The arms elements of the 1890 Brussels Act are an example of the first matryoshka doll of arms trade governance—a discrete prohibitory initiative applied, in this case, to a category of weapons in a specified region. Although never as benign as supporters suggested, it was certainly understood at the time as the outcome of a Europe-wide humanitarian campaign to control the evils of slavery, including the use of arms to prosecute the slave trade. In November 1889, diplomats convened to negotiate what would become the 1890 Brussels Act aimed at halting the African slave trade and its attendant evils, such as the trade in liquor and arms. With regards to the trade in arms, there was a certain historical irony at work given that the crucial role of guns in the slave trade (both for barter and protection) had been used in earlier eras as the basis for exempting companies from even war-time restrictions on the export of firearms and ammunition (West 1991).4 By the late nineteenth century, however, the slavery norm had been overturned in favor of a foundational and constitutive antislavery norm (Nadelmann 1990). In this context, a narrow (but incomplete) interpretation of the Brussels Conference would be that it represented an attempt to both consolidate an established antislavery norm and graft prohibitory norms on the provision of arms and liquor to Africans onto this established norm. As far as firearms were concerned, this meant formalizing the transformation of trading arms for slaves from a compelling national interest to a venal activity. However, the antislavery campaigners of the late nineteenth century were not expressing “cosmopolitan visions of universal equality and progress” but a world view characterized by “paternalism, prejudices and the compulsion to proselytise Africans” (Forclaz 2015, 29). For instance, The Pall Mall Gazette (January 30, 1890), in commenting on the Brussels Conference, noted: “We have heard the African native spoken of often as a child. We ought to realise that to allow firearms and gin to pass freely into Africa is literally as mischievous as to allow them to circulate in a nursery.” Equally, whilst antislavery was certainly pursued at some cost (Kaufmann and Pape 1999), it was also consonant with liberal market assumptions idealizing wage labor and the toleration of local practices that sometimes looked little different from slavery (Nadelmann 1990, 497). More immediate factors also created pressure for the Brussels Conference. The extension of European influence in Africa in the 1880s produced a backlash from Arab traders, particularly in Central and East Africa where life became more dangerous for missionaries and colonial settlers (Miers 1975, 257; Finlay 2016). Thus, the marauding Arab slave trader was deemed to be placing the beneficent and civilizing work of Christian missionaries under threat. At the same time, the increased European presence in Africa combined with the efforts of campaigners to discredit the slave trade resulted in numerous accounts of the horrors perpetrated by Arab slave traders (Bade 1977). For instance, in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society in 1888, the German explorer Herman von Wissmann described slave traders as the “wholesale destroyers of human life” (1888, 529) and recounted the use of captured slaves for target practice and cannibalism (ibid., 525–31; also see Laqua 2011, 717). This mix of moral abhorrence of slavery and concern about the threat to European settlers found its most influential tribune in the shape of Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, the French-born Cardinal and Archbishop of Algiers and Carthage. With the support of the Pope, Lavigerie toured Europe in 1888 preaching about the horrors of slavery in a series of talks in Brussels, Paris, Rome, and London. Like his supporters, Lavigerie was at pains to highlight the intersection between Arabs, Islam, and slavery in Africa. He not only campaigned for action to end the slave trade but called for armed volunteers to stop the traffic in slaves and pressed for restrictions on the trade in firearms deemed to be sustaining the operations of Arab slave traders (Miers 1975, 206). Some commentators were more than a little dyspeptic in their reaction to Lavigerie’s efforts. In Britain, The Graphic (August 4, 1888, 4) warned that “compassion for Sambo is quite compatible with earth-hunger for tropical possession, and with the desire of an energetic Church to expand its spiritual domination.” In Spain (which had only abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1867) the longstanding abolitionist Sanromá reflected on the irony of those who had so recently resisted abolition becoming fierce converts to the fight against Muslim slavery (Schmidt-Nowara 2016, 149). More generally, however, Lavigerie’s campaign energized popular opinion. The Anti-Slavery Reporter (July 1888, 85) compared Lavigerie to “a second Peter the Hermit” who had “arisen to preach a Crusade in the cause of humanity.” In London he met then Prime Minister, Salisbury, and the Prince of Wales. He also addressed a meeting at Prince’s Hall chaired by Earl Granville, a former foreign secretary, and attended by Cardinal Manning, the Archbishop of Westminster (Cameron 1888). This concluded by passing a resolution, forwarded to the government, proclaiming the slave trade “a crime against humanity” and calling for a Conference of the Powers to consider the issue of slavery (Anti-Slavery Reporter, Nov/Dec, 1889, 242). Lavigerie’s campaign prompted the creation of antislavery societies in several European countries including Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany (Laqua 2011, 707) and in 1889 both the Reichstag and the House of Commons called for action by the colonial powers (Miers 1975, 229–30). In the run-up to the Brussels Conference, Lavigerie also declared his intention to hold a