British Empire, showing the commercial routes of the World and ocean currents. David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries
About the project
GlobArms is a comparative historical research project examining the strategies employed by public and private law enforcement agencies to monitor, regulate, and suppress the trade, distribution, and smuggling of firearms across British, Italian, and French ports between 1890 and 1939.
Focusing on a critical yet understudied dimension of modern European history, the project explores how firearms circulation was policed at the nexus of domestic security and transnational commerce. During this era, the global arms trade expanded exponentially, with weapons becoming both more destructive and affordable – transformations that profoundly altered local and international power dynamics. Since ports functioned as primary gateways for the movement of goods, including firearms, European states were compelled to reassess their regulatory frameworks governing arms trafficking and public safety.
Despite the significance of this development, no scholarly work has systematically compared the efforts of public and private policing bodies to oversee the import and export of small arms. This project fills that lacuna through a multi-scalar analysis of port security practices in three leading arms-producing nations – Italy, France, and England – whose intertwined, and occasionally conflicting, geopolitical interests elevated arms control to a pressing national and transnational concern.
Larne Gun Running, 1914. Source: Illustrated London News [London, England], 2 May 1914
By investigating how local enforcement regimes interacted with the global arms market, the study reframes the evolution of European security cultures, demonstrating how the circulation of firearms influenced state approaches to violence before and after the First World War. In doing so, it provides a novel framework for analysing the continuities and disruptions in violence management during an era of sweeping political and technological change. The port thus emerges not simply as a logistical hub but as a contested space where domestic security imperatives and international pressures converged amid rising global instability.
[Image: Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers on board the Asgard, 1914. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116096155=]
Principal Investigator
Andrea Azzarelli
Is currently a post-doctoral researcher and PI of the GlobArms STARS@Unipd project on the history of gun-trafficking control in Italy, France and England between 1890 and 1939. He has held post-doctoral positions in Paris, Naples, Padua, Rome and Grenoble at several international institutions, including the Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation, the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano and the Fondation Maison de Science de l’Homme (Paris). He is the author of a monograph on the history of the Italian police forces (Polizia, crimine e ordine pubblico in epoca liberale, Rubbettino, 2025) and has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as French Historical Studies, European History Quarterly and Crime, History & Societies. His research explores the entangled histories of violence, policing and territorial control in modern Europe, with a particular focus on liberal Italy, England and Third Republic France. Over time, his work has increasingly investigated the intersections between public security, gun control and state-building, especially in contexts such as Sicily, where sovereignty and legitimacy were deeply contested. His current project, GlobArms, expands these questions onto a global scale, tracing the circulation of small arms and the political, social and criminal networks that sustained them across borders.
