Felix Brahm

The Arms Trade in East Africa: An Entangled History (1850s to 1907)

Abstract:
In the second half of the 19th century East Africa's imports saw a huge increase in firearms, powder and ammunition. The project to be presented here tries to understand the arms trade in East Africa as an entangled European-African history. On the one hand, the project traces commodity chains, discusses the role of certain actors and places and explores (trans-) local contexts and effects. On the other hand, a strong emphasis is placed on the question how Africans, and later Europeans, tried to gain access to trade routes, to regulate and to control the arms traffic. Taking up debates on capitalism and morality, the project traces the question when and how the arms trade in Africa was moralised. Becoming an international issue in the late 1880s, in particular it shall be discussed how the discourse on the arms trade intertwined with discourses and politics of the abolition of the slave trade. In regard to the colonial period, examining strategies to bypass the arms trade regime on the one and to combat smuggling on the other hand also sheds new light on questions of agency, resistance and of the administrative and military reach of the colonial state.