ABSTRACT
When war came, the British armaments interests exhibited no eager anticipation of impending profits, but were rather surprised and disturbed by the event. The complexity of the new weapons, the excellence of the equipment needed to produce them, and the heavy commitment to research would strongly suggest that by the 1880s the British armaments industry had reached a level of technical achievement from which it could profitably influence ‘civilian’ manufacturing practice. False legend stemmed mainly from the practice of judging the ante bellum armourers by the standards of the battered and disillusioned European civilisation which emerged from the war, a practice both anachronistic and unfair though frequently practised. In the area of utility as well as that of legend, it is again the rarified nature of the market which underlies the industry’s ability to generate not only myths of remarkable durability but also economic effects of wide significance.
