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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
5. Territorial-Sovereign Identity and the Seven Years’ War
War is diplomacy by other means.
—Clausewitz
America has been conquered in Germany.
—William Pitt the Elder
The Financial revolution and Strategic Consequences
It is less than clear whether the eighteenth-century explosion of financial vehicles owed more to the requirements of nascent merchant capital, to compensate for the scarcity of coin, or to the requirements of the state for the finance of war materiel. It is quite clear, however, from a quick look at some good data available on Britain 1 during the period that both capital and the state were placing rapidly growing demands on the available specie to finance emerging industrial production, and export promotion and growth, and to finance frequent conflicts with other territorial sovereigns.
The scarcity of coin was particularly troublesome to merchants, who had to keep “money in motion” in order to glean profits. In the absence of plentiful specie, their needs for ready capital to finance entrepreneurial trading ventures resulted in expanded use of bills of exchange and notes of credit, and the expansion of somewhat rudimentary banking practices. There is no doubt that these requirements and innovations had a highly salutary effect in the development of a structure of international credit. 2
The data presented in figure 2, for example, indicate that at the dawn of the eighteenth century Britain exported only 3.8 million worth, or 20.6 percent of its gross industrial output of 18.5 million. By 1755, on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, British exports of manufactured products had nearly trebled, to 9.2, or 30.1 percent of a gross industrial output that had grown to 30.4 million. This strongly suggests that Britain was experiencing a booming period of export-led industrial growth and that the demands for financial vehicles to accommodate it would have been intense, even without competition from the increasingly extractive demands of the flourishing and powerful state.
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| Figure 2: Growth of british Exports as Proprtion of Industrial Output 3 |
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| Figure 3: Growth of Eighteenth-century British War Expenditures 4 |
The data presented in figure 3 suggest that the financial demands of the belligerent, eighteenth-century British state on the available pool of capital were similarly intense. British annual expenditures to finance its efforts in the War of Spanish Succession had averaged only around 7 million, rising to almost 9 million annually during the War of Jenkin’s Ear, and the War of Austrian Succession, but had climbed to an impressive 18 million per annum during the Seven Years’ War. Paul Kennedy argues that the standing armies (composed almost entirely of mercenary and foreign troops in the anomalous case of Britain) and large navies “increased the government’s need to nurture the economy and to create financial institutions which could raise and manage the moneys concerned.” Wars were now “struggles of [financial] endurance” and the country that could best maintain its credit to keep the supply of fresh troops and materiel flowing generally won. 5
Good government credit in the financial markets entitled its bearer to more ready credit at lower rates of interest than an adversary with poorer credit. Raising credit to finance military operations was relatively easy in the United Provinces, where merchants were a significant part of the government. In fact, Dutch surplus capital was available to any and all with good credit, and a great deal of eighteenth-century war debt ended up being financed in Amsterdam. The eighteenth-century Dutch masters had begun earning the title of the “nation of shop keepers” that Napoleon was to so contemptuously fling at them early in the next century. For the Dutch, good credit, not religion, ideology or nationality, was the criterion of evaluation in assessing the benefits of providing loans to foreign governments. 6
Kennedy argues that the fates of Britain and France in the emerging contest over colonial possessions in North America, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent provide the “best example of this critical relationship between financial strength and power politics.” 7 Although British industry and technology were not advancing appreciably more rapidly than that of the French during this period, and the French system of taxation was “even less regressive” than that of the British in some ways, Britain had developed some advantages in the realm of finance over, for example, France, which Kennedy asserts enhanced her power in wartime and buttressed political stability, and thus economic growth, in peacetime. 8
There were, for example, no British “tax farmers” to skim off profits from the collection of taxes. The inefficiency of the French tax farming system was a two-fold curse for France. James Riley’s exhaustive study of French finances around the time of the Seven Years’ War indicates that fully 38 percent of taxes collected ended up in private hands without even being recorded as revenues accruing to the Crown. In addition the arrangement was a source of great resentment to the French people, and this resentment made the collection of revenues even more difficult than might have been the case if the people felt that their taxes were fairly assessed and efficiently administered. According to Riley his data:
provide a figure for all the revenues extracted from the populace under the authority of the king: 424.8 million l.t. According to this source, the taxpayers paid 162.4 million in 1752 that did not reach the king. Even the aggregate tax figure was considerably below what many people believed, for ‘l’opinion vulgaire’ held that the taxes totaled 600 million (and therefore that some 338 million did not reach the king). 9
To add to these difficulties, the French state had developed no system of national accounting, and the Bourbon monarchy, in its profligate absolutist disdain for frugality, had ignored chronic and severe deficits for decades. It had levied heavy taxes on commerce quite “inequitably” and “arbitrarily” and the sale of offices had no doubt diverted capital from private commerce, while the commercial monopolies granted by the Crown for revenues had erected severe disincentives to entrepreneurial enterprise. 10 As a result of its spending patterns and poor repayment record, the French government had acquired a quite poor credit rating in the Amsterdam credit markets relative to Britain, and thus paid much higher rates of interest than did Britain to secure foreign loans. Kennedy asserts that the French paid roughly double the rates that the British had to pay, and thus accrued roughly double Britain’s interest payments on an equivalent debt. 11 Riley notes that in 1759, as the war continued, “subscriptions on royal loans had slowed, which is to say that lenders had stopped advancing money at the yields offered.” 12 Thus in the midst of its great war with Britain the French government was forced to offer higher yields with the result of “a rise of 40 percent in the cost to the government of financing loans.” 13
Britain, on the other hand, had avoided not only the inefficiencies of tax farming, but also an oppressive French system of internal tolls and other disincentives to commerce. Britain also enjoyed the institutional advantage of having created a central bank, the Bank of England, which had been around since the late seventeenth century and permitted the control of the money supply, which it could increase throughout the banking system to meet the rising needs of commerce and government for specie, and issue paper money to further obviate shortages of coin. Even more important, British obligations were guaranteed by the power of Parliament to raise additional revenues. The security implicit in these arrangements resulted in better British credit, and lower rates of interest to the government as secure British obligations were increasingly attractive to nervous foreign investors. 14
Another advantage Britain held in holding down high interest debt relative to France was that the British aristocracy (and oligarchy) allowed itself to be taxed, unlike its French and Prussian counterparts. Woloch notes that “[t]he English land tax was levied on the chief source of a gentleman’s income: the rent he collected on his land. In wartime it rose temporarily to four shillings per pound of assessed valuation” such that “the English landed [and ruling] class probably paid the heaviest taxes in Europe.” 15 One obvious result was that the British had an incentive to avoid running up high interest debt while the French aristocracy, and particularly the French monarchy, did not. This is interesting as a study in the variation in territorial-sovereign identity. Both the French Bourbon monarchy and the British Whig Oligarchy had good reasons, stemming from the particulars of the internal dimensions of their territorial sovereignty, to regard the wealth of their countries as their own wealth.
