| Summary: | Studies of state formation and state-building in early modern Britain have almost
overwhelmingly focussed on how domestic resources were mobilised, taking for
granted that the state existed practically in a state of autarky that mirrored the
‘glorious isolation’ of the nineteenth century. Examining the role that foreign
manpower and money played between 1688 and 1815 in this paradigmatic ‘fiscal- military state’ suggests that British state formation can instead be understood in this
period as a partnership between the state and what has recently been
conceptualised as a European ‘fiscal-military system’, a series of cosmopolitan
networks and hubs that moved military resources around Europe. The British state
was structurally dependent upon the foreign manpower and money it supplied in
order to maintain its paradoxical combination of powerful wartime mobilisation, low
peacetime taxation and the preservation of British political liberties. Easy access to
these resources enabled ministers to retain a bare-bones military and naval
establishments in peacetime and then, in wartime, to ‘surge’ the state by using off-
the-shelf foreign military labour to hold the line while British forces were recruited.
Relying upon cheap foreign money enabled the British state to hold down taxation
and expensive borrowing. Aſter 1780 however, British ministers began to lose access
to the European fiscal-military system and were forced to look to domestic
resources, which generated damaging political conflicts within Britain. The transition
to a fiscal-military state in ‘glorious autarky’ therefore occurred long aſter the
existing historiography supposes, and largely out of necessity rather than by choice.
|
|---|