Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 293agerial decisions in the Admiralty meshed into financial and manage
rial decisions made within what were still ostensibly private firms.
Public and private policy became irremediably intertwined. Liberal
critics of the 1920s and 1930s and Marxist or quasi-Marxist historians
since the 1950s assert that the dominating element in this mix was the
private one. The pursuit of profit, according to this view, provided the
energizing force. Everything else was derivative, manipulated by
clever and greedy men who wished to enrich themselves and the
stockholders they served.
This seems a distorted vision of human motivation and behavior.
No doubt when patriotism and profit were seen to coincide, the re
sponse was so much the more electric; and this was the way private
managers of arms firms usually viewed their roles. But the abstract
challenge of problem-solving has its part in governing human actions,
and the arms trade attracted more than its share of technically innova
tive minds in the pre-World War I period simply because it was there
that industrial research was most vigorously underway.^51 One inno
vator attracted others in chain-reaction fashion.
Moreover, concepts of technical efficiency, public service, and ad
vancing a career by making the right decisions clearly dominated the
minds of the naval officers who played such a large role in the entire
process. The power of promotion in rank to focus ambition and in
spire men to strenuous effort is very great indeed, as anyone who has
served in a modern army or navy can attest. Promotion carried eco
nomic perquisites, to be sure; but what really mattered was the defer
ence and precedence over others that advance in rank entailed. If the
profit motive had really dominated behavior, Admiral Fisher would
not have turned down a job offer he got from Whitworth’s in 1887,
for example, nor would the naval designer William White have re
turned to the Admiralty at one-third of the salary he had received
during his two years at Armstrong’s.
The public interest, as colored by careerism within the naval com
mand hierarchy, together with overtly political pressures coming from
the Cabinet and through Parliament, probably did more to control the
overall direction of technical change than did private considerations of
profit. But it is really unhistorical to ask which of a complex of motives
difference to the national economy as a whole by establishing new skills, new demands,
and a new flow of public credit and taxes.- The personality of Tom Vickers, the engineering enterpriser behind the rise of
Vickers, illustrates how technology can become an end in itself. Tom Vickers lived
wholly for his work. Wealth, ownership, and the trappings of property meant little or
nothing to him. Cf. Trebilcock, The Wickers Brothers, p. 33.