The exemption of the French aristocracy from the burdens of both taxation and decisionmaking and the absolutist stature of the Bourbon monarchy, however, encouraged the latter to view the resources of the country as both its own and as essentially limitless. The British Whig Oligarchy, however, had paid some of the taxes that they levied from their own pockets, and had thus acquired very personal experience that relieved them of such naïveté. Thus, as a detailed study of the British policy of subsidizing the armed forces of French enemies on the continent during the Seven Years’ War demonstrates, the British Parliament rigorously scrutinized and hotly debated every proposal for every subsidy and other expenditure throughout the war. Neither did the government carry every proposal. 16 Each man voting on each spending proposal did so with the understanding that some of the money that he was allocating would have to be paid from his own pockets, and that this burden would be proportional to the expenditures he approved. The extension of territorial-sovereign identity in the British case to an active oligarchy liable to a share in the costs of empire—an identity that I argue had, conversely, not been internalized by the passive sycophants arranged ornamentally and impotently in the Bourbon court—had instilled in the British ruling class a conception that their personal interests and finances were bound up with those of the state. The Bourbon monarchy had experienced state finance only as a beneficiary. It lived in profligacy and encouraged the dependent aristocracy to do likewise. If money became scarce, it could be borrowed. The interest would be paid by the peasantry.
The eighteenth-century financial revolution, and the British mastery of it relative to adversaries, was to have enormous strategic consequences for British military success in the coming contest for empire. The French inability to mobilize financial resources as efficiently as could Britain was to strongly contribute to her losses of her North American and Indian colonial possessions and, as we shall also see, to the crisis and instability that was to topple the monarchy and assist in the transition from French territorial-sovereign identity to French national-sovereign identity by the end of the century. Significantly, variations of the institutional manifestations of the internal dimensions of territorial-sovereign identity that Britain and France had shared throughout most of the eighteenth century had been mirrored in a variation in the notion of interest among British and French elites. An important result of these variations were the aforementioned consequences for their respective abilities to leverage the financial revolution for the mobilization of strategic resources.
The Seven Years’ War
The question of the sources of the Seven Years’ War has been and remains a topic of debate among historians. It is well outside the scope of this book to join that debate. The purpose of Part II of this book has been to outline the causal significance of territorial-sovereign identity for the patterns of eighteenth-century European international politics adequately to foster a useful comparison with the patterns consistent with the later development of national-sovereign identity. This section will attempt to hold to that purpose, yet I will not avoid offering an explanation for the origins of the war as they pertain to my theses. My explanation is, in short, that the war’s origins, scope, terms of engagement, and terms of disengagement were in large measure artifacts of the unintended consequences of the territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests of the belligerents. I am hopeful that the meaning of this assertion will become clearer as I develop the following analysis.
North American Colonial Pressures for War
Certainly the major proximate cause of the war was the conflicting imperial ambitions of Great Britain and France in North America. As the conflict began, Britain controlled the lion’s share of the North American eastern seaboard from its Acadian border at the southern end of the Bay of Fundy in the north, to Georgia’s colonial border with Spanish Florida in the south. British colonial penetration into the continent had extended north to encompass the source of the St. John River, west to Lake Champlain in New York, west to the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania, and west of the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia and the Carolinas. French colonial penetration had spread both east and west of the great St. Lawrence and resulted, as one traveled southwest along it, in the settlements of Quebec and Montreal, on to Ft. Frontenac at its joining with Lake Ontario, south from the St. Lawrence to Crown Point and Ticonderoga on the west shore of Lake Champlain (with British expansion halted at the east shore).
From Lake Erie the French had accessed a tributary of the Allegheny from whence they had traveled to establish upon it Ft. Duquesne which threatened to halt the westward expansion of the British Pennsylvania colony. Worse from the British perspective, was that from their modest foothold on the Mississippi delta at New Orleans, the French had traveled hundreds of miles north up the Mississippi to establish Ft. de Chartres, and Ft. François on the banks of the Ohio, which lay due west of Virginia. Ft. Miamis near the south bank of Lake Michigan, and Ft. St. Marie at the junctions of Lake Superior and Lake Huron completed what clearly appeared to British eyes as a French attempt to subdivide the continent at the expense of further British westward expansion. 17
The 1753 establishment of Ft. Duquesne, and the subsequent aggressive French behavior in attempting to clear British settlers and traders from the headwaters of the Ohio, was particularly incendiary in escalating the colonial competition to military competition in the North American periphery. Commercial and mercantilist, not just geographic or peripheral strategic considerations, were brought into play by this French action against these British traders, particularly because, as Julian Corbett reminds us:
these same traders were mostly agents of the English Ohio Company, which was engaged in opening up a trade route to the great lakes, and its principal shareholders were the magnates of Virginia and Maryland, who had a concession of the Indian trade from the Crown. 18
This resulted in the famous expedition of the Virginia militia to attempt to expel the French, led by Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington, which met disaster at Ft. Necessity. Corbett marks the start of the Seven Years’ War with Newcastle’s appraisal of the failure of Washington’s expedition. 19 This is likely not the best date from which to mark the start of the war, which was as yet undeclared, particularly as Corbett himself points out that Washington’s mission was little more than a peripheral reprisal, involving few or no regular British troops, and was far from being regarded as a act of war in either London or Paris. As Corbett himself suggests, just a few pages later in his narrative:
the practice of reprisal was not yet obsolete. It still formed a debatable march-land within which the frontier between peace and war existed, but could never be traced. There were innocent forms of reprisal which were clearly distinguishable from war....Such were the seizure of vessels illegally fishing, or the seizure of vessels carrying contraband or breaking a blockade....But we have lost what in the middle of the eighteenth century was still recognized. Between such innocent forms of reprisal as those mentioned and actual war there were still other forms rising in intensity up to a state of general reprisal which was scarcely if at all distinguishable from full hostility. It was therefore natural for a statesman of the eighteenth century to draw no hard and fast line between diplomacy and strategy. For him every turn of hostilities presented itself diplomatically, and every diplomatic move as an aspect of strategy. 20
Corbett’s analysis reminds us of the extent to which eighteenth-century diplomacy and strategy were the games of elite professionals, wholly inaccessible to society at large. The insulated manner in which they were conducted was a characteristic, practical manifestation of territorial-sovereign identity. We can see Morgenthau’s “reactionary utopia” as territorial-sovereign identity-in-action. If Clausewitz could blithely assert, with regard to war on the continent, that it was simply “diplomacy by other means,” with what concern would the eighteenth-century statesman view war in the periphery? The sovereignty of the mother country had, to be certain, been extended to the periphery through colonial occupation. But as I have suggested, following Luard, this extension of British sovereignty over the North American periphery was instrumental for the mother country, a means of assuring monopolies of trade and flows of coin and credit to the mother country. This extension of British sovereignty over the North American periphery was not constitutive of British territorial-sovereign identity, at least in the eyes of the mother country. The collective identity of Great Britain in 1754, in the eyes of its European subjects, encompassed the union of England, Wales, and Scotland (and later Ireland, through simple annexation, at the turn of the nineteenth century). 21 It did not encompass the North American colonies.
