ABSTRACT
The manufacture and sale of armaments became big business in the late nineteenth century. By 1914, armaments had become a major industrial and military force in the world, and the armaments business was in the hands of a few giant firms. One of those firms was the British firm of Sir William Armstrong, Whitworth and Company. Armstrong provided states with armaments of unprecedented power and destructive capacity for their military and naval forces. However, the size and scope of Armstrong's activities make any single theory or model inadequate to capture the whole of the story. Armstrong's story is entwined with other relatively autonomous stories of technological innovation, business growth, parliamentary politics and international relations. A contextual and multi-perspective approach opens business history to much richer lines of investigation and provides a fuller understanding of business as part of a broad historical process.
