The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State

The introduction firmly restores the upkeep of a standing army in war- and peacetime to the center of the Habsburg government’s concerns in the early modern period. After a brief discussion of the peculiarities of Habsburg historiography, it argues that the idea of ‘composite monarchy’ (J.H. Elliott) best encapsulates the complex political framework within which a Habsburg fiscal-military state operated within its own borders. A review of the recent literature shows that the Habsburg Monarchy has figured more in the literature on ‘fiscal states’ than on ‘fiscal-military states’. Based on current knowledge, the introduction posits four major shifts in the Habsburg Monarchy’s fiscal-military arrangements between the 16th and 18th centuries. By the early 18th century, it is furthermore argued, a ‘fiscal-military core’ had emerged in the relatively well-coordinated and regularized fiscal-military activity occurring in the Bohemian and Austrian lands. Its three key facets constituted the rigorous use of primarily older forms of direct taxation, credit mobilization, and recruitment.

Though weakened by recent scholarship, the paradigm of “absolutist state-building” remains embedded in the thinking about Habsburg history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The “emasculation” of traditional elite groups such as the Estates by the reforming “state” of the eighteenth century is an especially tenacious assumption. The present study utilizes recent concepts for large, compound political entities in an international context including “fiscal-military state” and “composite monarchy” to throw light on the relationship of government and society over time. It anatomizes the impact of fiscal-military exigency on the relationship between the rulers in Vienna and the Estates of the archduchy below the river Enns (Lower Austria), which geographically, politically, and financially was one of the central Habsburg lands. The thesis is posited that the Habsburg monarchy’s composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Estates constituted an increasingly vital, if changing, element of Habsburg international success and resilience.

This chapter focuses on the seventeenth century, because in this century the Habsburg Monarchy underwent a process of growing integration inside and of separation vis-a-vis the Empire 'outside'. The Monarchia Austriaca was consolidated as a territorial state and separated from the Empire in fields of high importance within the state building process, such as the development of central (court) authorities independently from the authorities of the Empire to manage warfare, finances, and the postal system. The 'modern' fiscal-military state on the soil of the Holy Roman Empire came into being at the level of the territories, not at that of the Empire. In the long run the political future belonged to the major territorial states such as Brandenburg-Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and, not least, the Habsburg Monarchy, and not to the 'pre-modern' and 'pre-state' political system of the Empire. Keywords:Habsburg monarchy; Holy Roman Empire; Monarchia Austriaca ; political system; Separation; Seventeenth Century

Contents: Introduction: the fiscal-military state in the a longa (TM) 18th century, Christopher Storrs The fiscal-military state and international rivalry during the long 18th century, Hamish Scott The Habsburg monarchy from 'military-fiscal' state to ' militarization', Michael Hochedlinger Prussia as a fiscal-military state, 1640a 1806, Peter H. Wilson Russia as a fiscal-military state, 1689a 1825, Janet Hartley The French experience, 1661a 1815, JoAl FA(c)lix and Frank Tallett The triumph and denouement of the British fiscal state: taxation for the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1793a 1815, Patrick Karl O'Brien The Savoyard fiscal-military state in the long 18th century, Christopher Storrs Index.

This chapter presents the Savoyard state more clearly within the debate about the nature and even the existence of the fiscal-military state. It considers the significance of those payments, not least in terms of how far they stimulated or retarded the achievement of a full fiscal-military structure in the Savoyard state. The Savoyard polity also benefited enormously from its crucial strategic position, controlling the routes across the Alps, in an age dominated by war between Bourbon and Habsburg. The extent to which the Savoyard fiscal-military state triggered a social transformation that benefited the 'non-noble bourgeoisie' is by no means clear; it may mistakenly apply inappropriate concepts, labels or social classifications of a later age to the eighteenth-century Savoyard state. In wartime Victor Amadeus II and his successors benefited from the subsidies made available by allies in order to sustain the Savoyard army and fund an increase in its strength.

