(slow, calm music)
- War used to be simpler, violent, yes, always violent,
but more straightforward.
It used to be about large groups of men fighting
with their muscles, their spears,
and eventually their swords and their crossbows,
and then their guns and their cannons.
(cannon fires)
But then we hit a point where it just started to change
so quickly, faster and faster until
(mysterious music)
eventually we got this,
private corporations
who make unfathomably powerful death machines
and then ship those weapons to every corner of the globe.
(airplane revs)
I once heard about these guys who would make weapons
and sell them 150 years ago,
sell them to anyone who would buy them.
These were industrial weapons,
and sometimes they were sold to the opposite sides
of really big rivalry's conflicts.
I heard these guys started World War I,
though I'm skeptical of that.
(soft music)
This is something I've wanted to understand forever,
the arms trade.
As a student of conflict,
it's something I feel like I have to understand,
and I recently found a way to better understand it.
In an old bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I found a book
that has changed my perspective on this.
It's called "Merchants of Death",
and it is surprisingly relevant to today,
even though it was written in 1934.
This book has been the center
of something I've been thinking about and studying.
Why do countries, especially the United States, make
and sell weapons to every corner of the globe?
That's what we're gonna get to the bottom of,
and it all starts with this book.
So I'll start with planting seeds,
just emailing experts.
We're trying to map arms trade.
Data is a huge part of this, like I wanna make a map,
I wanna see it visually,
and there's not a lot of clear maps out there,
so we're gonna make our own, but that's not easy.
Look at my beautiful art here.
Talk to the team, loop them in,
let them know what we're up to.
Testing one, two, three, four, five,
big lines coming out of either side.
Oh God, I dunno what I'm doing here.
(mysterious music)
All right, let's put the mapping aside for a little bit,
turn back to this book.
This book is what hooked me on this topic,
and there's a lot here.
(coffee splashes)
Okay, videos like this take a really long time to make
and there's a lot of really creative, amazing,
talented people who work on them.
The ability for us
to do this deep dive data journalism is made possible
because of sponsors.
Media is always made possible because of sponsors,
and this is the part of the video where I'm going
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Longtime viewers of this channel know that,
in addition to talking about international relations,
I am also a big fan of therapy.
I got into therapy a few years ago
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I didn't go to therapy because I had some clinical diagnosis
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Betterhelp is a platform
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It's online.
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Thank you, betterhelp for supporting the video.
I'm gonna dive back into this long journey
of figuring out what's going on with weapons
and the United States government.
Here we go.
(somber music)
Our starting place is that point in history
where war dramatically changed.
Instead of large groups of men fighting with handheld tools,
war became much more about fighting
with machines bigger and bigger.
This was made possible by the massive amounts of energy
that were found stored in coal and oil.
Now warships could be pushed by steam instead
of wind, shielded by iron instead of wood.
Armies and supplies could be brought
to the battlefield on trains.
Out with the horses and in with the trucks.
It's the late 1800s
and the fires are burning hotter than ever.
Metal is taking the shape of souped up cannons and guns
and ships, tools of war that were never thought possible
now flowing in abundance.
(somber music)
"Arms makers engineer 'war scares.'
They excite governments and peoples to fear their neighbors
and rivals so that they can sell more armaments.
The simple, relatively inexpensive weapons
of earlier ages were displaced
by highly scientific death machines,
and the cost of these, together with the upkeep
of huge armies brought a rapid increase
in national war budgets."
So that's when it happened.
And overseeing all of this, this production
of industrial weaponry, not governments, but businessmen.
"But the arms merchant doesn't see himself as a villain.
According to his lights, he is simply a businessman
who sells his wares under prevailing business practices.
The uses of which his products are put
and the results of his traffic are apparently
no concern of his, no more than they are, for instance,
to an automobile salesman."
Still haven't heard back from a lot of experts,
and still just kind of intimidated by this data set.
"One British arms manufacturer compared his enterprise to
that of a house furnishing company, which went so far as
to encourage matrimony to stimulate more purchases
of house furnishings.
The arms maker felt that he too was justified
in promoting his own particular brand of business."
Hey Steven, Happy New Year to you.
I'm curious if you can help us crunch this data.
We'd love your thoughts and we'll go from there.
"The arms industry is undeniably a menace to peace,
but it is an industry
to which our present civilization clings
and for which it is responsible."
(intense music)
SIPRI is this organization that shows all
of the weapons being transferred from every country
to every other country.
So here's Chat GPT's initial take on the dataset.
It's really disheartening how horrible it all looks
at first.
So these lines are telling me nothing,
and you know that at some point
it will get into a pretty place,
but it's not there, not even close.
(upbeat music)
First up, Hiram Maxim, world famous as the inventor
of the wholesale killing machine,
a type of machine gun.
Maxim invented this gun
that could fire 666 rounds per minute.
That was very fast and crucially, it didn't jam
like most machine guns.
With his amazing invention,
Maxim takes his gun out on the road all over the world
to try to pitch it to different governments.
He's in South Africa and France and Switzerland
and Italy and Germany.