week-long alternative meeting of activists in Lucerne and, at the instigation of King Leopold, the date of the Brussels Conference was put back to permit delegates to take account of this alternative conference. As part of the planning for Lucerne, preparatory commissions were established to report on the state of the slave trade and the means to be taken to end the trade. The latter was to include support for religious missions, control of arms sales, and the possibility of armed intervention (Renault 1994, 380). Ultimately, the Lucerne meeting was cancelled but a meeting eventually convened in Paris in September 1890 with some 800 delegates drawn from sixteen countries (The Morning Post, 24 September, 1890, 5; Laqua 2011, 710). One point of tension concerned Lavigerie’s call for military action against the slave traders. As he noted in an interview given to Charles Allen, the secretary of the British Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society, critics saw in this a call for “a crusade to put down the Mohammedan religion.” This accusation he rejected by suggesting “actual hostilities would be confined to the disarming of Arab or negro slave traders” (Northern Echo, October 4, 1888, 3). However, the Paris meeting ultimately resolved to prioritize the use of “pacific means” to combat slavery (The Morning Post, September 24, 1890, 5). This was certainly the position of British antislavery campaigners who tended to draw support from Protestant, Quaker, and Methodist groups rather than the Catholic heritage that was often a feature of antislavery on the continent. The former also figured prominently in the numerous letters of support for the Brussels Conference sent to the British government. This included letters from well established antislavery organizations such as the Aborigines Protections Society but also groups such as: the Band of Hope Union, the Church Missionary Society, and the Cambridge University African Slave Trade Committee.5 The Young Men’s Christian Association of Great Britain and Ireland also sent a letter to the President of the Brussels Conference on behalf of their 61,000 members (Northampton Mercury, February 22, 1890, 2) as did the Foreign Missions Committee of the Free Church of Scotland (The Scotsman, February 3, 1890, 10). Notably, some groups sent messages of support in direct response to feedback from British delegates that they were “disappointed” at the low number of memoranda they had received. This included a communication from the Yorkshire Society of Friends (Leeds Mercury, February 1, 1890, 4) and another drafted at a meeting at Birmingham Council House convened by the Lord Mayor (Birmingham Daily Post, 11 January 1890, 5). The Foreign Office also noted in October 1889 that various societies and associations had announced their intention to send delegations to Brussels whilst the conference was sitting.6 This included representatives of the Presbyterian Alliance (Daily Telegraph and Courier, February 14, 1890, 3), the Aborigines Protection Society, and the British Anti-Slavery Society. The latter pressed the conference to declare slave traders as pirates and “enemies of the human race” (Anti-Slavery Reporter, Nov/Dec 1889, 247; Mulligan 2013, 157). In total, the secretariat of the Brussels Conference received 155 petitions from different groups, of which two thirds called for prohibitions on the trade in firearms (Laqua 2011, 716). At one point the negotiations were temporarily halted so that letters of support from Britain, France, and Switzerland could be read out to the delegates.7 In addition, Lavigerie compiled a volume of “Documents Concerning the Foundation of the Anti-Slavery Campaign” and sent a copy to each of the participants at the conference (Renault 1994, 382–83). At the conference itself there was a notable consensus between diplomats, humanitarians, and sympathetic journalists on the benign and civilizing effects of the European presence in Africa, the primitive state of the natives, and the inhuman practices of Arab slavers. The Conference President, the Belgian Baron Lambermont, told the journalist Flora Shaw that two civilizations were contesting for Africa: Islam “which was spreading from the North like a stain of oil” and Christianity, representing the civilization of the West. They would “decide their quarrel by force” but the West would triumph, not least because it promised to rescue Africans from the vicissitudes of the slavery that trailed in the wake of Islam (Schneer 2001, 135). The Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs opened the Brussels Conference by informing the delegates: The work which you are about to undertake is great and pure—it is generous, it is disinterested. For it does not entail the gratitude of those races oppressed and decimated with the most revolting barbarity, whose safety it is your mission to organize.8 Baron Gericke de Herwynen of the Netherlands observed, “our presence here is the best proof of the unanimous desire of our Governments to co-operate in . . . [a] great humanitarian work.”9 The British representative claimed “the work which we are carrying on is purely humanitarian; it has no connection with politics.”10 In a speech at Guildhall in November 1889, Salisbury observed: “I do not think any Conference in the history of the world has ever met for the purpose of promoting a matter of pure humanity” (Anti-Slavery Reporter, Nov/Dec 1889, 238). Writing in the Wesleyan-Methodist magazine, the Rev. Joseph Rhodes (1890, 912) simply described the agreement as “the Magna Carta of the negro,” one designed “to protect the negro by disarming his Arab-enemy.” In this context, civil society actors were merely refracting the ideology of liberal imperial states back onto the representatives of these states, rather than asking them to challenge it. At the same time, however, whilst the humanitarians and the diplomats may have shared