Fiscal-military State Research Articles

From fiscal-military state to laissez-faire science: liberal government and the nineteenth-century market of scientific activity

AbstractIn nineteenth-century Britain, the role of the state in the cultivation of scientific activity was controversial. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, successive governments rolled back the apparatus of the ‘fiscal-military state’, characterized by high taxation and government spending. What followed was a moment of self-avowedly laissez-faire, liberal governance in which contemporaries placed great emphasis on the value of minimal government intervention in market activity. This not only concerned the nation’s social and economic life, but its scientific culture. Leading political and scientific figures frequently promoted science as something best advanced if left to individuals. Yet by the 1900s, the British state was increasingly engaged in financing and organizing large-scale scientific research. The twentieth century would see governments around the world expand their scientific and technological investment, epitomized by the American concept of ‘Big Science’. This article analyses the relationship between the British government and scientific activity during the nineteenth century and argues that, far from a simple matter of minimal intervention, the state was always highly active in the market of science.

War, the State and Local Office-Holders in Britain, 1689–1750

Abstract Research on the British ‘fiscal-military state’ has placed great emphasis on the development of a financial infrastructure and professional bureaucracy in explaining Britain’s rise to superpower status in the eighteenth century. This article argues instead that, to appreciate fully the extent of the British state’s involvement in warfare, historians need to acknowledge the crucial and varied roles that local office-holders played in raising manpower for the army and supporting many of its requirements. Such an emphasis allows for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the British fiscal-military state and the relations between centre and localities. This article illuminates the impact of war at a local level by examining how local office-holders, principally justices of the peace and parish constables, found and enlisted men into the army, secured deserters, intervened in mutinies, organised quarters for soldiers and transport for the army, and assisted former and injured soldiers and soldiers’ families. This work added to their burdens of office, it could jeopardise their authority and create bitter tensions within communities. Nevertheless, there was a high level of co-operation from local office-holders. The article analyses why local office-holders complied with the demands of central government and stresses their importance within the British ‘fiscal-military state’.

Overseas trade and taxation in England and Wales, c. 1680–1790

AbstractHistorians have made relatively little headway in quantifying the economic influence of central government taxation in the eighteenth century. This question has a bearing on both the claims of the fiscal military state thesis that taxation got more regressive after 1690 and histories of welfare, which have argued that the lot English labourers improved during this period. The following article shows how the state indirectly taxed English and Welsh consumers and what impact that had on prices. It pays special attention to revenues derived from overseas trade and compares them with excises on beer and malt. It also uses recent estimates of consumption to calculate the taxes paid by ‘respectable’ households and charts the advancing impositions made by the state. It finds that most revenues derived from overseas trade were paid by middling or elite households with incomes that could easily achieve respectability. Poorer households were, however, squeezed hard by inland duties on beer, coal, and other necessaries. In this respect, factoring in state taxes should cause historians to revise downwards the living standards of much of the population.

Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States Londres, Routledge, 2002, 277 p.

Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States Londres, Routledge, 2002, 277 p.

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

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

Volunteer Bands and Local Identity in Caithness at the Time of the Second Reform Act

Caithness lay outside the national railway network in 1868, but as this article demonstrates, used the band music of its local volunteer military units, embedded within a wider contemporary British context of imperial music-making, as a means to express and shape local political identities. The second Reform Act of 1867, enacted in Scotland by the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868, prompted wider reimagining about what it meant to be a citizen of Scotland and Britain. Regular references to civic bands in contemporary newspapers and carefully posed photographs in local archives provide evidence for the popularity of Silver and Brass bands connected with the Caithness Volunteer movement. As they marched around towns, villages and countryside, especially around the time of the national elections and local by-elections of 1868-9, their music created powerfully affective soundscapes that connected traditional local identities with the modern British fiscal-military state, helping people to imagine their place as citizens in a period of widening political engagement. The county’s band music provides a microhistory that allows exploration of contrasts between rural and civic patterns of political behaviour in this period.

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

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.

Paul M. Dover. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

In this outstanding and deftly written synthesis, The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Paul Dover places paper at the heart of “the information revolution in early modern Europe.” An earlier generation of scholarship, chiefly inspired by groundbreaking works by Lucian Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (L’Apparition du livre, 1958) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1980), located in the rise of print and the material object of the book the signal transformations that defined the media landscape of early modern Europe. Dover builds upon more recent research on topics such as archival practices, state formation, and political economy to emphasize instead the importance of paper as a substrate of communicative and preservative practice across early modern European societies. Paper’s importance as a medium, the author argues, was the underlying development that enabled information—its creation, circulation, and preservation both in print and non-print forms—to become a fundamental facet of life in early modern Europe. Drawing on scholarship in five languages, Dover brilliantly brings together a variety of adjacent historiographies on the structural transformations of the early modern period—the expansion of commerce, the origins of the fiscal-military state, and the rise of print itself—and demonstrates how paper’s expansive availability in Europe from the end of the medieval period provided the underlying condition for these developments.