It is important to discern that the British extension of British sovereignty with regard to these colonies was, so far as the British Crown and government were concerned, an extension of sovereignty over, not an extension of sovereignty to the territory of these colonies. Thus British colonial “citizenship” was, proportionally, very much a “second class” citizenship. The realization of this curtailed franchise among many of the inhabitants of these colonies later in the eighteenth century was manifested to them with particular force by the Crown’s consistent assertion of its right to tax them as subjects of the British Empire while consistently refusing to allow them representation in the British parliament. Both Hans Kohn and, in a similar account, Liah Greenfeld, suggest that this treatment undermined the self-identification of the British colonials with the British state, and fostered the creation of a uniquely American collective identity. 22 The consequences of this differential exercise of eighteenth-century British territorial-sovereignty, and the belligerent colonial reaction to it upon the construction of an American national identity, are still celebrated in the United States on the fourth day of every July.
The European “Diplomatic revolution” and Unsettled Scores
As Europe prepared for the Seven Years’ War it was still fully in the hands of European territorial sovereigns. As I suggested in chapter 4, the Bourbon&-;Hapsburg rivalry which had dominated European international relations from the Westphalian settlement through the close of the War of Spanish Succession had begun to give way to a more multipolar arrangement. The issues surrounding the realignment about to occur in Europe were led by the Franco-British competition in the periphery, and the Austrian vendetta against Prussia over the loss of Silesia in 1740. This action by Friedrich the Great had roughly doubled the territory of Prussia, created a “Great Power” to upset Austrian hegemony over the German states, and enraged the Hapsburg dynasty. The Prussian acquisition had also upset Russia’s ambitions in central Europe. We should also consider the importance of the personal caprice of territorial-sovereign monarchs in the equation. The Russian Czarina, Elizabeth, clearly despised Friedrich II of Prussia as an individual, which provided venom to the potion of dynastic ambition and more than soured the relationship between Berlin and St. Petersburg. 23
As Britain and France squared off over control of territory in the colonial periphery Britain had begun to cast about the continent in search of allies there. Dutch fear of a French neighbor, which had clearly recovered its strength so many years after the Treaty of Utrecht had formalized the demise of the last French bid for continental hegemony, had placed the previous British arrangements with the Dutch in question. Prussia had been hostile to Britain since 1753 due to an unresolved maritime dispute. Moreover, the existing British defensive alliance with Russia was due to expire in 1757. Apprehending the dangerous isolation to which these problems threatened to consign them as they contemplated war with France, the British monarch and government instituted a frenetically active diplomacy in 1755 in order to correct this isolation.
The Hanoverian succession of 1714 had dealt Britain another misfortune. As war with France for empire in America loomed, the reigning British monarch, George II, was simultaneously Elector of Hanover on the continent. In the event of continental hostilities, little Hanover was vulnerable to being overrun either by France from the west, or by Prussia from the east. So long as George was attached to his electorate, royal pressure for the provision of the defense of Hanover was to be a factor in every decision taken by Newcastle, and later by Pitt, in the conduct of British foreign policy. Unfortunately for Newcastle and for Pitt, George was very much attached to Hanover, as his sovereignty over it provided him with a great deal of personal income and enhanced his status as a player in the politics of Central Europe and the flagging Holy Roman Empire. Of course this dual-sovereignty of a monarch over, in this case, both English- and German-speaking territories separated by geography, language, culture, and history is no longer possible in the national-sovereign era, for reasons that will be treated at length later in this work. Yet such an arrangement was quite unremarkable in the eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign system, and, I will argue, had causal significance not only for the conduct of British diplomacy, but also for the British conduct of the war. The causal significance of such an institutional fact is beyond the notice of realist and structural neorealist systems theoretical explanations which would generally emphasize arguments like this one:
The Seven Years’ War—whatever its immediate causes—represents a deeper structural crisis within the global political system, generated by the need to readjust relations among the “core states” in the system in line with intervening changes in power distributions and in a more general sense, to resolve prewar ambiguities in the order and status hierarchy of the system itself. 24
It is never made clear in such arguments why these “immediate causes” are of no interest or significance. Neither is it ever really made clear what these “system needs” are, or at what point they become dire. Schweizer cites, as his inspiration for this analysis, the “power transition theories” of Organski and Kugler, and the “cycles of hegemonic war” thesis of Robert Gilpin that I have referenced earlier in this work, among other theorists such as George Modelski and Immanuel Wallerstein. 25 It is not my purpose, nor do I have time or space in this chapter, to critique at length the myriad functional-to-structural, liberal realist-to-Marxist theories of the causes of war with reference to this single eighteenth-century case. Neither is it clear what might be gained by such an endeavor. My purpose with this section is merely to identify the significance of territorial-sovereign identity for the origins, conduct, and terms of termination of the Seven Years’ War for later comparison with these behaviors and patterns of politics in the national-sovereign era. It is worth pausing to note, however, that it is puzzling to see a historian acquire the structural realist passion for the reification of functional-structural teleology in this context, and to generate an assertion in which the designation of actors is abandoned in place of the agency of a disembodied “system” that is in “crisis.” Social systems are transformed and replaced when they cease to be reproduced by social actors, but they are intentionally transformed by the agency of these actors. Similarly, alliance systems do break down, but in response to specific decisions taken by specific social actors.
