Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 299
management, having won enormous and impressive victories on every
front,^62 nevertheless acted to put the social system as a whole out of
control. As its parts became more rational, more manageable, more
predictable, the general human context in which the Royal Navy and
its rivals existed became more disordered and more unmanageable.^63
International Repercussions
The international side of this paradox is its most obvious aspect, for, as
is well-known, military-industrial complexes spread swiftly from Great
Britain to other industrial lands. Up to the 1890s, France had consti
tuted the only plausible naval rival Great Britain had to face; but
French taxpayers continued to resist the scale of naval appropriations
needed to develop a self-sustaining feedback loop of the kind that
arose in Great Britain after 1884. Even such a notable French techni
cal breakthrough as the invention in 1875 of production methods
capable of supplying the first uniform and dependable alloy steel for
naval use,^64 did not suffice to make the French navy a reliable ongoing
market for French metallurgists. Instead, as we saw above, the French
Chamber of Deputies suspended the building of battleships com
pletely between 1881 and 1888.
This coincided with intensified price competition from German
steelmakers. The French government reacted by imposing a protec
tive tariff in 1881, and then in 1885 removed the ban on the sale of
weapons to foreigners which had hitherto prevented French manu
facturers from competing with Krupp, Armstrong, and Vickers in the
international arms business. Response on the part of French arms
makers was spectacular.^65 During the 1890s, Schneider-Creusot, the
leading French arms firm, squeezed Krupp out of the Russian market.
- Personnel selection, training, and promotion underwent systematic rationaliza
tion in the same tumultuous decades when naval material was being radically trans
formed. Cf. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York,
1976), and Michael A. Lewis, The History of the British Navy (Harmondsworth, 1957).
- A similar paradox inhered in the chronologically parallel triumphs of industrial
management. From the 1880s, big corporations could plan production and achieve
enormous economies by nursing a smooth flow of appropriate factors of production
through shop floors, steel mills and assembly lines; but before World War II, their
capacity to manage their own internal affairs did not extend to the economy as a whole,
where, indeed “sticky” administered prices for industrial products probably began to
accentuate the dysfunctional effect of the business cycle from the 1873 crash onwards.
- Duncan L. Burn, The Economic History of Steel Making, 1867–1939: A Study in
Competition (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 52–53.
- James Dredge, Modern French Artillery (London, 1892) trumpeted French techni
cal virtuosity to the English-speaking world.
