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

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.

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

This volume offers a fresh interpretative agenda for thinking about the Vienna-based Habsburg Monarchy’s development, coherence, functionality, and domestic legitimacy under the impact of enduring international rivalry and armed conflict across a period spanning nearly two centuries, from the Thirty Years War to the Napoleonic wars. It does so in a wider European comparative perspective and by engaging closely with the concept of the ‘fiscal-military state’, rendering it both greater depth and precision and elaborating heuristic potential. This volume firmly returns the maintenance of a permanent standing army to the centre of the Habsburg government’s concerns between 1648 and 1815. In an exemplary way, it spotlights a broad range of structures, practices, and actors on both the financial and military sides that sustained the Habsburg fiscal-military state over time. These include the General War Commissariat, foreign subsidies and other external support, the provincial Estates and diets, taxation and borrowing, recruitment and the enrolment of officers, supply and provisioning as well as individual noble families, brokers, and contractors. In also applying the idea of ‘composite monarchy’ to the Habsburg polity, the volume additionally calls attention to both symmetries and asymmetries in the processes of state formation that occurred under the impact of fiscal-military exigency. Consolidation was accompanied by the emergence of new forms of particularism.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Soldiers, Taxes, Debts. Lower Austria as Part of the Habsburg Fiscal-Military State. In the 18th century, the Habsburg Monarchy and its heartland Lower Austria underwent a development that has rightly been described as a process of quantitative and qualitative militarization. The article focuses on the changing methods of supplementing the standing army with “fresh” recruits, on the resistance and opposition to this expressed in self-mutilation, draft evasion and desertion, the organization of marches and quartering of troop units, the construction of barracks (the first were opened in 1723 in Ybbs, Krems, Stockerau and Vienna), and the military academy founded in Wiener Neustadt in 1751. Finally, some financial-historical aspects of the subject are briefly discussed, namely fundamental changes in the tax system and the credit and debt system of the Habsburg Monarchy, with particular attention to the important role played by the Lower Austrian provincial estates. Keywords: military history, Estates of Lower Austria, standing army, recruitment, barracks

The ability to borrow on a sustainable basis was an essential element of a successful fiscal-military state. Historians have shown greater interest in direct taxation as a source of revenue, though they have drawn attention to the role played by the Vienna City Bank and external borrowing in the rise of a medium- and long-term public debt in the 18th-century Habsburg Monarchy. This chapter factors two further, crucial elements into the story. First, the central government increasingly tapped into the credit facilities of the provincial Estates in the Austrian and Bohemian lands, in effect deriving a critical advantage from the Monarchy’s composite political structure and the public bodies associated with it. The high points of this activity would be the Seven Years War and the wars of the 1790s. After 1763 Vienna’s debt management strategies proved so successful that the first sustainable form of cameral debt could be sold, which came to represent the fourth main pillar of affordable public credit.

This chapter deals with the development of the General War Commissariat from its establishment in the 1640s to the reforms of government and military between the 1740s and 1760s, discussing its position within the administrative structure of the Habsburg Monarchy. Responsible for the economy of the imperial armies in the broadest sense, the Commissariat’s activities were not restricted to Vienna and the imperial court, where its bureaucratic centre was located, but extended over large parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, including the kingdom of Hungary. The Commissariat’s history was long characterised by its sometimes tension-filled, intermediate position between the Aulic Chamber and the Aulic War Council. Further attention is paid to the quantitative and structural development of the Commissariat’s personnel, and to the ways in which commissarial officials interacted with the regional and local authorities, especially representatives of the provincial Estates.

In the 1650s about a quarter of the new peacetime standing army of the Habsburg Monarchy (c. 5000 soldiers) served for a time in one of the castles on the Hungarian-Ottoman frontier. Organising the upkeep of these soldiers was coordinated by the central authorities in Vienna with the collaboration of the Bohemian and Austrian lands as well as the Hungarian Estates. The kingdom of Hungary – a theatre of war since the 1520s – participated in the Habsburg fiscal-military state primarily through the provision of resources in kind (grain and wine), rather with taxes paid in cash. Contractors drawn from among Hungarian magnates and military officers played a key role in this business.

The geopolitical expansion of the Habsburg Monarchy led to a profound reshuffling of its internal power structure. Сentralist tendencies were reinforced to impose a tighter control on resources and political power by the imperial court in Vienna. This manifold process was inextricably linked to a legitimizing discourse that strived to impose homogeneous cultural values and social norms that were considered conducive to future cultural and socio-economic transformation. The imposition of these values and norms ultimately led towards the construction of a strong fiscal-military state and facilitated empire-building. While many of these social norms, such as thriftiness and industriousness, were part of the reformist discourse of cameralists, their cultural framework was heavily influenced by other Enlightenment ideas, such as the civilization discourse and the theory of developmental stages. Orientalist metaphors contributed to construct social and spatial hierarchies within the Habsburg Empire. While integration strengthened the imperial framework, the discourse that facilitated these processes also contributed to the establishment and legitimation of unequal treatment between the centers and peripheries of the Habsburg Empire.