Military Entrepreneurs And The Spanish Contractor State In The Eighteenth Century

Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century offers a new approach to the relationship between warfare and state construction. Historians looking at how war funding impinged on state development, and how state growth made wars more significant, have tended to downplay the role of military-provisioning entrepreneurs. Written off as corrupt and selfish, these entrepreneurs jarred with the received view of a rationally growing and modernising state. This volume shows that the state-entrepreneur relationship was much more fluid and constant than previously thought. The state was not able to enforce a top-down military supply policy; at the same time it benefited from the entrepreneurs' collaboration and their shared mercantilist ambitions. The entrepreneurs' mobilisation of military supplies was crucial for extending state authority and helped to knit together national and colonial markets. But this fluid state-entrepreneur relationship gradually became shrouded in privileges and monopolies, not so much ideology driven or imposed by the entrepreneurs but rather as an arrangement exploited by the state to boost its control over them, whittling down middlemen and ensuring the solvency and creditworthiness of the chosen few. This arrangement spiralled into a risky inter-dependence and cramped entrepreneurial competition. Rafael Torres Sánchez furnishes new insights into the role of military entrepreneurs in debates about warfare and state construction.

Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century offers a new approach to the relationship between warfare and state construction. Historians looking at how war funding impinged on state development, and how state growth made wars more significant, have tended to downplay the role of military-provisioning entrepreneurs. Written off as corrupt and selfish, these entrepreneurs jarred with the received view of a rationally growing and modernising state. This volume shows that the state-entrepreneur relationship was much more fluid and constant than previously thought. The state was not able to enforce a top-down military supply policy; at the same time it benefited from the entrepreneurs' collaboration and their shared mercantilist ambitions. The entrepreneurs' mobilisation of military supplies was crucial for extending state authority and helped to knit together national and colonial markets. But this fluid state-entrepreneur relationship gradually became shrouded in privileges and monopolies, not so much ideology driven or imposed by the entrepreneurs but rather as an arrangement exploited by the state to boost its control over them, whittling down middlemen and ensuring the solvency and creditworthiness of the chosen few. This arrangement spiralled into a risky inter-dependence and cramped entrepreneurial competition. Rafael Torres Sanchez furnishes new insights into the role of military entrepreneurs in debates about warfare and state construction.

“Money, money, and more money.” In the eyes of early modern warlords, these were the three essential prerequisites for waging war. The transnational studies presented here describe and explain how belligerent powers did indeed rely on thriving markets where military entrepreneurs provided mercenaries, weapons, money, credit, food, expertise, and other services. In a fresh and comprehensive examination of pre-national military entrepreneurship – its actors, structures and economic logic – this volume shows how readily business relationships for supplying armies in the 17th and 18th centuries crossed territorial and confessional boundaries. By outlining and explicating early modern military entrepreneurial fields of action, this new transnational perspective transcends the limits of national historical approaches to the business of war. Contributors are Astrid Ackermann, John Condren, Jasmina Cornut, Michael Depreter, Sébastien Dupuis, Marian Füssel, Julien Grand, André Holenstein, Katrin Keller, Michael Paul Martoccio, Tim Neu, David Parrott, Alexander Querengässer, Philippe Rogger, Guy Rowlands, Benjamin Ryser, Regula Schmid, and Peter H. Wilson.

In the course of the early modern period, the capacity of European states to raise finances, wage wars, subject their own and far away populations, and exert bureaucratic power over a variety of areas of social life increased dramatically. Nevertheless, these changes were far less absolute and definitive than the literature on the rise of the "modern state" once held. While war pushed the boundaries of the emerging fiscal military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rulers remained highly dependent on negotiations with competing elite groups and the private networks of contractors and financial intermediaries. Attempts to increase control over subjects often resulted in popular resistance, that in their turn set limits to and influenced the direction of the development of state institutions. Written in honour of the leading historian of war and state formation in the early modern Low Countries, Marjolein 't Hart, the chapters gathered in this volume examine the main drivers, beneficiaries and discontents of state formation across and beyond Europe in the early modern period.

