The Arms Trade and American Revolutions.

This essay examines how the international arms trade shaped and interconnected the revolutions in British North America, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and Spanish America by creating dependent relationships through an informal early modern arms control regime. This regime, maintained by European empires, restricted colonial subjects from mass-producing or legally acquiring sufficient war matériel, making independence through armed rebellion practically impossible without external support. The success of the US Revolution depended on secret French and Spanish aid, which ultimately undermined this arms control system, enabling the United States to become a key arms supplier to later revolutions in Saint-Domingue and Spanish America. Unlike the US, these later insurgents lacked generous foreign patronage and had to navigate a competitive and often exploitative arms market dominated by US merchants, a dynamic that influenced their protracted conflicts and postcolonial challenges.