Frontline and Factory : Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914-1924

It has been said that history is a debate between the present and the past about the future. Nowhere are these lines drawn more significantly than in the study of science and war. And nowhere is the discourse more relevant, than in the study of science and technology as foundations and multipliers of military power. This book is concerned with one particularly seminal aspect of this development ― the history of chemical munitions during and immediately after the First World War. The Great War, as it came to be known, was not the first industrial war, but it was the first to involve all the major industrial nations of the world. Within four years, the world witnessed unprecedented feats of industrial development, many of which drew upon and extended pre-war reservoirs of scientific and technological knowledge. The experience comes down to us as a conjuncture of scientific, economic, political and, ultimately, military departures, which by their nature involved new ways of meeting crises, and eventually new forms of critical thinking. That these new forms emerged only gradually and unexpectedly is not to underestimate their capacity to endure, or to minimize their relevance. From the Great War came patterns, assumptions, and practices which were to make an indelible mark on science and technology for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

The First World War is often called the ‘chemists’ war’. But few realise precisely how, or the extent to which modern chemistry became a significant factor in the struggle, and would be in turn deeply shaped by it. Gathering momentum at first, by 1916, success in applying scientific knowledge to ‘frontline and factory’ became a measure of a nation’s capacity to win an industrial war. In the end, the titanic contest was won in large part through the command of raw materials and industrial output. This book represents a first considered attempt to study the factors that conditioned industrial chemistry for war in1914-18. Taking a comparative perspective, it reflects on the experience of France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Britain, Italy and Russia, and points to significant similarities and differences. It looks at changing patterns in the organisation of industry, and at the emerging symbiosis between science, industry and the military, which contributed to the first ‘academic-military-industrial’ complex of the 20^th century. At the same time, it reflects on the world’s first, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to monitor ‘dual-use’ chemical technologies, and so restrict the proliferation of an important category of weapons of mass destruction.