The passage quoted above is a very strange argument when the prose is disaggregated, as I have just done, in order to clarify what is being said. I have by contrast been careful to point out that France and especially Britain, not “the system,” needed to adjust relations among core states. Britain needed to do so because France was challenging her in the periphery and threatening to isolate her on the continent. Britain and France “needed” to fight the Seven Years’ War because they were, respectively, eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign mercantilist oligarchies and autocracies, and they were playing the game that they had been created to play. Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria needed “to resolve prewar ambiguities in the order and status hierarchy” because Friedrich had played the game well at their expense and they consequently despised and resented him. The “system needed” the legitimate functioning of mercantilist, oligarchic, and autocratic territorial-sovereigns in order to continue to exist in its eighteenth-century form. It ceased to exist when these did. Failure to recognize that the functioning of a system is dependent on the variable “needs,” motivations, interests, and agency of social actors, which must be designated in the ontological construction of a system theory, is the greatest error of structural realist teleologies of this form.
Let us return to the European theater of the war for further illustration. The discussion to come will deepen my critique of structural realist system theory by demonstrating that without correction it cannot adequately explain the notion of interest that informs the practice even of territorial-sovereign alliance formation. I will demonstrate that commitments to particular territories cannot be explained by structural realist theories without incorporating a more rigorous analysis of the prevailing, historically contingent, structure of sovereign identities and interests.
The Defense of Hanover and Issues of Territorial Sovereignty
The devastating seventeenth-century English Civil War that had toppled the Stuarts and created the monarchical vacancy that the Hanoverian succession was designed to fill had also resulted in a distrust of a large standing army that had remained to the eve of the Seven Years’ War. It was a measure of the value Britain placed in further westward expansion in North America, at the expense of France, when Parliament voted 1,000,000 on March 22, 1755 to enhance the army and navy. 26 It was generally felt in Britain that her forces were adequate to deal with the French on the North American continent, and on the seas approaching and surrounding it, as the British had established “a clear working superiority” 27 over the French in naval forces. The relatively diminutive size of Britain’s standing army, and the lack of enthusiasm for strongly enhancing it, however, suggested to the British that they would need to fight the French on the continent with the forces of others. This could be accomplished only by alliance diplomacy, or by the payment of subsidies, or with a combination of these strategies. 28
The payment of subsidies implied either subsidizing the armed forces of allies engaged in hostilities for their own casus belli, or payment of cash to the sovereign of troops who would serve under British colors and direction for a period of time specified by treaty. Such an arrangement was essentially a contract for mercenary troops, whatever the arrangement might be called. In significant contrast with the national-sovereign era, there were, during the period of the Seven Years’ War, a large number of states who seemed to specialize in these services, and whose sovereigns relied upon the revenues from such contracts to make ends meet. This arrangement was entirely consistent with a mercantilist, territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests, in which military and economic resources could be fungibly and interchangeably applied through the logic of the principles of raison d’état. When these principles were later replaced by those deriving from a national-sovereign structure of identities and interests, then mercenary armies attached to states and procurable through the payment of subsidies to their “sovereign” disappeared. This arrangement was to become unsustainable in a system legitimated by the principle of national-self-determination.
Eldon’s 1938 study of the British policy of subsidies to the continent during the Seven Years’ War provides an appendix that details the annual British subsidies to no less than ten such states. According to this data, Britain provided subsidies to, or contracted troops from Mentz, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Cassel, Hanover, Prussia, Brunswick, and Portugal. 29 Britain also subsidized Russia for a time early in the war. Among these states, Russia and Prussia, at least, were belligerents in their own right, and should not be seen merely as provenders of mercenaries in order to glean state revenues. Russia, of course, fought on the side of France. Eldon demonstrates that the diplomatic record provides evidence that Saxony and Bavaria, however, were highly dependent upon subsidy money to maintain themselves as states. 30 Both of these states approached Britain for such arrangements. Saxony was initially engaged for the defense of Hanover (to quell the fears of George) with the understanding that Britain would defend Saxony if attacked, presumably by Prussia. 31
Clearly Saxony’s armed forces did not exist solely for the purpose of defending Saxon territory, a finding somewhat at odds with the assumptions of the structural realist position, which assures us that the system is an anarchic, self-help affair, and that states maintain military capabilities primarily to ensure their own survival. Clearly the territorial-sovereign system was at least somewhat tolerant of functional differentiation among the units. 32 Bavaria was not to be so engaged by Britain during the war as the Bavarian Elector demurred on renewal of an existing subsidy arrangement with Britain until he could ascertain the sentiments of Austria, 33 whose immanent presence and preponderance of force no doubt weighed heavily on his mind.
Parliamentary debate on the issue of the defense of Hanover had come about indirectly through debate on a measure to provide a subsidy to Hanover to pay and provision 8,000 Hanoverian troops for its defense. That this measure would be advanced by the government, men who were appointed by and beholden to the king, could not have been a surprise for the Whig oligarchy assembled in parliament. Such a measure allowed George II to ensure the defense of his Electorate with troops, paid with British money, and to ensure his own revenues in the bargain. Pitt, then still in opposition, included in his arguments against the measure the fascinating dilemma that the government’s emphasis of the defense of Hanover demonstrated that treaties made with other powers for the defense of Hanover had been made in the interests of the Electorate of Hanover, namely George II, not in the interest of Britain. Many felt that the interests of Britain would be best served by surrendering Hanover until the end of the war, and demanding it back as a condition of peace. 34
Eldon has captured the gist of the debate on the pros and cons of a British subsidy policy on the continent in his study of the pamphlets circulating in Britain in the summer and fall of 1755 that debated the issue. They are worth pausing to discuss, not only as they recount an important debate whose outcome would strongly influence further British conduct of the war, but also because they provide a fascinating glimpse at the notion of interest of the eighteenth-century mercantilist oligarchy of Britain.
