Abstract
My humble effort in the form of “Global Weapons Trade Between the United States and Japan: From the Civil War to the Boshin War” (2023) based on a previous study by Harald Fuess in “The Global Weapons Trade and the Meiji Restoration: Dispersion of Means of Violence in a World of Emerging Nation-States” (2020) introduces the following. A Swiss company, Siber & Brennwald was successful in closing the American carbines’ deal with the Shogunate, however, they failed to proceed with Swiss-made breech-loading rifles’ deal. Fuess’s article based on an abridged translation of Brennwald’s Diary (2015) does not clarify the specific reasons for this failure. This article, therefore, tries to elucidate circumstances of that time based on a complete translation of Brennwald’s Diary (2020). Furthermore, this article would also like to suggest certain factors that contributed to the spread of Western-Style rifles throughout Japan in the late 1860s.
