Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company

Nathan Rothschild retained a substantial shareholding in the new Maxim-Nordenfelt combine and ‘exerted a direct influence over its management’.

[2] The company produced a range of light artillery, machine guns and ammunition.

[3] It was the subject of one of history's most famous court cases in 1894, Nordenfelt v Maxim, Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Co, in which Nordenfelt successfully claimed that the takeover condition preventing him from competing with Maxim for 25 years "in any way" was an unreasonable restraint of trade, but failed to overturn the main condition preventing Nordenfelt from competing with Maxim in the guns and ammunition trade for 25 years.

This gave Vickers a complete naval shipbuilding, engineering and armaments capability, an advantage Armstrongs had held for many years, and eventually allowed Vickers to take over Armstrongs.

[5][6][page needed] During the Second Boer War, the British used Maxim machine guns, and the Boers used the QF 1-pounder, a modified Maxim, a belt-fed, water-cooled machine gun that fired explosive 1-pound (0.45 kg) rounds (smokeless ammunition) at 450 rounds per minute, which became known as the "pom-pom".