Those opposed to the subsidies argued that Britain could never gain enough on the continent to compensate for the cost of the subsidies. They argued that the European costs would starve British military forces in America. They asked why Britain should hire German princes to defend their own lands. They argued that France would not, in any case, overrun those countries on the continent with which Britain was engaged in active trade, and thus saw no benefit to the trade of the country whatever from a continental war. They argued that continental wars had always impoverished Britain in the past. This was just a play into French hands and that mercenary troops were, in any case, untrustworthy. 35
Also gleaned from the pamphlets are the arguments of those favoring the subsidy arrangements. The pro-subsidy forces argued that subsidies were the best and cheapest way of diverting France, and conversely the most expensive for France. They argued that the Russian subsidy would prevent Prussian aggression, by cowing Prussia and thus neutralizing Friedrich. They argued that German subsidies would permit their continental fight to take the offensive, and would allow Britain to focus on the destruction of the French navy and commercial shipping, and thus to defend the colonies. They argued that it was better to pay in British money than in British lives, and that the destruction of French shipping alone could not destroy French trade due to the inevitable persistence of land routes and neutral carriers. They argued that there could be no markets for re-exports from British colonies if France overran Europe, and that the maintenance of an English army on the continent would be much more expensive than the provision of mercenary troops. They also argued that an English militia would draw men from economic pursuits, that Britain’s real wealth lay in the pursuits of industry, trade and commerce, and thus that it would be wasteful to turn productive workers into soldiers. 36
The fact that these points were debated, and hotly debated, is highly suggestive in itself, even though many of these arguments are highly problematic upon further examination. Lacking the mercantilist blinders of these eighteenth-century oligarchs, we might find, from our national-sovereign perspective, serious flaws with the premises of most of these arguments. What is particularly noteworthy is that nearly all of them, both pro and con, are predicated on the assumptions and notions of state interest that were consistent with the legitimating principles of mercantilist, oligarchic, or absolutist, eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign identity. In this Weltanschauung, as we have seen, international economic competition is a zero-sum game. What helps you must hurt your opponent. Men, money, commodities, trade, armed force are all fungibly interchangeable. 37 Colonies are valuable as they promote trade and gain wealth. More of this is better, thus more colonial lands are war objectives. Continental allies with whom one trades minimally are expendable. British subjects are too valuable for the commodity value of their labor to risk losing to French cannonade.
These people thought like capitalists, not like patriots, let alone nationalists. This is not to suggest that there was no “love of country” in eighteenth-century Britain or France, but that this sentiment did not appear to significantly influence either decisions to go to war, or war objectives, or the conduct of war, or even who would do the fighting. These decisions, at least in the British case, appear to have been more strongly influenced by love of profit than of country. Here is, in many dimensions, the model of the state-as-firm in the competitive marketplace that inspires many theories of rational choice in the literature on international relations. Debates such as these certainly give advocates of these theories something to hang their hats on. But these theories fail to mention the extent to which the character and issues of such debates change when the notion of state (or later, national) interest changes. Such a transformation was to begin, before the end of the eighteenth century, in the British notion of state interest with the humiliating loss of the North American colonies that provided much of the impetus for the commencement of hostilities, and with the delegitimation of mercantilist thought that followed the development of liberal economic theory of the later Scottish Enlightenment. Then, mercantilism might have been abandoned in favor of liberalism, but a territorial-sovereign oligarchic structure of identities and interests had remained. But during the opening gambits of the Seven Years’ War, the debate was settled when Parliament voted 301 to 105 in December of 1755 to retain the pledge of assistance to Hanover with the lame assertion that British “honor” was at stake in Hanover. George had his way. Russian and Hessian subsidy treaties were also approved that month. 38
An active British diplomacy had also turned toward Berlin and Vienna in the hope that if defensive alliances could be arranged with both of these, France would wisely eschew continental hostilities and be forced to confine these to the sea and North America, where Britain had a strong advantage in forces deployed and deployable. Prussia had not been a natural British ally, but Friedrich’s seizure of Silesia from Austria in 1740 had transformed Prussia into a considerable continental power, and Friedrich was still anxious merely to maintain and consolidate Prussian control over it by 1755. Neither is it inconceivable that dynastic loyalties played some role in this British-Prussian diplomacy when we realize that George II was Friedrich’s uncle. 39 By the end of November 1755 Britain had promised to renew its guarantee of Prussian control of Silesia and to settle Prussia’s grievance of the ships Britain had seized from Prussia in the previous war if only Prussia would guarantee Hanover’s neutrality in any future conflict. The result of this diplomacy was the Convention of Westminster, signed January 16, 1756, in which each party pledged peace and friendship. 40 This alliance poisoned British diplomacy with Austria, however, and the Austrian Empress, intent on recovering Silesia from Friedrich, “refused point-blank to subscribe to a treaty in which Prussia was a party.” 41
The Convention of Westminster, concluded in large measure to secure Prussian defense of George’s Hanover, triggered the rest of the European realignment that has become known as the “diplomatic revolution.” The hasty arrangement of the convention, and the fact that it was concluded without consultation with other interested parties, namely France, Russia, and Austria, strongly irritated these and set in motion the diplomacy that led to their own alliance. It was not lost on the court in St. Petersburg that the British subsidy arrangement with Russia that had just been signed in December was starkly contradicted by the Convention as it “provided for Russians coming into Germany [sic], the former for keeping them out.” 42 The Austrian vendetta regarding Prussian control of Silesia assured that the Hapsburgs had at last found a common cause with the Bourbons, in their capacities as territorial sovereigns, that their common Catholicism had never been able to foster when, in their capacities as purely dynastic sovereigns, Catholic Hapsburgs had squared off against the Catholic Valois and Bourbon kings of France in centuries past. 43
This rapprochement was cemented in a Franco-Austrian alliance with the signing of the First Treaty of Versailles on May 1, 1756. Britain declared war against France two weeks later, Russia promised assistance to Austria in the event the latter was attacked by Prussia, and Franco-Russian rapprochement strengthened with an exchange of ministers in May. By June, Friedrich’s strategic-political position was quite precarious. Certain of the imminence of hostilities he decided on a preemptive move to strengthen his strategic-military position and invaded Saxony against British wishes and advice to the contrary. Russia mobilized in response and promised assistance to France and Austria. Newcastle then suspended British subsidy payments to Russia lest they be used to fight Friedrich. 44
This series of events suggests that it is less illuminating than it would appear to suggest that “whatever its immediate causes...[the war]...represents a deeper structural crisis in the global political system.” 45 The British requirement to provide for the defense of Hanover resulted directly and solely from the dual sovereignty of George II over Britain and Hanover. The Prussian alliance was clearly designed primarily to assure Prussian defense of Hanover. France was to be belligerent in any case. Since neither Russia nor Austria were situated geographically to provide a credible guarantee of Hanover’s security, they were not approached in this regard. Only Prussia possessed the geographic proximity and military capability to either defend Hanover as a British ally from a powerful and belligerent France, or to seize it as an enemy of Britain. In the absence of the requirement to defend Hanover, and the Prussian alliance that predominantly secured this defense, British diplomacy would have been free to pursue, and much more likely to secure, Austrian and Russian alliances that might well have prevented any French action on the continent.
