Provisions, Passports and the Problems of International Warfare in Early Eighteenth-Century Northern Italy: A Micro-Historical Study

Abstract

The relationship between the rise of the modern European state and military resource mobilization has been studied either through the capacity of Europe's fiscal-military states to mobilize war-making resources internally or the continued importance of private, non-state contractors to fund, recruit and supply armies. Missing from this literature is an understanding of how military contractors acquired supplies outside of national borders as well as the sorts of diplomatic and personal connections these contractors drew upon to move war goods across multiple jurisdictions for hundreds of miles. This article adopts a micro-historical approach to the history of military resource mobilization, paying close attention to one shipment of grain purchased in central Europe by the British army during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). By studying closely how British money paid French Huguenot contractors to buy the grain and transmit it across northern Italy to feed German and Spanish troops fighting in Spain, this one case shows how scholarship can move towards a transnational history of military logistics based on key urban centres rather than nations and borders.