URAP

PATH: The Project on Arms Trade History

Brian DeLay, Professor  
History  

Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.

Guns and power go together. Like today, most forms of inequality in the global 19th century depended on a weapons gap. The unequal distribution of firearms helped determine power relations both between countries and within countries. Where did all those guns come from? And why did some have so many, and others so few? The Project on Arms Trade History seeks to answer these questions by doing something unprecedented: quantifying the global arms trade between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War I. For the past several years, our team has been extracting data from customs reports issued by the globe's major arms-producing and arms-trading nations. We are moving into the final stage of data entry, and need your help to get there.

Role: We hope to recruit students to read 19th- and early 20th-century customs reports issued by Germany, France, and Spain; identify entries for firearms, ammunition, and artillery; and enter the relevant data into a relational database. Depending on how quickly data entry goes, other supervised work doing targeted historical research is a possibility.

Qualifications: No background in history or data entry required. A (very) basic reading knowledge of German, French, or Spanish is desirable but not essential. Customs reports aren't literature: they are simply lists with names and quantities of commodities.

Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Brian DeLay and Ph.D. student Kyle Jackson will jointly supervise, Ph.D. candidate

Hours: to be negotiated

Off-Campus Research Site: Some of the work will take place in the microfilm room of the library. But most of it will be working with PDF versions of customs reports and Excel, so students can complete it wherever they like.

Related website: http://history.berkeley.edu/brian-delay

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