It is therefore quite reasonable to argue that one of the major “immediate” causes of the continental theater of the war was the unique character of George II’s dual territorial sovereignty over Britain and Hanover. It is not at all clear from the diplomatic record that either Britain or France perceived any structural crisis they needed to resolve on the European continent or that hostilities initiated in the North American periphery would have migrated to a European theater at all without the British anxiety over the status of Hanover.
The European alliance realignment that we now call the “diplomatic revolution” occurred only after the signing of the Convention of Westminster, and in reaction to it. The realignment was due not to any parsimonious, disembodied, structural determinism latent within the “system,” but to Austria’s having an axe to grind with Prussia, and to Russia’s ambitions in central Europe—ambitions that could be much more easily achieved after the demise of Prussia. The European theater of the Seven Years’ War was thus engaged largely because the whims and caprice of eighteenth-century territorial sovereigns led to decisions (George’s insistence on the defense of Hanover at all costs, Maria Theresa’s insistence on the recovery of Silesia at all costs, Friedrich’s anxiety to leave a Prussia augmented by Silesia to his heir, Czarina Elizabeth’s loathing of Friedrich) that had unintended consequences. Opposition to the will of the king in Hanoverian England could have cost the average ambitious Whig Oligarch dearly in patronage and position, 46 and the whims and words of Maria Theresa, Friedrich, and Elizabeth were law in their lands.
In the conduct of the War the defense of Hanover appeared to take precedence over many other objectives as well, including sound military and political strategy. With William Pitt the Elder, the earlier opponent of continental subsidies, in charge of the government in 1758, George II again displayed the division of his loyalties between Britain and Hanover. Friedrich was now receiving British subsidies to the tune of £670,000 sterling per year. After the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Kolin in June of 1758, and the subsequent Prussian evacuation of Bohemia (in which much of Friedrich’s mercenary army had disappeared in mass desertions), Friedrich had gathered his strength and prepared to resume the offensive. Pitt wanted to send Friedrich a strong letter of British support of this intention, but George wanted the forces under Friedrich’s command in Hanover excluded from the campaign under the lame pretense that this would be impossible “due to his [George’s] obligation to accept an Austrian agreement regarding Hanover’s neutrality.” 47 After leaving George’s presence Pitt expressed the opinion that a separate peace for Hanover would be an intolerable breach of faith with Friedrich and ordered Newcastle “to give Prussia the strongest assurance of support” counter to George’s wishes. It was a rare act of courage in an eighteenth-century statesman to issue an order directly in contravention of the wishes of the monarch, but it was not rare in Pitt, who “did not find it easy to co-operate with others...[and for whom]...politics was a matter of absolutes.” 48
George had evidently moved privately to obtain a separate peace for Hanover in any case, perhaps leery of a direct clash on the matter with the formidable Pitt, whom he needed as Britain grappled with war on two continents. In any event, later in the year, George’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, concluded the Convention of Closterseven and a separate peace for Hanover, acting on the full powers of his father. The temerity of George when confronted with this breach of faith was remarkable. As Eldon recounts it: “The king [George] insisted falsely that the convention had been signed contrary to his orders.” 49 Not even the equally audacious Pitt had a stomach for questioning the king’s veracity, but Pitt, in his capacity as head of the government, insisted upon the abrogation of the treaty in vehement terms, and refused to allow the exchequer to send any more funds to Hanover until the troops there were again in motion against France. 50 Later, in the summer of 1759, George declared that his Hanoverian revenues were only sufficient to pay his 42,000 Hanoverian troops, and that consequently Britain would have to pay all other expenses associated with the defense of Hanover. An angry Pitt refused and instead spoke of terminating all continental operations. 51
Conquering America in Germany?
