization of Economics

First of all, naval construction and the manufacture of the diverse

kinds of machinery that went into warships became really big business.

Instead of lagging behind civil engineering, as had been the case in

1855 when William Armstrong decided it was time to bring gun-

making abreast of contemporary standards, military technology came

to constitute the leading edge of British (and world) engineering and

technical development.^43 According to one calculation, about a quar­

ter of a million civilians, or 2.5 percent of the entire male work force

of Great Britain, was employed by the navy or by prime naval con­

tractors in 1897;^44 and by 1913 when naval appropriations had dou­

bled the figure for 1897, estimates make as much as one-sixth of Brit­

ain’s work force dependent on naval contracting.^45

The process through which welfare and warfare linked together to

42. Gray, The Devil’s Device, p. 206.


43. Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History,” pp. 474–80.


44. W. Ashworth, “Economic Aspects of Late Victorian Naval Administration,” Eco­
    nomic History Review 22 (1969): 492.


45. Marder, Anatomy of British Sea Power, pp. 25–37. This is probably an exaggera­
    tion, but I have not found a responsible econometric calculation. See also William
    Ashworth, An Economic History of England, 1870–1939 (London, I960), pp. 236–37 for
    remarks on the navy’s economic role.