His gun selling missionary efforts eventually take him
to Russia where he was almost thrown out
for looking like a foreign Jew.
Man, that's like kind of aggressive,
but then eventually he was able to stay
and show them his gun, but they were skeptical.
They're like, "No gun can shoot 666 rounds a minute," but,
(gun fires)
and they were incredibly impressed.
His fame became so great in Russia that the Czar invited him
to visit him, which he did.
He was also decorated with other Russian orders.
The British eventually start using Maxim's gun
in their big adventures in Africa.
They were taking over modern day Sudan
and started using this gun against the locals
who were fighting with swords.
The British newspaper giddily reported
that when the Maxim gun was turned on the Arabs,
"A visible wave of death swept over the advancing hosts."
(mysterious music)
"In most of our wars, it has been the dash, the skill,
the bravery of our officers
and the men that has won the day,
but in this case, the battle was won
by a quiet scientific gentleman living down in Kent."
Yeah, this book is so good.
War was changing and Maxim was on the front lines of it,
and he was making a (beep) ton of money in the process.
China hears about the Maxim gun
and immediately sends someone to go check it out.
The Chinese representative gets to the UK
and the first words as he stepped off the ship
on English soil were," I should like to see Hiram Maxim."
The Danes passed on the gun, the king himself, saying
that it would, "bankrupt my little kingdom
in about two hours."
But the King of Persia, the Shah, wanted some of these guns,
so he asked the Prince of Wales to gift him some,
and this is a key moment.
The Prince of Wales says that he actually is not authorized
to give the king of Persia any of these guns
because they belong to Hiram Maxim's corporation.
Pause here for a second.
Do you see how this works?
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
governments couldn't sell weapons.
It was the corporations that sold the weapons.
They were the ones who were in charge.
It was a free market of weapons
and the weapons kept flowing to everyone on earth,
and these guys kept on making a lot of money, which gets us
to our next character in the story,
our next merchant of death, Basil Zaharoff,
AKA, the SuperSalesman of Death,
AKA, The Mystery Man of Europe
because he was "a shadowy figure".
This guy has an insane story
and someone should make a movie about him
because his story is wild,
but he was the SuperSalesman of Death.
He went around Europe and around the world selling guns
and submarines and all manner of weapons
to anyone who would purchase them, including two sides
of the same war like Greece
and Turkey, which was the Ottoman Empire at the time,
were definitely like arch rivals,
and they would sort of break out into conflict
at any moment.
Zaharoff first goes to Greece
and sells them some outdated submarines
that the Great Powers didn't wanna buy,
and then goes right to Turkey
and says, "Hey, Greece just bought a bunch of submarines.
You need some too."
And they buy some submarines,
and then he goes to Russia and does the same thing.
"Hey, Greece and Turkey have these submarines.
They're in the Black Sea.
You probably need some."
And indeed, Russia bought one because of that,
and this guy's commissions go through the roof.
It was rumored that Zaharoff became one
of the richest men on earth because of the arms trade.
(upbeat music)
Luckily, I have very skilled map friends
that are gonna help me make this data look pretty
including Marcus.
- [Marcus] Hey Johnny, this is a multi-level problem,
so I'm gonna try to break it down.
- Who invented the mapping tool
that we use called geolayers?
- [Marcus] So I've transformed your data,
and I have imported it here,
and right now we can create a data-driven style.
- So you have all these international businessmen
that we're making lot of money off of this new demand
for industrial weapons, the Krupp family and their steel,
the DuPont family and their gunpowder,
Remington making guns,
and of course, Alfred Nobel, the dynamite king,
(dynamite explodes)
who did go on to repent for his sins
by creating a Peace Prize in his name.
Peace, brought to you by killing machines,
the paradox of the heart of international relations
and the theme throughout this entire video.
These men got richer and richer.
The weapons got better
and better until one day it all blew up.
(explosion thunders)
(siren rings)
"The number and variety
of death machines had never been equaled.
All of the sinister engines
of war invented and perfected
in the previous half century were used in the fighting,
and naturally enough, there was further development of these
during the war itself.
The machine gun was improved, artillery was motorized,
and its range became longer.
Sights and fire control apparatus became more scientific
and more accurate.
Many new implements of war were invented.
The tank, a combined American
and French invention was first used by the British.
Hand grenades were supplied in the trenches
and rifle grenades increased the range
of these deadly missiles."
(somber music)
The first World War took place between 1914 and 1918,
and thanks to all these new deadly chemicals
and weapons, it was easily the deadliest conflict
that the world had ever seen, tens of millions
of people killed or wounded.
It was after this war that the world woke up
and realized that making weapons a free market to be sold to
who the highest bidder was probably a bad idea,
and that's when this book came out, the 1930s.
It was a part of a larger discussion
and critique of the international arms trade.
Some of these critiques went so far as to say
that it was the arms makers themselves
that exacerbated tensions between countries
and caused the war,
though most historians just say
that the arms trade actually just exacerbated the violence
by putting more weapons into the system.
But then in the conclusion of this book, you have this kind
of prophecy moment.
(soft music)
"The future may very well bring fiercer
and more destructive wars
and increased business for the arms makers.
