A smaller power develops a military industry, should it start with the small arms or the big guns ?

As more and more nations get industrialised in the XIXth century, how would they go about developing their national weaponry? Provided they have access to steel and coal and copper and tin in sufficient quantities of course.

I don't know if that's a no-brainer, but should there be a priority regarding developing muskets/rifles and pistols first, or rather cannons and howitzers? Or both in parallel?
 
You develop what you cannot easily get elsewhere if you are a small country. In general arms large scale industries tended to develop in fairly big countries and even they often needed to export to the international market to stay afloat. Often of course you can see a smaller country such as Belgium arrive on the world scene with an inherited arms industry from a larger power (the same thing would also happen to Czechoslovakia in the C20th) and these thrived by selling arms for export. You also see small native arms industries in countries that mostly imported their weapons, think Mexico and various South American countries.

After all until the 19th Century arms production was a fairly cottage industry and there are gunsmiths to this day who can make limited runs of their own design weapons in their shed. Thus the technical knowledge of what a gun or rifle required was fairly widespread. The industrial skills and capital to produce arms in quantity was often the stumbling block. Lots of people had a go at some point, the Japanese would be increasingly successful, the Chinese rather less so.

The thing is there is no single model of success nor failure. You need to consider for your "smaller power" what unique requirements it has if any and the amount of resources in both skilled manpower and money it can throw at the problem. So many countries first started with small arms because they had local gunsmiths who could scale up. On the other hand you may have a nation under effective embargo who would be more interested in larger artillery type weapons as small arms can be smuggled.
 
Thanks a lot for the pointers ! My question was a bit abstract because I am wondering about very different potential countries , spanning from kingdoms in India to North-American midwest republics, hence the interrogation as to whether there's a general way to develop regardless of context or if priorities and pathways are, conversely, highly context dependent.

In general arms large scale industries tended to develop in fairly big countries and even they often needed to export to the international market to stay afloat.

The main idea for now is simply a military industry aimed at self-sufficiency for the domestic armies, but from what you're saying without exports the industry actually cannot sustain itself so external exchanges seem a necessity.
 
The main idea for now is simply a military industry aimed at self-sufficiency for the domestic armies, but from what you're saying without exports the industry actually cannot sustain itself so external exchanges seem a necessity.

Unless youre fighting a steady stream of wars (which small counteries tend not to do), than a purely domestic market for military grade weapons can't generate demand on a scale and consistency to justify the investment. If you just need to occasionally supply your armies,it just makes more sense to buy a Great Power's surplus every so often.
 

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Yea, you can but it has prerequisites that simply make big countries much more suited:

1. You need proper resources
2. You need technical expertise
3. You need demand for the gunz

Now point 1 and 2 are easy enough, but point 3 is a big stumbling block. Big countries need big armies, and big armies generate demand for guns, and then it's a feedback loop of sorts. Now, there are cases where small countries went full Sparta tier, but that often automatically means that they turned to big countries, but these events happened prior to the massive proliferation of firearms beyond simple muskets (most famous example of small country going big very fast is Prussia).

Then, there is the secret option - pull something off that makes everyone go "holy smokes what is that". Imagine if a more powerful Indian state with a tradition for gunsmithing invents the Gatling gun, and uses it to basically mow down every Brit they see. They'd sell that shit like hotcakes
 
Then, there is the secret option - pull something off that makes everyone go "holy smokes what is that". Imagine if a more powerful Indian state with a tradition for gunsmithing invents the Gatling gun, and uses it to basically mow down every Brit they see. They'd sell that shit like hotcakes
That only works in an era with properly enforced, internationally recognized intellectual property laws.* Otherwise the little country's inovation will be simply stolen and produced by the armoury of a larger state.

*and IIRC that's a little late into the industrial revolution to develop a new armament industry from the ground up.
 
Using Qing China as an example for non-European states in the 19thC, I think it's also worth remembering the internal political dimension of weapons imports + development. While most 19thC countries could make their own small-arms, having access to modern weapons dramatically increased the state's coercive power advantage over its subjects (rifles vs matchlocks or even no guns in China, for example). At the local level it was the constable with his modern rifle that collectively contributed the most to the state's internal security.

At the same time, however, giving local authorities modern weapons also increased their power vis-a-vis the central government, setting off powerful centrifugal forces that could eventually lead to state dissolution (as eventually happened with the Qing). So with the diffusion of modern small arms, central governments were also pushed to eventually develop/import the ultima regio of artillery and 'big guns'.

So for a 19thC state, internal security would first demand the development/importation of modern small arms, but that process itself sets off centrifugal forces that encourages the central government to develop big guns. There is also a local/central government dimension: developing/importing small-arms can be a local government thing, but big guns are always the preserve of the central government.

As an example, Qing provincial leaders were empowered to import their own small-arms (contributing to the Western 'spheres of influence' in China during the warlord period) and did so with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but the importation and production of artillery was always a central government prerogative (Kiangnan/Fuzhou arsenals etc). So you had a situation on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War 1894-5 where Qing China had the largest fleet in Asia, but at the same time was using 6 different rifle cartridges and only 60% of Chinese troops had actual firearms.
 
Unless youre fighting a steady stream of wars (which small counteries tend not to do), than a purely domestic market for military grade weapons can't generate demand on a scale and consistency to justify the investment. If you just need to occasionally supply your armies,it just makes more sense to buy a Great Power's surplus every so often.

What if you happen to be a very rich but sparsely populated country? The surplus tends to be obsolete most of the times. How do you get the best weapons for your tiny "Marine Corps"?
 
