From the ‘military revolution’ to the ‘fiscal-naval state’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In this short article I draw on some earlier work of mine, some not yet published: 'The military revolution at sea'; 'Introduction' to Navies and state formation; and 'War as an economic activity in the "long" eighteenth-century'. Roberts, The military revolution, 1560–1660; Schumpeter, 'Die Krise des Steuerstaates'. Parker, 'The "military revolution", 1560–1660 – a myth?' I make no attempt to summarise the extensive literature on this theme. It is discussed generally in Black, A military revolution?; Rogers, The military revolution debate; Bowen, War and British society; and Conway, War, state, and society in mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cook, 'The Norman military revolution in England'; Cornell, 'The military revolution, effectiveness, innovation, and the Duke of Wellington'. Bachrach and Bachrach, 'Saxon military revolution, 912–973? Myth and reality'. Black, War in the early modern world, 1450–1815; Lorge, The Asian military revolution; Cook, The hundred years war for Morocco. Parker, The military revolution. Black, in War and the world, is more sceptical. See also Black, 'European overseas expansion and the military revolution'. See, for example, Bean, 'War and the birth of the nation-state'; Finer, 'State and nation-building in Europe'; Batchelder and Freudenberger, 'On the rational origins of the modern centralised state'; Tilly, 'War making and state making as organised crime'. For more recent contributions, see Reinhard, Power elites and state building; Ertman, Birth of the leviathan; and Ertman, 'The sinews of power and European state-building theory'. This applies to most of the very numerous books on the subject. Honourable exceptions are Black, A military revolution? and Parker, The military revolution. Jaime Vicens Vives was perhaps the first to mention the naval contribution to state formation. See Vicens Vives, 'The administrative structure of the state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries'. Glete, Navies and nations is an outstanding study which eschews the 'military revolution' as such; Professor Glete followed it with War and the state in early modern Europe. Brian M. Downing is a rare political scientist who is uneasily aware that the existence of navies somewhat undermines his argument. See Downing, The military revolution and political change, 72–3, 165, 224. See also Bruijn, 'States and their navies from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries', 69–98. Jones, 'Fiscal policies, liberties, and representative government during the reigns of the last Stuarts', 69. See also Brewer and Hellmuth, Rethinking leviathan. Parker, 'The "military revolution" ', gives an admirable summary. I do not know any directly comparable figures for the quantities of earthwork and masonry required, but there are some suggestive calculations in Jewell, The experimental earthwork on Overton Down, Wiltshire, 1960, 51–8, and Coles, Archaeology by experiment, 73–4. This is true regardless of whether you believe the military revolution was the cause of absolutism, or (like Black, Military revolution) the consequence. Storrs and Scott, 'The military revolution and the European nobility, c. 1600–1800', 34. Edgerton, Warfare state, 5–6. Meyer, Le poids de l'état, 128–9. Hoffman and Norberg, Fiscal crises, 302. Brewer, The sinews of power. Scholars are only beginning to consider the implications of the 'fiscal-military state' for the 'great divergence' between Europe and the East, but see Torres Sánchez, 'The triumph of the fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century: war and mercantilism', 24–8. Stone, An imperial state at war, was an influential early collection taking up Brewer's theme; the most recent treatment is Storrs, The fiscal-military state in eighteenth-century Europe. North, Institutions, institutional change and economic performance, 49–51, 113–16, 139–40; North and Weingast, 'Constitutions and commitment'; Weingast, 'The political foundations of limited government'. North, Institutions, institutional change and economic performance, 116. Brewer, The sinews of power, 21. Anderson, Lineages of the absolutist state, 123; Mokyr, 'The industrial revolution and the new economic history', 8–9; Ayton and Price, The medieval military revolution, 6. I refer in particular to O'Brien, 'The political economy of British taxation, 1660–1815'; O'Brien and Hunt, 'The rise of a fiscal state in Britain, 1485–1815'; and O'Brien, 'Fiscal exceptionalism'. Dickson, The financial revolution in England. Ertman, Birth of the leviathan, 220; O'Brien and Hunt, 'The rise of a fiscal state, 1485–1815', 151–9. Using the figures of Cookson, The British armed nation, 1793–1815, 5–7. Other figures (the differences not much affecting my argument) are offered by different authorities such as O'Brien, 'The impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815', 342; Emsley, 'The social impact of the French wars', 214; Hall, British strategy in the Napoleonic War, 1803–15, 1–6; French, The British way in warfare, 1688–2000, 116; Colley, 'The reach of the state, the appeal of the nation', 165–84. Rodger, 'War as an economic activity', explores this theme. Allen, The British industrial revolution in global perspective, explains the Industrial Revolution as the consequence of high wages and low fuel costs in Britain. Wrigley, 'The divergence of England'; 't Hart, 'Mobilising resources for war'; Scott, 'The fiscal-military state and international rivalry during the long eighteenth century', 33–6. On the Dutch economy, the standard work is de Vries and van der Woude, The first modern economy. Anglo-Dutch competition is studied by Ormrod, The rise of commercial empires. Beckett and Turner, 'Taxation and economic growth in eighteenth-century England', 401. See also Mathias and O'Brien, 'Taxation on Britain and France, 1715–1810'; Kennedy, The rise and fall of the Great Powers, 100; O'Brien, 'Inseparable connections'. Neal, The rise of financial capitalism, 218. Bowen and González Encisco, 'Introduction', 19–21; Torres Sánchez, 'The triumph of the fiscal-military state'. Wheeler, The making of a world power, 50–2, 140–1, 148–62. Torres Sánchez, 'The triumph of the fiscal-military state', 16. O'Brien, 'The impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars', gives estimates for the British war effort (military and naval together) in 1804, 1809 and 1810: pay 50 per cent, food 16 per cent, shipbuilding and repairs 15 per cent, charter of sea transport 5 per cent, clothing 4 per cent, arms and ammunition 4 per cent, building and construction 3 per cent, horses, barrack stores and prisoners of war 1 per cent each. There is some material on this question for an earlier period in N.A.M. Rodger, 'The continental commitment in the eighteenth century', 43. £112,329,347 over the 52 peacetime years between 1689 and 1815, out of a total of £606,609,397; calculated from House of Commons Sessional Papers 1868–89 (366), XXV, 1177–9. Lediard, The naval history of England, I, xii, reckons the capital value of the ships of the navy in 1735, without armament, at £2,591,337. Using rather smaller figures, Brewer, The sinews of power, 34, reckons the ships were worth about 4 per cent of national income. Adding guns, dockyards, victualling plant and other equipment and infrastructure would certainly push the figures up considerably. O'Brien, 'The impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars', 366–8. Saville, 'Some aspects of the role of government in the industrial development of England, 1686 to 1720', is a notable but rare case. Especially, Buchet, Marine, Économie et Société. Glete, Swedish naval administration 1521–1721. Candiani, I Vascelli della Serenissima. Torres Sánchez, War, state and development; Bowen and González Encisco, Mobilising resources for war.