page_title: War profiteering
section_title: Industrial Revolution
hierarchical_section_title: War profiteering / History / Industrial Revolution
caption_attribution_description: English: An 1827 view of the Eli Whitney Gun Factory and Whitneyville. Connecticut's Mill River flows through the middle-ground.
context_page_description: A war profiteer is any person or organization that makes unreasonable profits from warfare or by selling weapons and other goods to parties at war. The term typically carries strong negative connotations. General profiteering, making an unreasonable profit, also occurs in peacetime. An example of war profiteers were the "shoddy" millionaires who allegedly sold recycled wool and cardboard shoes to soldiers during the American Civil War. Some have argued that major modern defense conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Raytheon fit the description in the post-9/11 era. This argument is based in the political influence of the defense industry, for example in 2010 the defense industry spent $144 million on lobbying and donated over $22.6 million to congressional candidates, as well as large profits for defense company shareholders in the post-9/11 period.
context_section_description: In 1798, American inventor Eli Whitney received a government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets in less than two years. After failing to produce a single musket, he was called to Washington to defend his expenditure of the treasury funds before a committee that included both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Believing to demonstrate the ingenuity of interchangeable parts, Whitney earned widespread support and has been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts. However Merritt Roe Smith concluded that this demonstration was staged by marking the parts beforehand, so they were not as interchangeable as he made them seem. Eventually Whitney was able to accomplish his goal of 10,000 muskets with interchangeable parts at a relatively low cost in the next 8 years, and later produced more than 15,000 in the following 4 years.
caption: Whitney's gun factory in 1827
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