ABSTRACT
Attempts to place some forms of control on the means of warfare have a long, if not always distinguished, history. A recent attempt to place arms control into a historical framework finds examples of such attempts at least as early as the fourth century BC. There is then a fairly significant gap between 188 BC and 1766.1 Modern arms control is a Cold War social practice, related to the structure of ‘Great Powers’ in the twentieth century international system. Great Powers can be considered to form the skeletal structure on which the evolving international order is built and, certainly, there are Great, indeed super, Powers at the heart of arms control and its precursors in the first half of the twentieth century. However, arms control is not simply an epiphenomenon of the superpower structure of the Cold War, but rather that structure itself was in part forged in and through the practices of arms control. World order-making, at least in the case of arms control practice, although elsewhere as well, is an iterative process of forming and being formed in and through the practices which constitute the very order being made.
