Humanitarian bullets and man-killers: Revisiting the history of arms regulation in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

In 1899, the delegates at the first Hague Peace Conference outlawed the use of expanding bullets in warfare. Also known as “dum-dum” bullets, their prohibition was largely the product of a media spectacle that evolved around their use in British colonial warfare, a spectacle that focused particularly on the ghastly nature of the wounds these bullets inflicted. This article revisits the “dum-dum” controversy of the 1890s as it played out in the Anglo-European public sphere. It argues, firstly, that there was nothing all that innovative about employing the principle of expansion in rifle ammunition. Secondly, it shows that controversies around bullets and their wounds had existed since the invention of industrially produced military rifles – and soft-lead ammunition – in the 1850s. In 1868, the St Petersburg Declaration outlawed the use of exploding projectiles for many of the same reasons for which expanding ammunition would also be banned in 1899. The article also shows that many of the ideas mobilized in the early 1890s to promote a new range of cordite-powered full-metal-jacket bullets because of the supposedly “clean” and “humanitarian” wounds that they inflicted offer an important context in which to read and explain the prohibition of “man-slaying” expanding ammunition. Above all, the article highlights how powerful racist thinking and imperial imperatives were to the framers of the laws of war at the turn of the twentieth century.