This article begins by exploring – and insisting upon – the difference between a ‘fiscal-military state’ and a ‘fiscal state’, concepts often amalgamated by historians. It then explores how the idea of a fiscal-military state in 18th-century Britain has evolved since the term’s invention in 1988, paying particular attention to its impact upon Ireland and Scotland and on relations between central and local government. It goes on to suggest that the concept might profitably be applied to the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy during its Heldenzeit (‘Age of Heroes’) between the 1670s and 1720 and, more generally, during the long 18th century, when many financial and administrative innovations resembling those in Britain were introduced due to the impact of regular and large-scale warfare, above all the development of a system of structured borrowing supported by public bodies and by fiscal innovations.

:<i>The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State: Contours and Perspectives, 1648–1815</i>

William D. Godsey / Petr Maťa (Hg.): The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State. Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815

GODSEY, William D. – MAŤA, Petr, eds. THE HABSBURG MONARCHY AS A FISCAL-MILITARY STATE. Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 369 s

Central to the consolidation of state power across eighteenth-century Europe was an expansion of the number of trained, professional soldiers. Indeed, the composite monarchy of Great Britain and Ireland, with its growing overseas empire, might be described as an archetypal 'fiscal-military state'. But the establishment of the standing army that underpinned the authority of the Westminster government met with sustained opposition. Vocal elements within the political classes were opposed to the idea of a permanent, professional armed force as inimical to the preservation of individual liberty and the survival of representative institutions. Drawing on examples from classical antiquity, and the much more recent history of the Cromwellian Protectorate, they argued a preference for a force mustered from the property-owning citizenry — the militia or trained bands — men committed in principle to the cause rather than hired for pay, as a safer guarantee not only of the immediate defence of the realm, but also of longer-term security against domestic tyranny. King William's determination to maintain a large standing army after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, in readiness for a renewal of hostilities against France, provoked heated interventions in the English House of Commons and a vigorous pamphlet campaign by 'classical republicans'.1 While the issue diminished somewhat in importance during and after the War of the Spanish Succession, MPs and political commentators did not forget the potential threat posed to liberty by a professional army.

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century state building was the formation of standing armies. Kings and princes throughout Europe, responding to conditions of almost constant strife, were compelled to transform ineffective feudal levies and unruly bands of mercenaries into regularized bodies of professional troops, making ever larger and more costly military establishments instruments of rational foreign policy rather than the preserves of the old nobility or freebootingcondottieri. In building armies of the new type, European monarchs had to surmount determined opposition from two sources: the local representative bodies (estates) which were reluctant to grant rulers the powers of taxation necessary for the maintenance of permanent troops, and the mercenary colonels who were expected to relinquish their rights as independent recruiting masters and subordinate themselves to the state. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, various territorial sovereigns were successfully mastering this opposition to their political authority and were able to take an essential step in the direction of true standing armies by routinely keeping strong military forces under their command at the conclusion of a campaign, thereby diminishing their reliance on contingents approved by the provincial estates or soldiers hastily raised by private entrepreneurs to meet specific emergencies.

Scholars have used the concept of fiscal–military state to study the importance of finance in the development of the states in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The term was first used in the late 1980s by John Brewer in a study on eighteenth-century Britain. It has since been employed widely, notably in a comparative context. The term was apposite to describe the evolution of states and their fiscal systems to meet the demands of larger armies and more expensive equipment. A central question was the effectiveness with which economic resources could be mobilised. For Brewer, to cover the increasing costs of warfare, a fiscal–military state had to be able to raise funds through both credit and taxation. Further, a good administrative structure was necessary to support its fiscal and military activities. This became particularly relevant in the eighteenth century when the costs of warfare in Europe increased significantly. Recently, the relevance of a fiscal–military state has also been examined for the Habsburg monarchy in the eighteenth century.

The Fiscal-Military State and International Rivalry during the Long Eighteenth Century

When in 1715 the Southern Netherlands passed formally into the hands of Vienna, one of the formerly wealthiest regions of northern Europe became a part of the Austrian Habsburg composite monarchy. For nearly 100 years, the Austrian Netherlands played an important role in the financial management of that Monarchy in the form of contributions, subsidies, credit, and loans accommodated by the provincial Estates in wartime. This paper considers a key opening episode in that financial relationship during the reign of Charles VI. Two key issues are considered. First, the problem of tax farming will be analysed on the basis of the example of the county of Hainault and the tax negotiations between its Estates and the government. Second, the intermediary role played by the area’s leading nobleman, the duke of Arenberg, between provincial Estates and emperor will elucidate the problem of wartime borrowing and debt management.