‘The Pound of Flesh is Ours’: United States Armaments and the Neutral Sinews of Global War, 1914-1918

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wars are rarely contained or limited affairs. They almost always involve non-belligerent neighbours in some significant way, be it as suppliers of goods or money, as geo-strategic buffers, as conduits for trade, diplomacy, propaganda or other information, as places of refuge or as agents of humanitarian aid, or even (or rather especially) as potential future belligerents. In turn, the primary concern of most neutral communities in time of war is to mitigate its impact and to avoid becoming embroiled in it as belligerents. Of secondary concern is the possibility of maximizing the opportunities offered by the fact that one’s neighbours are at war with each other and not with you. As a result, neutrals rarely remain unaffected or uninterested in a conflict, and particularly in one fought on their borders or conducted by communities with whom they have an on-going relationship. Using a micro-history of a singular advertisement, placed in the American Machinist magazine in the neutral United States in May 1915, this article highlights how fundamental issues of neutrality and armaments supply were to defining the contours of the First World War as a global total war and to how contemporaries framed the roles of neutrals and belligerents in that conflict.