The War of the Pacific, Technology and U.S. Naval Development: An International History of Regional War

Historians have generally recognized The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) as a significant event in the political, military, and economic history of South America. Applying an international lens to the conflict reveals its influence on extra-regional states and actors. Violence along the Pacific Slope in the 1860s stimulated demand for surplus (especially U.S. Civil War-era) and experimental weapons, while also offering an operational laboratory for their evaluation. During the war, additional and decidedly “modern” technologies were produced by foreign firms and local actors alike. Information about the efficacy of these systems was carefully documented by international observers as far away as the United States and China. Beginning in the 1880s, Chilean naval preponderance in the American Pacific—a key military result of the war—threatened both U.S. expansion in the region and the ideology of racial superiority which underwrote it. That challenge, in turn, stimulated and for many justified the emergence of the U.S. “New Navy” in the 1890s. An international perspective, as such, suggests the profound and unpredictable ways in which regional or peripheral violence articulated with Great Power politics and navalism in the late nineteenth century.