What if you happen to be a very rich but sparsely populated country? The surplus tends to be obsolete most of the times. How do you get the best weapons for your tiny "Marine Corps"?

First off, sparcely populated counteries tend not to be very rich throughout in the industrial era, nor is it very efficent for them to industrialize in the 19th century where concentrated labor pools are key. If your army is small, you can just place limited orders with forgein firms to buy high quality weapons if you have the cash for it though: like @RodentRevolution pointed out those industries usually have the capacity to export to help stay afloat.
 
The question of population number is indeed very interesting. What would be the "threshold" number beyond which a country is populated enough to consider a domestic military industry as a viable, nay, a preferable option?

(and at the other end of the spectrum, China's wonderfully diverse arsenal in the XIXth century is a very telling example as well.)
 
The question of population number is indeed very interesting. What would be the "threshold" number beyond which a country is populated enough to consider a domestic military industry as a viable, nay, a preferable option?

(and at the other end of the spectrum, China's wonderfully diverse arsenal in the XIXth century is a very telling example as well.)

Again there is probably no hard population threshold but rather a confluence of circumstances. Rather than raw numbers you need to be able to supply a surplus of food to support specialist arms workers and also the workers to support them. You need to be able to transport this food to a site where you can transport the raw materials for weapons production, primarily superior grades of iron and coal in the C19th but also other metals, wood for certain fittings such as rifle stocks and/or gun carriages and of course the materials for primers and ammunition. You can of course use imports in some cases but anything you import needs to come from a reliable supplier, America in the Trent Crisis was in the uncomfortable situation that the quality of iron it used in its rifle barrels only came from Britain at the time* which could have been awkward had things gone hot.

The essential choke point is likely the existence of industrial management skills.

*There would have been work arounds but the result would have been heavier more costly barrels.
 
Again there is probably no hard population threshold but rather a confluence of circumstances. Rather than raw numbers you need to be able to supply a surplus of food to support specialist arms workers and also the workers to support them. You need to be able to transport this food to a site where you can transport the raw materials for weapons production, primarily superior grades of iron and coal in the C19th but also other metals, wood for certain fittings such as rifle stocks and/or gun carriages and of course the materials for primers and ammunition. You can of course use imports in some cases but anything you import needs to come from a reliable supplier, America in the Trent Crisis was in the uncomfortable situation that the quality of iron it used in its rifle barrels only came from Britain at the time* which could have been awkward had things gone hot.

So it would be akin to other forms of scalable highly specialised industries, but with a strong diplomatic/geopolitical icing on it.
 
This isn’t a matter of choice. Artillery is much more challenging as it requires greater investment and specialized equipment and techniques. Small arms can be made by any factory that can make sewing machines. Artillery technology, especially things like fuses are high tech, require a high level of precision, and becomes obsolete relatively quickly. Any nation state with the wherewith-all to make cannons can easily make rifles. But there were and are today many countries that can produce small arms but have to import artillery.
 
"Rome isn't build in one day" same for Britain started small before they became empire, so I think developing countries started building small weapons then incorporated what have learned building small weapons into big one like battle ship guns then again it depends on what country is developing, do they have resource and the Know how to build from Big To Small?.
 
As more and more nations get industrialised in the XIXth century, how would they go about developing their national weaponry? Provided they have access to steel and coal and copper and tin in sufficient quantities of course.

I don't know if that's a no-brainer, but should there be a priority regarding developing muskets/rifles and pistols first, or rather cannons and howitzers? Or both in parallel?
Another thing to consider is how much hunting the country's population engages in. A factory which is meant to make long rifles for the army can and will subsidize its existence through the sale of "sporterised" rifles, provided the laws and markets make it viable. That's certainly not an avenue that an artillery manufacturer could (easily) pursue.
 
I'm wondering what the geopolitical situation looks like. Is this *Poland, with enemies on all sides? Or is it *Canada, with a big, strong, frinedly neighbor & membership in a big, strong, friendly commonwealth (or empire)? Is it *Turkey, with a fairly hostile neighbor & (potentially) rebellious minorities? Is it *China, with no real desire for conquest?

Yeah, that's not really answering the OP, is it...?:oops:

So let me throw in my $0.05: I agree, it could go either way. Which can't your country get? Israel started building jet fighters in part because of embargoed purchases. So...

Edit:
Four other things cross my mind. First, what happens when a foreign country can't build weapons? Like after WW1, when Germany was banned from building fighters & U-boats. Can your "home' country attract them? (Yes, building smallarms &/or cannon is a bit different, but...where do people with those skills go?) Same applies in the middle of a Depression.

Two, & following that: can your "home" country afford to hire such expertise? Or even "poach" it?

Three, do your own universities & technical institutes produce people with enough bright ideas to make "poaching" unnecessary? (Is your population large enough?) So, do you need to hire Kalashnikov or Browning or Armstrong, or does he already exist?

Four, following from three: does your country have the industrial & engineering base to exploit the ideas? If you can't produce the tooling to build smallarms... And, as Japan learned the hard way, if you don't have the "depth" of engineering skill, building copies may serve the immediate need, but can't cope with an enemy able to out-design you...
 
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One thing to remeber, there is a difference between privately run arms industry and statre run arsenals. In the first place,what isprofuced is governed by what people like to buy, while for state arsenals, the demand is created by the governement.

And generally a fomestic smallarms industry would be the first to evolve. One good examplemight be the development of fire arms in Japan.
 
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