From 1650 to 1750 the provision of medical care for injured seamen in the Royal Navy underwent a major transformation, shifting from care provided by civilians in private homes to care at hospitals run by the navy. Early Modern Naval Health Care in England examines the factors responsible for the emergence of centralized naval health care over the course of a century. In 1650 sick and injured Royal Navy sailors were billeted in homes in coastal communities where civilians were paid to look after them. Care work, which involved making meals and feeding patients, administering medicines, washing clothes and bed linens, and shaving and cutting hair, was essential to the recovery of tens of thousands of seamen – and it was done mostly by women. Beginning at the turn of the eighteenth century, naval health care moved to a more centralized system based in hospitals, where the conduct of sailors and care workers could be overseen. A key factor driving this change was the relationships between naval officials and female civilian caregivers, which were often fraught. Yet even with the shift to naval hospital settings, most care for convalescing sailors continued to be provided by women. Early Modern Naval Health Care in England shines a light on the care work that lay behind England’s formidable Royal Navy during the Age of Sail.

By focussing on timber sourcing, this book sheds light on the exploitation of forests in settings outside the Iberian Peninsula, including foreign states in the southern Baltic region and the colonial territory of New Spain between the c.1740-1795. Analysis of contracts, projects, and their implementation by the Spanish crown in the 18th century allow for a better understanding of the position of the Spanish monarchy’s nearly global efforts to sustain its naval commitments in the Atlantic World.

Britannia's Auxiliaries provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many European inputs - financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from outside - through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases. The book explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation by both private interests in the British Empire and by the British state. Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. Many of them became at least partly Anglicized by the experience, and even those who retained their national character usually came under British direction and control. This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain exclusionary empires. In the British case, at least, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests. In this sense, those foreign Europeans who involved themselves in or with the British Empire, whatever their own perspective, acted as Britannia's auxiliaries.

This book showcases new historical research on foreign soldiers, including an overview of the early modern period and numerous case studies which cover the last 175 years and stretch over 5 continents. The last two decades have seen the term ‘foreign fighter’ enter our everyday vocabulary. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian Civil War and the rise and fall of the Islamic State group have sparked public interest in the phenomenon of people choosing to leave their own country and fight in a foreign conflict. Foreign fighters, their origins, motives, activities and potential danger to their home countries have become subjects of debate, attracting contributions from politicians, military personnel, the media, political scientists, legal scholars but to a much lesser extent from historians. The ten essayss in this volume showcase new historical research on foreign military labour. The aim of the volume is to better understand the experiences and challenges faced by both the foreigners and the host country, particularly its armed forces, and to highlight the significance of these trends to the contemporary debate on foreign fighters. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal European Review of History.

This wide-ranging military history examines the vital yet overlooked role of logistics through the global evolution of warfare. An army cannot operate without supplies, yet military researchers and historians often overlook the essential aspect of logistics. In this comprehensive study, Jeremy Black provides an informative yet concise world history of military logistics through the ages. With special focus on key conflicts, Black examines such factors as climate, geography, food supplies, welfare of troops, payment, transport, communications, terrain, and distance. He also considers related factors including government policy, stability, and financial conditions. He covers the sweep of history, from ancient and medieval times to modern eras of industrial warfare, highlighting technological advances from oil and steam to cyber warfare and smart weapons.

The international financial crisis of 2007-08 and the ensuing scandals continue to raise important debates about the role of institutions in maintaining trust and fighting corruption, as well as in sustaining economic growth and political stability in a globalized world. This book proposes to historicize these problems by looking at the ways in which early-modern Europe responded to similar challenges brought about by the rising costs of international warfare in a period marked by the development of commercial capitalism and the rise of fiscal states. Building upon the expertise of a group of fiscal historians who are leaders in their respective fields, ten chapters successively examine how Spain, Britain, France, the Southern Low Countries, the Netherlands, Sweden and Prussia dealt with domestic conflicts arising from the business of war, especially issues of financial profit, fraud and corruption. Through a series of case studies, this volume explores how the various European polities engaged with the transformative effects of warfare on the relationship between private and public interests, paving the way for institutional reforms and transformed ethics.