Maxim gun

Using its "Maxim guns" (which Gbagbo had not got) to get its way in Cote d'Ivoire, to install a candidate and rebels it has supported since Adam, in the hope that they will look after French national interests in that country, and by expansion to put the fear of God into other Francophone countries who might want to opt out of the obnoxious Colonial Pact and CFA Franc arrangements that France imposed on its African colonies before independence in 1960, amounts to bare-faced neo-colonialism at its worst.

Many subtle changes, particularly smokeless powder, would be made to the Maxim gun, but this 1883 invention became the killing machine of the Western Front in the Great War.

On 2 March at 5 AM whistles blew and one hundred men of #3 Company PPCLI rose from their trenches to the left of #2 Company, struggled forward in the face of two German Maxim guns. For a few brief minutes they succeeded in clearing a section of the German trenches; but they could not hold it, and were soon chased back to their original positions.

Before World War II, automatic weapons were exclusively on the side of imperialism, a lopsided balance of power summarized in Hilaire Belloc's tidy couplet, "Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not." But the story in the latter half of the twentieth century was quite the opposite.

An earlier example involves the Maxim gun. When asked in 1884 why Western nations had colonized almost the entire known world, the English writer Hilaire Belloc said that it was not because of their advanced civilization, greater universities, or cultural advances.

During a heavy battle, the Boers tried to seize a prized Maxim gun.

The first widespread use of the Maxim gun by the German army came in 1901 as a result of a licensing agreement for production of the gun in Germany by the firm that was to become Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) of Berlin.

Armed with the Maxim gun, they left behind a trail of blood wherever they went.

For European intellectuals it was the book, not the Maxim gun, which made victory in the contest with indigenous opposition a foregone conclusion.

The Maxim gun gave European armies a still greater advantage over native levies in Africa and Asia.

The Maxim machine gun, invented by Hiram Percy Maxim, was put into production by the Maxim Gun Company.

The corollary is that in the nineteenth century when they had no power they did not need to be, or as Belloc put it: Whatever happens we have got The maxim gun and they have not.

Still to come are a Maxim Gun, Dreyse Zundnadlegewehr and Ferguson rifle.

Over the next decade and a half, the Maxim gun was adopted by the dozens of armies around the world.

"It is one of the oldest brands in the UK and was made to mark the return of the Maxim gun detachment from the Boer war, which was commanded by Colonel Vaux.