Patriots and the Country party tradition in the eighteenth century: the critics of Britain’s fiscal-military state from Robert Harley to Catharine Macaulay

ABSTRACT The distinguished historian Steven Pincus has recently argued that “Patriotism” was a distinctive ideology in the middle of the eighteenth century that indicated “governmental activism” and support for “the British way of governing, grounded in the principles set forth in England’s Revolution of 1688–89.” By contrast, this essay shows that “Patriot” was more commonly used as a generic term for opposition politicians in eighteenth-century Britain. Moreover, for much of the century, the term was frequently associated with a slightly more precise and substantial set of political arguments: those associated with the “Country party” platform. In its eighteenth-century guise, the Country party’s raison d’être was opposition to the growth of executive power since the Glorious Revolution. It was not a party as such but rather an opposition stance and a set of principles which occasionally brought together Tories, Whigs, and independent Country gentlemen as well as self-proclaimed Patriots. In the eighteenth century, “the Country” was especially scathing of the “financial revolution” and the growth of the fiscal-military state in the years after 1688–1689. By its continuous association with the Country party tradition, Patriotism and suspicion of the growth of executive power and government finance were intimately linked.

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New Fiscal-Military State in the Eighteenth-Century English Literature

The purpose of this article is to present the new fiscal-military state in light of eighteenth-century English literature. In reality, there were many different reactions to the new financial system at the time. It turns out that while many people embraced them, many others criticized them. The fiscal-military state produced enormous vested interests that were reliant on the results of the exceptional experiment in public credit. In addition to the armed forces, everyone who had a stake in it included the staff members of financial corporations, those who rendered services to them on the stock exchange, and the officials who worked in the revenue system. Among those who supported its founding were the stockholders of the three major corporations. Owners of Bank and East India stock made up approximately a third of the group, which numbered around 10,000 persons. Most of them lived in London and the Home Counties, and non-landed sources of income made up the majority of their income. Fewer than many landowners have excess cash to invest in bank stocks or related to the South Sea or East India. The ‘monied interest’ investors in government loans received heavy criticism from spokespeople for the landed classes. Because of the disagreements between the Whig and Tory parties in the latter Stuart era, the conflict of interests purportedly caused by the financial revolution became entangled in those conflicts. The Whigs were said to be fostering the wealthy interest by the Tories, who claimed to speak for the landed interest. Not all Whigs supported the new public credit system uncritically. It has revealed the rationale behind the growth of the fiscal-military state.

A Wicked War

As war is an eminently political event, the impact of wars on inequality can be seen as an expression of the politics in society. This paper engages with the ongoing literature relating warfare to wealth inequality dynamics in a pre-industrial world. It employs an unbalanced panel of wills in a combined event study and instrument variables research designs to explore the wealth inequality dynamics in Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. The findings suggest that weak public finances and financial crisis led to increasing wealth inequality through military expenditures and national debt. However, the formation of a regressive fiscal-military state and a levelling effect of warfare can coexist. Inequality depends on how war is financed and how destructive to capital and wealth the war is.

Dissecting the Sinews of Power: International Trade and the Rise of Britain's Fiscal-Military State, 1689-1823

Dissecting the Sinews of Power: International Trade and the Rise of Britain's Fiscal-Military State, 1689-1823

Sarah Kinkel. Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance and the Rise of the British Navy.

Sarah Kinkel. <i>Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance and the Rise of the British Navy</i>.

Jacobitism, Coastal Policing, and Fiscal-Military Reform in England after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702

AbstractCustoms activity during the 1690s has mainly been studied from a fiscal-military perspective that attributes administrative growth and bureaucratic efficiency to the rise of fiscal necessities in the wake of the Nine Years’ War. This article challenges that view with a focus on the one truly momentous change of the Customs during the 1690s: the establishment of a preventive coastal police. Changes in the Customs were occasioned not primarily by fiscal concerns but resulted from the government's preoccupation with Jacobitism and the successful lobbying of Parliament by the wool interest. As the politics of the wool ban before 1689 demonstrate, coastal policing was a losing bargain in fiscal terms and mainly reflected the interests of certain sections of the merchant community. Fiscal pressures alone do not, therefore, explain the fundamental reform of the Customs in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The beginnings of systematic coastal policing are instead linked to the rise of Parliament and anti-Jacobite precautions of William III's government. The article offers a new, coherent picture of such changes and calls into question the validity of a central assumption about the rise of the fiscal-military state in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, suggesting a more complicated explanation for fiscal reforms.

The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics

The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics

МИЛИТАРИЗАЦИЯ ГОСУДАРСТВА - ВЛАСТЬ И ВОЕННЫЕ В НОВОЕ ВРЕМЯ: ОПЫТ ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ И МЕТОДОЛОГИИ ПРОБЛЕМЫ

The article contains the results of research on the development of foreign and Russian history. The work is based on materials of monographs and scientific articles in Russian. The main task of its analysis is to reveal what intellectual processes influenced historians. The sphere of scientific interests of the given scientists includes the history of the state, the fiscal-military state and the processes of formation of modern armed forces in Western Europe and Russia in the XV-XIX centuries.

