Peter Thorsheim’s paper on chemical weapons experiments in the British Empire uncovers the history of participants in these trials. Many trials, Thorsheim shows, were undertaken without the informed consent of participants and resulted in painful wounds to sensitive body parts. Heather Perry’s work on nutritional science in Germany during the First World War shows how expert knowledge was conceptualized as a weapon of war, and to what consequence. Women not only manufactured weapons on the home front. The home itself became an integral site of nutrition as a weapon. Jennifer Tucker’s paper draws on U.S. patent records to demonstrate how firearms were produced by changing social and technical systems, and shifting ideas about how people would use these weapons. The development of firearms did not follow a linear path, but was instead the variable result of distinct contexts. Elena Kempf’s contribution focuses on the history of weapons prohibitions under international law. She shows how weapons like explosive and expanding bullets were conceptualized as transgressively violent, and how rapid technological change soon challenged such associations of law, morality, and weapons technology.

Together, the papers cover some though not all major military powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the British Empire, Germany, and the US. They bring together a diverse set of methodologies, including legal history, the history of science and technology, and the history of gender. From this terrain, a capacious conception of weapons in history emerges, including firearms, chemical weapons, biological weapons, but also practices as well as expert knowledge. Modern weapons, this panel suggests, were an integral part of society. Scientists, experts, lawyers, engineers, housewives, and, of course, military personnel all produced and confronted weapons.