the same assumptions about the benefits of European colonialism, the latter were also moved by more prosaic concerns. Regarding arms, this meant preserving supplies to local allies whilst negotiating a regime that ensured colonial authorities maintained a qualitative military advantage over native populations. The challenge was neatly set out in a note to the Marquis of Salisbury of a meeting with the Belgian King immediately prior to the Brussels Conference. The King considered: it would be dangerous to supply the Arabs or the natives with modern firearms. . . . it might be possible to allow the limited importation . . . of flint and steel guns, reserving the supply of modern fire-arms for Europeans only.11 Sir John Kirk, the British plenipotentiary to the Brussels Conference was even more forthright: …If Europeans wish to retain in their hands the advantage given them by the possessions of modern firearms, there is no time to be lost in at once stopping absolutely the sale of rifles [and] breech-loaders . . . this will have no effect upon the slave-hunters . . . in whose hands the old flint muzzle-loading gun is sufficiently . . . deadly.12 Kirk was equally forthright in the years following the agreement at Brussels, noting in an 1896 report on the Niger Coast protectorate that: “the disarmament of the country” was “a matter of policy apart from the Brussels Act [my italics].”
arms elements of the 1890 Brussels Act are an example of the first arms trade governance understood at the time as the outcome of a Europe-wide humanitarian campaign to control the evils of slavery, including the use of arms the slavery norm had been overturned in favor of a foundational and constitutive antislavery norm antislavery campaigners of the late nineteenth century were not expressing “cosmopolitan visions of universal equality and progress” but a world view characterized by “paternalism, prejudices and the compulsion to proselytise Africans noted: “We have heard the African native spoken of often as a child. We ought to realise that to allow firearms and gin to pass freely into Africa is literally as mischievous as to allow them to circulate in a nursery consonant with liberal market assumptions idealizing wage labor and the toleration of local practices that sometimes looked little different from slavery The extension of European influence in Africa in the 1880s produced a backlash from Arab traders Thus, the marauding Arab slave trader was deemed to be placing the beneficent and civilizing work of Christian missionaries under threat. At the same time, the increased European presence in Africa combined with the efforts of campaigners to discredit the slave trade resulted in numerous accounts of the horrors perpetrated by Arab slave traders wholesale destroyers of human life recounted the use of captured slaves for target practice and cannibalism Lavigerie was at pains to highlight the intersection between Arabs, Islam, and slavery in Africa. He not only campaigned for action to end the slave trade but called for armed volunteers to stop the traffic in slaves compassion for Sambo is quite compatible with earth-hunger for tropical possession, and with the desire of an energetic Church to expand its spiritual domination Lavigerie’s call for military action against the slave traders a crusade to put down the Mohammedan religion the Paris meeting ultimately resolved to prioritize the use of “pacific means” to combat slavery This was certainly the position of British antislavery campaigners who tended to draw support from Protestant, Quaker, and Methodist groups rather than the Catholic heritage there was a notable consensus between diplomats, humanitarians, and sympathetic journalists on the benign and civilizing effects of the European presence in Africa, the primitive state of the natives, and the inhuman practices of Arab slavers. The Conference President, the Belgian Baron Lambermont, told the journalist Flora Shaw that two civilizations were contesting for Africa: Islam “which was spreading from the North like a stain of oil” and Christianity, representing the civilization of the West. They would “decide their quarrel by force” but the West would triumph, not least because it promised to rescue Africans from the vicissitudes of the slavery that trailed in the wake of Islam The Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs opened the Brussels Conference by informing the delegates: The work which you are about to undertake is great and pure—it is generous, it is disinterested. For it does not entail the gratitude of those races oppressed and decimated with the most revolting barbarity, whose safety it is your mission to organize. Baron Gericke de Herwynen of the Netherlands observed, “our presence here is the best proof of the unanimous desire of our Governments to co-operate in . . . [a] great humanitarian work.” The British representative claimed “the work which we are carrying on is purely humanitarian; it has no connection with politics.” the Magna Carta of the negro,” one designed “to protect the negro by disarming his Arab-enemy.” In this context, civil society actors were merely refracting the ideology of liberal imperial states back onto the representatives of these states, rather than asking them to challenge it. At the same time, however, whilst the humanitarians and the diplomats may have shared the same assumptions about the benefits of European colonialism, the latter were also moved by more prosaic concerns. Regarding arms, this meant preserving supplies to local allies whilst negotiating a regime that ensured colonial authorities maintained a qualitative military advantage over native populations. : it would be dangerous to supply the Arabs or the natives with modern firearms. . . . it might be possible to allow the limited importation . . . of flint and steel guns, reserving the supply of modern fire-arms for Europeans only.