The subtitle encapsulates the central theme of Katherine Epstein’s new book, Analog Superpowers. Its main narrative centers around alleged acts of theft targeting two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, and their highly mechanized and integrated ship gun fire-control system. The first act of theft (Chapter 2), perpetrated by the Royal Navy before World War I, was a combined result of dishonesty and an inflated sense of institutional entitlement. After its naval officer, Commander Frederic Dreyer, pirated the Pollen–Isherwood system, albeit incompetently, the Admiralty unilaterally severed its ties with the inventors and asserted the Dreyer system as the original, dismissing the inventors’ counterclaims of authorship by citing their supposed “civilian” ineptitude (p. 69). The second act (Chapter 4), perpetrated by the US Navy during and after the war, was emblematic of a venerable Yankee tradition of seeing what glitters and claiming it as one’s own. Recognizing the superiority of the Pollen–Isherwood system, US naval officers aided their defense contractors Sperry Gyroscope and Ford Instrument in pirating it by providing them with intelligence (pp. 105–106) and even instructing them on which ideas to plagiarize (p. 121). In shielding their misconduct, the British and US governments of the battleship age laid the foundations for the national security state of the nuclear age.

Whether, and to what extent, Dreyer, Sperry, and Ford pirated the Pollen–Isherwood system will remain open to debate. As the relevant pages in the Journal of Military History (Vols. 69 and 70) and Journal of Strategic Studies (Vol. 38) reveal, the relationship between the Pollen–Isherwood and Dreyer systems, in particular, has sparked a controversy among naval historians as heated as the post-Jutland feud between the Jellicoeites and Beattyites. It is beyond the capacity of this reviewer to determine whether Epstein has offered the definitive account, though a more detailed delineation of the “errors” attributed to John Brooks (p. 56, footnote 1; p. 150, footnote 2), the foremost defender of the Dreyer system in the controversy, would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the breadth of evidence that Epstein employs—spanning Admiralty records, the personal papers of Dreyer and Pollen, and transcripts of Royal Commission hearings—along with the persuasiveness of her “intent-based” history—which is aimed against the “outcome-based approach” that, far too charitably, infers Dreyer’s authorial intent from outcome (p. 57)—suggest that the Dreyerites face a formidable challenge.

Ultimately, the argumentative value of the book does not hinge on the “truth” of the matter. After all, Epstein’s main argument is that the legal doctrines implemented to control the flows of technology and information (sovereign immunity, eminent domain, secrecy laws, and secrecy privileges), not the technology theft itself, are what built the national security state. In Chapters 3 and 6, for example, Epstein examines the attempts of the Royal Navy to restrict Pollen from exercising his property rights, to freely sell his product and receive just compensation for state infringement, in the name of national security. Rather than adhering to the liberal norms of contract and due process, which would have entailed greater expense and disclosure of information, the Admiralty preempted Pollen’s claim entirely by declaring fire-control knowledge a state secret. “Here,” Epstein notes, “was the logic by which the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 made nuclear knowledge ‘restricted data,’” a knowledge “born secret” (pp. 99–100). The last three chapters of the book (Chapters 8–10) trace how this logic traveled westward to the US. By bringing the lenses of political economy and legal history together in these chapters, Epstein succeeds in providing a comprehensive and detailed picture of how different actors with conflicting interests—the US government seeking lower costs, monopsony, and technological innovation and the defense contractors seeking higher profits, a monopoly or oligopoly, and product protection—acted strategically within the overarching legal structure of the US patent system.

To conceptualize the historical relationship between military and business analyzed in the book, Epstein employs the term “liberal militarism.” The intent is to underscore the record of British and US governments behaving “illiberally toward the IP [Intellectual Property] rights of contractors” notwithstanding said governments’ “liberal reliance on capitalist production” (p. 8). In this reviewer’s judgment, a more fitting term for Epstein’s intent would be “warfare state,” a concept that, surprisingly, does not appear in the book. Indeed, one could read Analog Superpowers alongside works by other historians—such as Mark Wilson’s The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 and Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II—and political scientists—such as Ira Katznelson’s classical essay on “The Military and Early American Statebuilding”—who have wielded their cudgels against liberal exceptionalism, shedding light on the role of the warfare state as a recognizable force in reordering the domestic political economy throughout US history. To the roster of military actors who have captured the attention of these scholars, ranging from engineers to procurement agents, Epstein has now added contract and patent experts associated with the navy, further enriching our understanding of the intricate dynamics between war, law, and society.

More broadly, one could also situate the book within a body of recent studies that identify the era of the world wars as a laboratory for state interventions in the property order during times of war, economic crisis, and other real or perceived emergencies. As international historian Nicholas Mulder has recently argued, confiscation of property became the favored tool of statecraft among polities across the globe during this period: the British and US navies’ classification of private intellectual property as state secrets formed part of a mass expropriation of civilian property under the pretext of necessity. The early and mid-twentieth century also witnessed the expansion of state capacity. In tandem with the restructuring of the liberal patent system to better control the flow of technology, the US government moved to establish statutory authority and expand the bureaucratic mechanisms to monitor, regulate, and, when it deemed necessary, restrict the movement of goods and finance, ushering in what historian Ben Coates recently termed the “sanctioning state” (see “The Secret Life of Statutes: A Century of the Trading with the Enemy Act,” Modern American History 1, no. 2 [July 2018]). As the title of Epstein’s conclusion—“Everything Old Is New Again” (pp. 266–277)—suggests, perhaps we have returned to similar terrain. Analog Superpowers is therefore a welcome addition to the ongoing effort to understand the present century through the violent crises of the previous one.