Finance Beyond the Bounds of the Fiscal-Military State: Debt, Speculation and the Renovation of Nineteenth-Century French Financial Capitalism

Abstract Focusing on the Paris Stock Exchange in the early nineteenth century, this article examines the renovation of public debt and speculation following financial, political and military collapse. Though financial capitalism at the Exchange in the eighteenth century had been located mostly within the architecture of the fiscal-military state, the fallout of the Revolution and the defeat of the Napoleonic regime eliminated this option. Rather than military competition, financial capitalism at the Exchange in the nineteenth century was rebuilt by focusing inwards, by being linked to political values such as defined property rights, a particular vision of liberty and theories of representative government. Financial capitalism was still connected to empire, however; the reconstruction of financial capitalism at home helped to establish the conditions for exporting capital abroad, in the pursuit of informal empire. The article thus shows how financial capitalism came to be aligned with the political good in the post-revolutionary world.

Centralized Regionalism: The rise of regional fiscal-military states in China, 1916–28

AbstractWarlordism in early Republican China was more than political fragmentation and intensive warfare. It involved serious efforts and breakthroughs in state-making at the regional level. Warlords or regional forces that centralized and bureaucratized their fiscal and governing institutions would eventually outcompete those who did not. Geopolitical advantages and access to modern economic and financial resources added to their competitiveness. The Guangdong-based Guomindang force prevailed over all others precisely because of a combination of all these factors in its state-building efforts by 1928. Central to state-making in early twentieth-century China, therefore, was the rise of regional fiscal-military states and their rivals for national dominance. China joined some of the most prominent latecomers to nation states in other parts of the modern world in their shared bottom-up path of state-building.

Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Andrew J. B. Fagal (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Political economy, Economic history, History of capitalism, National security capitalism, Fiscal-military state Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848. By Lindsay Schakenbach Regele. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 263. Cloth, $59.95, e-book, $59.95.) More than fifty years ago William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin School highlighted the importance of political economy for American diplomacy. Increasing industrial output, coupled with the boom and bust of the business cycle, led the political class to embrace an “open door policy” in U.S. foreign relations. The “open door” then led to a number of ill-thought-out ventures in order to secure foreign markets for American manufactured goods, culminating in the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam. This became, in Williams’s estimation, the “tragedy of American diplomacy.”1 Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s Manufacturing Advantage takes this familiar story of late-nineteenth-century political economy and foreign relations and places it squarely within an early republican context. According to Schakenbach Regele, after the Revolution politicians, military officers, and businessmen all sought to make the United States a manufacturer of small arms and textiles. They succeeded, [End Page 744] and in the first decades of the nineteenth century U.S. officials pursued a vigorous campaign to open up Latin American markets for these American-manufactured goods. Thus, what the Wisconsin School characterized as a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century becomes one of the founding. If there is a tragedy to American diplomacy, it is one that has always been there. Schakenbach Regele’s overarching argument is provocative and well-argued, and her historiographical intervention in the fields of U.S. foreign relations and the new history of capitalism are significant. Her book deserves to be read and engaged with not only by specialists focusing on the early republic but by the larger field of American historians. The stakes for national industrial development were apparent from the beginning of the United States: how to arm and clothe the ragged Continental Army. The answer of the founding generation was “National security capitalism” (164). In essence, this meant putting the fiscal–military state, as explained by Max Edling, into practice.2 Once the federal government received the power to tax, it began a longstanding program of supporting two industries central to collective security: small arms and textiles. These goods were essential for waging war, and the federal government sought their promotion through contracts to domestic manufacturers and a trade policy that aided their export. The economic opportunities opened up by the British crisis (1807–1815) spurred on the development of significant manufacturing in these sectors. Following the peace, the federal government used diplomacy to open up markets in Latin America for these firms to export. The emergence of the American System of Manufacturers likewise helped to spur on an “Industrial Manifest Destiny” as the federal government acquired territory at the point of the bayonet. By the 1850s, the United States was recognized as a world leader in the production of small arms and textiles. This was no mere historical accident, but rather the culmination of two generations of politicians, military officers, and businessmen who aligned their interests in the promotion of American state power. I do have three minor critiques of Manufacturing Advantage. The first is that there are a few times when the terminology obscures more than it reveals. For example, the decision to uncritically refer to this period as a “military-industrial complex” (3) seems out of place. One commonality [End Page 745] of all polities across time and space is collective defense, and the early American republic was no exception. As William H. McNeill pointed out in 1982, the industrialization of war is as old as civilization itself, but only in a “limited sense.”3 While arms and textile manufacturers in the early republic clearly had real political power through their ability to garner state support, there is a world of difference between that and the specific political and economic contexts of...