If war continues, it is not at all fantastic to predict
that the arms merchants will grow increasingly important.
Already the stage of national affairs has been reached
where the largest item on national budgets is for past
and future wars.
Already war appears the greatest
and most important activity of government.
The economic consequences
of this new nationalistic militarism will soon be apparent
in the arms industry."
"This new nationalistic militarism,"
it was new back then.
It's not new anymore, but this is where it started.
So now it's time to fast forward
and see how right they were.
(mysterious music)
All right, this is for MJ.
This is the pass off for you to make a beautiful map.
- Okay, so Johnny just sent me over the direction
for the next map.
This one is a bit complicated.
(upbeat music)
I think I finally have a good map update to show you
- Today the United States is the global superpower
and the country who exports more weapons
than any other country and by a long shot,
and this is what we've been working to try to map.
(upbeat music)
All this data hunting and trial
and error, is to try to see what this looks like.
Today private companies still make and sell the weapons,
but, unlike in the "Merchants of Death" era,
weapons sales go
through a government approval process, which means
that weapons are no longer just a product
that make money for businessmen.
Instead, they are a currency that countries use
to purchase influence.
In this case, the United States being the top country.
(rocket launches)
Thanks mostly
to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
or SIPRI, we know where these weapons come from
and where they go.
This has been the bedrock of our data hunting
and I'm happy to say that,
after a fairly long process, we have mapped this.
So let me show you
what it looks like when the global superpower uses weapons
as a currency for influence around the globe.
(intense music)
(soft music)
This map is pretty beautiful
and I'm really grateful for the team that helped me make it.
We've got a great team and it's helpful
for seeing one really important thing, which is the expanse
of US arms trade, how far it goes, how wide it goes,
the thicker the lines, the more weapons flow,
but this map only shows us the first layer.
In reporting this story, I've realized
that there's a deeper way to understand this map
and it's gonna take a little extra reporting,
which is why there's gonna be a part two of this video,
which dives into the modern arms trade,
what it looks like
when the US sells weapons all over the world,
and why they do it.
The purpose of this video was to introduce you
to the "Merchants of Death",
so that they could teach us about
how the business of war came to be,
and what happens when that business goes too far.
Part two will be coming out really soon,
and in part two we're gonna talk to arms trade experts,
as well as get some help from my new colleague, Sam Ellis,
the creator of our new channel Search Party,
all with the hope of drilling deeper into this map
to understand why the United States sells weapons
to over 100 countries,
and what effect that has on conflict in this world.
So stay tuned for our next video, which will be part two
of the arms trade, and thanks for watching today.
(soft music)
Hey folks, thanks for watching today's video.
This was the journey.
I tried to document the whole journey,
and I hope you enjoyed that process.
It's a very different way of making stuff for us,
but I find value in bringing you
into how it's all made so you can see
how we got all this information.
Big shout out to Search Party.
I mean Search Party, our new channel,
is such an amazing journalistic project.
Sam Ellis is excellent,
and he really contributed a lot to this story,
so go over, subscribe to Search Party,
watch what they're up to.
Sam focuses on geopolitical explainers,
but also brings in global sports, which kind
of maybe doesn't seem like it fits,
but it actually does more and more.
Sports are becoming a geopolitical thing,
as you can see in places like Saudi Arabia,
and it is worth paying attention to how the business
and the geopolitics of sports are evolving in our world,
so thank you to Sam and Search Party
for being a part of this vid.
I also wanted to let you guys know
that we have an in-house composer here, Tom Fox.
I've worked with him for like five or six years.
He makes all the music for all of our videos.
Him and I collaborate on a lot of music,
and we publish that music,
and you can use it in your videos for free.
By free we mean you can use it in your videos.
If you monetize those videos, it will flag it,
and we'll share whatever revenue you have in it.
If you wanna license the music, you can do that as well,
but for now, look at the link in the description
where you can go download as much of the music as you want
and use it in your videos.
We just opened that up to everyone
and I think we're gonna keep it open for anyone
to use the music in their own videos.
Big thank you to all the supporters over
at The Newsroom, which is our Patreon.
I am so grateful for those who support every month.
We publish a behind the scenes vlog for all
of our Newsroom members as well as our scripts
and some other perks that you get,
but really it's about supporting the independent journalism
we're trying to do here and we're very grateful
for those supporters.
We have a poster I think is still in production.
It may be sold out at this point.
I do not know,
but it is called All Maps are Wrong.
It is a poster of all the different map projections put
onto one grid.
I designed it last year, and I'm a map nerd,
and I like this stuff.
If you like this stuff too, go buy the poster,
help support the channel, and that's it.
Big shout out to everyone on the team here
who helped bring this story to life.
As you can see, it's a big operation.
It's a lot of effort.
Big shout out to the experts we talked to, as well as SIPRI,
which is the think tank we were able
to get a lot of this data from.
So grateful for those doing this kind of work
so that we can take it and turn it into something magical.
Hope you all are having a good year so far,
and I'm excited to share with you a lot more.
We've got tons of different videos
on lots of different topics.
I will see you soon in the next one.
Have a good one, guys.