Conclusion

Following Émile Cottin’s attempted assassination of Georges Clemenceau in February 1919, the victors in the First World War reassembled at the Paris Peace Conference and enacted protocols to prevent surplus stocks of weapons from being distributed “to persons and states who are not fitted to possess them.”...

Counterterrorism in British India

On the night of April 18, 1930, some 100 armed revolutionaries calling themselves the “Indian Republican Army” mobilized in Chittagong, a seaport city in East Bengal near the Burmese border, just prior to launching multiple raids on British colonial sites. The Chittagong Armory Raid of 1930, modelled after the 1916 Irish Easter Rising, sparked a renewed period of terrorist activity in India, along with the increasing involvement of female revolutionaries as assassins. The British Government of India responded with a multipronged approach to counterterrorism that included the pursuit of another international treaty to control gun-running, stricter anti-terrorism legislation, and the ability to arrest and detain militants indefinitely. Whitehall disagreed with the anti-terrorism policies promoted by Delhi policymakers, especially the creation of a vast detention camp system to imprison alleged terrorists, as it embarrassed them internationally and legitimized Gandhi in the eyes of Indians and Britons.

The Arms Traffic Conference of 1925

In May 1925, the League of Nations convened a Conference for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War in Geneva, Switzerland. Six weeks of negotiations resulted in a new Arms Traffic Convention (as well as the Geneva Protocol against the usage of chemical and biological weapons), which representatives from eighteen countries—including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—signed on June 17. The United States led the way to that moment yet did not follow through on it afterward. The treaty, which lacked robust enforcement mechanisms, languished in national legislatures and never entered into force. Even so, it had a constructive legacy: the compilation and publication of statistics on gun-running. Intelligence based on open and closed sources collected for, and resulting from, the Arms Traffic Conference, indicated systematic violations of the European peace settlements and revealed a world awash in guns.

Fear and Liberty

On June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in eight cities in the United States, including at the doorstep of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C. Mass arrests and deportations brought on by the Red Scare that followed convinced communist parties to go underground, while fears of the Communist International persisted. Two offices in the State Department oversaw the gathering and analysis of intelligence pertaining to Soviet Russia: the Office of the Under Secretary of State and the Division of Eastern European Affairs. The former drew on wartime connections with the British; the latter assessed intelligence gathered by diplomats at posts in Eastern Europe. In the mid-1920s, the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary of State prepared a study of the global arms trade that comported with intelligence reports from British secret services: an illicit small arms trade flourished even among those countries subjected to international weapons inspectors.

Intelligence, Empire, and Terror

The passage to India of small arms, which often accompanied revolutionary ideas, was central to London’s concerns about the proliferation of arms prior to and after the 1919 Arms Traffic Convention. The British government attempted to combat political violence using tools developed during the Great War. Officials in London identified the province of Bengal in British India as the center of several terrorist networks. British counterterrorism strategy in India relied on three parts: arms controls, passport restrictions, and domestic anti-terrorism legislation. Intelligence memoranda warned of danger from the Communist International’s efforts to move funds, weapons, and foreign fighters into Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Persia, and Iraq, with an eye toward the penetration of India. Reports shaped the policy recommendations of the newly-established Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest (IDCEU). However, as colonial administrators learned following the Rowlatt Act, domestic anti-terrorism legislation would be revoked were Indian and London politicians to find it oppressive.

Arms and Diplomacy in the Postwar Order, 1919–25

While the peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 did not anticipate the extensive revanchist and state-sponsored terrorism that would bedevil the Great Powers during the interwar years, members of the British delegation persuaded their French and American counterparts that the unprecedented scale of production of weapons in wartime would lead to an upsurge in global arms trafficking in peacetime. They signed the Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10, 1919. National priorities and diverging security concerns in the years following the signing of treaty, however, took precedence over ratification and enforcement of the agreement. By the end of 1924, the League of Nations had emerged as the principal organization concerned with stopping international arms trafficking and keeping surplus munition stocks from being “distributed to persons and states who are not fitted to possess them.”

State-Sponsored Terror, 1934–37

Clandestinely supported by Italian and Hungarian authorities, Balkan terrorists assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou on October 9, 1934, in Marseilles, France. The brazen political murders caused a diplomatic crisis and prompted the League of Nations Conference for the International Repression of Terrorism, which produced two treaties in 1937: the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court. The treaties defined terrorism in international law and included provisions to regulate arms trafficking and fraudulent passports. Only the British Government of India ratified the Terrorism treaty. Neither of the treaties had entered into force by the time of the September 1938 Munich Conference in which the Great Powers ceded the Czech Sudetenland to Adolph Hitler and placed the fate of peacetime Europe in the hands of the Führer.

Introduction

Paris was quiet on February 19, 1919. Abuzz for a month as the peacemakers bickered, cajoled, and negotiated the peace treaties that formally ended the Great War, the city finally rested as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George took a brief leave to return home, leaving behind Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister known to all as “the Tiger.”...