Aaa Mobilising LIBRO

1 Mobilising Resources for War: Britain and Spain at Work During the Early Modern Period Edited by H.V. Bowen and A. González Enciso 2 Foreword by Patrick Karl O’Brien (Centennial Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics) The theme addressed by this volume of essays (mobilizing resources for war) is an integral and potentially illuminating part of the master narrative of European history concerned with state formation. Simply defined, state formation refers to a very long run evolutionary process that all states passed through before they can be represented in as “modern” in the Weberian sense of that contentious term. “Weberian” serves as a handy adjective or label for a state that exercises sovereignty over a well-defined territory and is in command of sufficient revenue, information, and organizational capacities to sustain external security, maintain internal order, promote economic growth, and provide acceptable levels of social welfare for the subjects of a particular country. When, where, and how the confederated towns, regions, estates, countries and nations of Western Europe formulated and sustained the constitutional frameworks, established fiscal bases, and constructed the institutions and organizations required to operate as Weberian states has been difficult to date and remains extremely difficult to explain. Theory imported from political science, sociology and latterly from economics is only moderately helpful to historians endeavouring to analyse the long run complex and highly diverse process of state formation that dominates the history of Western Europe. The beginnings of state formation can be traced back to the functions and powers over territories and populations exercised by hereditary kings who had emerged in the Middle Ages from the turmoil of dynastic rivalries among warrior magnates for the status of primus inter pares. Acting as “monarchs” recognized as possessing that status they deployed their own considerable resources and coordinated military forces under the control of other powerful feudal “lords” with fiefdoms within their kingdoms for: the “collective defence” of “confederated” territories; for warfare in the form of “collaborative attacks” on rival confederations and for “cooperation” to maintain internal stability, hierarchy, property rights, and preserve a status quo within Europe’s diverse array of kingdoms and republics. 3 Over several centuries of violent transition from a multiplicity of feudal confederations to federated kingdoms moving over time towards Weberian states, Europe’s hereditary sovereigns and oligarchies attempted to centralize and to realize the economies of scale, scope and specialization embodied in effectively organized, increasingly capital-intensive armies and navies for defensive and aggressive warfare. Geopolitical imperatives driven by dynastic rivalry as well as advances in the technologies and organization associated with the delivery of violence, impelled monarchs and oligarchies everywhere to progress from acting as coordinators of the military and naval power available within frontiers, towards positions of command over the coercive force required for the defence of vulnerable territories, national wealth, domestic fiscal bases, and, increasingly after 1415, colonies overseas. This familiar “trajectory” towards centralized sovereign states, which proceeded gradually and falteringly along several routes at different speeds across the continent is a history marked by varying degrees of internal opposition from estates, aristocracies, urban oligarchies, churches and other networks of power located within kingdoms and republics. Constrained by traditional and embedded centrifugal forces, rulers of Europe’s polities constructed several types of state that first became viable and stable, but only gradually sovereign enough to govern efficiently within the defined geopolitical spaces, frontiers and domestic political contexts in which they happened to be located. Acting within the constraints of constitutionally unstable realms and republics and a highly competitive geopolitical order, monarchies, oligarchies and power elites “struggled” to fund and construct states that could protect and govern their territories and populations. They simultaneously coerced and co-opted rival claimants to local powers and taxes (ancient kingdoms, estates, territorial magnates, ecclesiastical authorities, cities, towns and rebellious peasants) into compliance with their missions to centralize and exercise sovereignty. Co-option, which is now perceived to have been as significant as coercion in sustaining Europe’s ancien regimes, involved nominally absolute monarchs and powerful oligarchies in persistent conflict and complex political settlements with aristocracies and other elites over: powers to assess, collect and profit from taxation; over patronage to appoint to senior positions at court and in armies, navies, churches, judiciaries and other public institutions of Europe’s realms and republics, and also over (the issue addressed by research embodied in these essays), namely, the formation, recruitment and 4 management of the departments of state responsible for the execution of monarchical or oligarchical decisions in general and the organizations responsible for mobilizing resources for warfare in particular. In analysing and comparing the diverse historical trajectories along which Europe’s competing polities evolved into Weberian states political history has concentrated to an excessive degree upon teleological taxonomies of precocious or protracted transitions to freedom and democracy. Nevertheless, and despite the preoccupations of philosophers, political scientists and historians since the Enlightenment with constitutional forms of rule, those forms have never been clearly correlated with the security of kingdoms and republics from external aggression, the quality of internal order, functional fiscal systems, social welfare, property rights and other institutions conducive for economic growth. There were connexions between the constitutional and legal forms of states and their capacities to deliver public goods. Nevertheless, historians in touch with the diverse political, geographical and economic realities and constraints surrounding rulers everywhere in early modern Europe are less inclined to ascribe their successes and failures to the malign influence of pretensions to absolutism compared to stylized representations of Parliamentary forms of governance. They prefer (as this volume exemplifies) to depart from traditional preoccupations with political forms and the machinations of national elites and to concentrate the next generation of research upon substance – namely upon a programme designed to understand and (by way of comparisons) to appraise the efficiencies of the methods and organizational forms developed by European states to deliver public goods. Given that all European states accorded the highest priority to policies for external security, imperial expansion, and to mercantilist gains from colonization and commerce overseas, investigations into how Spain and Britain mobilized resources for warfare promises to deliver more insights into how (and how efficiently) two rival states operated in this key area of concern than another ideologically charged and spurious binary contrast between Spanish despotism and English democracy. Early modern states established and managed large scale complex organizations in order to preserve their security against external aggression and to wage warfare for mercantilist and imperialist gains. During the long transition to sovereignty scope for functional levels of efficiency from the administrative and organizational capacities at the disposal of every conceivable type of political regime 5 and polity (imperial, parliamentary, republican, monarchical, absolutist, and democratic alike) remained severely constrained and difficult to develop. Comparative studies of complex organizations performing similar functions will eventually move European history on from theoretical and taxonomical speculations about the forms of states towards an understanding of how they constructed and maintained institutions for warfare, welfare, and economic growth. 6 Preface In recent years considerable scholarly attention has been focused upon the war-driven development of European states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, some historians have attributed the long-run success of Britain to the emergence of a ‘fiscal-military state’ whose essential characteristics were shaped by the increasingly heavy demands of war. This has generated much debate about the role, function, form, and strength of the British state, and as such the model provided by the fiscal-military state offers a good point of departure for further discussion of the various ways in which European states endeavoured to organise financial, material, and human resources for war during lengthy and recurring periods of warfare. This collection of essays draws upon papers presented at an international symposium hosted by the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain in September 2004. The essays explore further the relationship between war and the development of the state by examining in detail how Britain and Spain gathered, organised, and deployed resources in support of recurring and extended national war efforts that were becoming increasingly global in their scope and form. In particular, the essays explore the multifarious relationships

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