In reading such accounts, it is both fascinating and terrible for those of us reared in the era of national sovereignty to watch an eighteenth-century statesman be required to negotiate with, and to outmaneuver his monarch in order to ensure that the latter conducts foreign policy in a manner consistent with the “interests” and security of the state whose throne he has mounted. A conflict in the “interests” of the sovereign qua king of Britain and the empire, and the interests of the sovereign qua Elector of Hanover, could be acknowledge and debated, as Pitt had done while still in opposition. Ultimately, however, precisely because the interests of the king qua dynast and the interests of the king qua territorial sovereign could not be decoupled, the “interests” of George in both capacities had to be accommodated, and reconciled with those of the British Empire, as Pitt had done when he left the opposition and agreed to lead George’s government. The same William Pitt the Elder who had so vehemently opposed the defense of Hanover, and the expense of the system of continental subsidies designed to ensure it, was now called upon to defend the subsidy policy as expenses mounted with the progress of the war. As Schweizer himself suggests, though he does not grasp that the assertion damages his structural realist explanation of the origins of the war:
Although Englishmen often resented the union of Hanover and Britain, abandoning Hanover was strategically [?] and politically [much more to the point] unfeasible....the impossibility of severing the connection insured that Hanover’s interests would be considered by British administrations, and, on occasion, would predominate. It also meant that Britain was obliged to make provisions for Hanover’s defense and thus for continental war, by subsidies to allies, through a British expeditionary force or both. 52
It is difficult to argue, in the face of this realization, that British “sovereignty” was so firmly lodged with the people or with the Parliament as Britons then and now might wish to believe. George may have had a Parliament and the wishes and interests of British oligarchs to contend with, but his arrangement of the defense of Hanover throughout the war, in the teeth of voices and evidence that suggested this policy could not be easily reconciled with the seemingly objective political and strategic interests of the British Empire, demonstrates that George II was an eighteenth-century territorial sovereign in his own right. Even though it would appear he acted to protect personal and dynastic interests, the principle of raison d’état still legitimated his actions to the extent that he successfully extended his sovereignty over, and to, German Hanover. When it became clear that he insisted upon this extension, the British notion of “state interest” adjusted to incorporate the necessity of the defense of Hanover. As this is the case, and as this example serves to help illustrate, it becomes quite problematic to speak of the “objective interests” of the state in a trans-historical or an ahistorical fashion. 53 It is difficult to see how any rational-choice model, let alone structural neorealism, can account for this. One suggestion that emerges from this discussion is that the interests of whatever institutional form of collective action which forms the units that populate a given historical system are not static, not “an object of rational determination,” 54 or objectively given even within the time span of a single military conflict, let alone across the time frame in which that “system” is dominant, or across “systems” that I argue are constituted and reconstituted by transformations in the prevailing forms of collective identity.
This British conduct, and especially Pitt’s conduct to the end of the war, illustrate that British war objectives had certainly expanded from colonial territorial aggrandizement in the periphery at least to encompass extracting Britain from the European theater of the conflict without surrendering or endangering Hanover, and without undue cost in lives or money. Money may have won out over lives near the end when, as British finances became strained, Pitt acceded to the introduction of British troops to the “German war” by May 1760, upon learning the huge cost in money that Friedrich demanded in exchange for allowing Britain to conclude a separate peace with France. 55 Further, by the close of 1759, in the North American periphery, the strategic points of Niagara, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Quebec had all fallen to British forces and Pitt had begun to realize, contrary to his earlier opinion, the real benefits that the British free hand in the North American theater, occasioned by the continental subsidy policy, had gained for Britain at the expense of France.
Other British war objectives and “interests” had remained constant. As Montreal fell in September of 1760, the British conquest of North America was moving to mopping-up operations and Pitt and Newcastle had determined to continue the war only to obtain the most favorable (and lucrative) settlement from France. Pitt was now kept quite busy defending the “German war” before the restless Parliament that was the first to convene with a new king, George III, on the throne. Prussia’s price in money for a separate British peace with France remained too high, however, and Russian diplomacy under Elizabeth insisted on Russian acquisition of Prussian territory in return for a Russian cessation of hostilities. 56 At this point Pitt provided the final demonstration of his extreme mercantilist proclivities as head of the British government when Spain, hoping to bolster its own colonial empire, concluded an alliance with France in mid-August of 1761. Spain’s miscalculation was enormous and its timing disastrous. Pitt was anxious to use the alliance as a pretext to declare war on Spain to allow the British navy to capture Spanish treasure fleets. 57 Spanish gold from America would alleviate severely strained British finances and defray the long-term expenses of the unexpectedly expensive war for Britain. Outvoted on this measure, he resigned October 5, 1761, and consigned himself to defending, as a private member of Parliament, the continental war “for having diverted the energies of France. “America,” he said, “has been conquered in Germany.” 58
Irrespective of the merits of this claim, Parliament was not consoled by the fact that America had been conquered so long as the war raged on in Europe at a ruinous cost, principally in British money. Fortunately for British coffers, for Prussian territorial integrity, and for Pitt’s reputation the irascible Russian Czarina Elizabeth died in January of the following year, “when Frederick II’s military fortunes were at their lowest point.” She was succeeded by the Pro-Prussian Peter III, who offered Prussia peace on terms so favorable that Austria and France, in recognition that they could now hope only for a return to the status quo ante bellum at best, were forced to sue for peace. 59 The 1763 Peace of Paris left Great Britain in control of the North American continent east of the Mississippi River, the Indian subcontinent, and a number of strategic islands. 60
Thus this eighteenth-century, transcontinental war ended with Britain overwhelmingly the big winner. 61 Had America been conquered in “Germany”? Pitt has long been lionized by historians as the visionary who saw that the strategic division of French energies between two continents and an ocean, made possible by the system of subsidies to the continent, had left British forces free to ride herd over the Atlantic and Caribbean and the North American continent, in spite of the evidence that he clearly held the opposite opinion while in opposition and vacillated while in office. 62 Pitt may well have been, and probably was, convinced of the efficacy of this policy at some point, most likely in the annus mirabilis of 1759, when French colonies fell to British forces around the globe. More important than the answer to this question, in my view, is the uniquely territorial-sovereign notion of state interest that animated the subsidy policy. To illuminate this notion I will conclude this chapter, appropriately, with a citation from the last paragraph of Eldon’s study of the subsidy policy.
Whether we take the word of the [British] pamphleteer who wrote: “if you take your people from their work, and make soldiers of militia men...you will certainly be the cause of its (money) going abroad, never to return again,” or whether we quote the ministerial doctrine that “we must be merchants while we are soldiers,”...we can see operating even in war time the belief that it is better to work for one’s country than to die for it. 63
These sentiments, particularly the notion that it is better to work and produce for your country than to die for it, are quintessential tenants of the notion of interest that animated the eighteenth-century, mercantilist, territorial-sovereign state system. This last sentiment, as we shall see, was to become quintessentially alien to the national-sovereign collective identity that was soon to break upon America and Western Europe, and from there to Central and Eastern Europe and the globe.
Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise
The Seven Years’ War provides a highly effective illustration of the causal significance of the territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests for the security conduct of territorial-sovereign states. First, variations in the institutional manifestations of territorial-sovereign identity strongly influenced the manner in which France and Britain engaged in strategic financing of their respective military efforts. French absolutist tax-farming put France at a significant disadvantage relative to British oligarchic arrangements which proved more fiscally efficient and rewarded Britain with more favorable terms of credit. Variations in territorial-sovereign identity were also mirrored in the respective notions of interests of French and British state elites, encouraging thrift on the part of British elites who were, in part, spending their own resources to conduct the war. French defeat was attended by a financial crisis resulting from its crushing war debt. This debt was to play no small role, when compounded with the debt acquired by France to assist the American provincials in detaching themselves from Britain, in bringing down the French absolutist regime within thirty years of the close of the war.
I have argued that that scope, conduct, terms of engagement, and terms of disengagement of belligerents during the Seven Years’ War are inexplicable without recourse to analysis of the manner in which the interests of the belligerents were structured by their territorial-sovereign social identities. Analysis of George’s dual territorial sovereignty over Britain and Hanover is required to explain the scope of the war and the diplomatic revolution that demolished a classical European system of alliances which had stood for centuries as more consistent with the balancing requirements of European actors. The choice of alliance partners and the theaters of conflict are otherwise inexplicable. They are equally inexplicable without analysis of the consequences for alliance formation of the whims and caprices of the territorial-sovereign monarchs who were to become belligerents. No argument predicated on assumptions of rational instrumental decisionmaking on the part of belligerents can explain why a continental European theater of the war should have been opened, unless the interests of actors are properly understood to be structured by historically contingent territorial-sovereign social identities.
Similar analysis is required to apprehend the terms of engagement of the war. On the part of the British, the peripheral war was fought primarily with the British navy and provincial troops over whom the British Crown had extended sovereignty, but to whom the Crown had not awarded full citizenship. The British oligarchy reasoned like capitalists, not like patriots, evincing evidence of their love of profit rather than love of country in decisionmaking regarding whether or not to conduct the war, for what objectives, and with whom. The state-as-firm model is quite nearly reified in this portrait of mercantilist, oligarchic, territorial-sovereign decisionmaking. But the notion of state interests that emerges from this portrait is a construction of a very specific structure of social identities and theories that exogenize this notion of interests by assumption to all actors in quite different systems consequently severely limit their potential explanatory utility.
I have argued that similar analysis is required to apprehend the conduct of the war. On the British side, the primacy of the defense of Hanover was continuously elevated over other, more likely genuinely strategic priorities, in decisionmaking regarding the application of strategic resources—namely troops and subsidy funds for more troops. In the person of one territorial-sovereign individual and his system-legitimated proprietary sovereign interests, we are witnesses to the spectacle of a conflict of interests between the sovereign and the rational, objective, strategic and pecuniary interests of the nation. This dichotomy was to become an impossible contradiction in terms in the national-sovereign system that followed. In the system structured by territorial-sovereign identities and interests, however, the division had to be accommodated and reconciled. The British notion of state interests had to adjust to accommodate the proprietary and quite territorial interests of the sovereign’s second territorial-sovereignty. Thus we observe that it is ineffectual to theorize about the objective interests of state or nation in a transhistorical or ahistorical fashion—a fashion in which socially constructed and empirically verifiable notions of state or national interests are disregarded in some accounts in favor of a priori assumptions.
Lastly, I have argued that similar analysis is required to apprehend the terms of disengagement from the war. It is certainly true that France had suffered serious military defeats in the periphery and might well have been financially exhausted in the last year of the war. It is also certainly true that the death of Elizabeth and the accession of a capriciously pro-Prussian Peter to the Russian throne had left France bereft of continental allies with the resources to effectively assist France in a successful conclusion of the continental theater of the war.
Endnotes
Note 1: Earlier in this work I have sometimes referred to “England” rather than “Great Britain” or “Britain.” In the remainder of this work I will generally be referring to events that occurred after the union of England with Scotland, from which time it is more appropriate to speak of “Britain,” rather than “England.” As this naming convention changed in history, it will now also change in my analytic narrative. Back.
Note 2: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 77 Back.
Note 3: I have presented graphically data taken from Homes & Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy, See Table L.1:“Industrial output, exports and home consumption in England and Wales, 1700–1785,” p. 388. Back.
Note 4: Also a graphical representation of data taken from Homes & Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy, See Table I.2:“The armed forces and the cost of war, 1689–1783,” p. 374. Back.
Note 5: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 76. Back.
Note 9: Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France, p. 56. Back.
Note 10: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 82–83. Back.
Note 12: Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France, p. 90. Back.
Note 13: Ibid. p. 91. For a study of the post-war consequences of the massive French debt, see the following reprint of the 1944 Columbia University Press study of Paul H. Beik, A Judgment of the Old Regime: Being a survey by the Parlement of Province of French economic and fiscal politics at the close of the Seven Years War (New York: 1967). Back.
Note 14: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 80–81. Back.
Note 15: Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, p. 85. Back.
Note 16: See Carl William Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy Towards the Continent During the Seven Years’ War, Ph. D. Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1938. Back.
Note 17: See, for example, Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, Vol. 1, AMS Press reprint of Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1918, Reprinted 1973 by AMS Press, New York, pp. 112–15, and Homes & Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy, pp. 252–57. Back.
Note 18: Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, p. 14. Back.
Note 19: Ibid. p. 15. Note that the Duke of Newcastle headed the government of George II at the start of the Seven Year’s War in a position very much like the modern office of Prime Minister, which did not yet then exist. Back.
Note 21: See Daniel J. O’Neil, “Enclave Nation-Building: The Irish Experience,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 15 (3) (Fall 1987): 1–25. Back.
Note 22: See Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of its Origins and Background, (New York: Collier Books, 1967), pp. 263–325, and Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 399–491. Back.
Note 23: See, for example, Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, p. 41. Back.
Note 24: Karl Schweizer, “The Seven Years’ War: A System Perspective,” in Jeremy Black (ed.), The Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), p. 242. Back.
Note 25: Ibid. p. 255, fn 4. Back.
Note 26: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy , p. 11. Back.
Note 27: Corbett, England and the Seven Years’ War, Vol. I, p. 23. Back.
Note 28: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 111–13. Back.
Note 29: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy , See the appendix, “Table II - Subsidy Payments,” p. 160. Back.
Note 32: For an extended critique of the Waltzian version of structure in this context see Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory.” Schroeder points out that states in this period indeed “specialized” functionally within the system in many ways at odds with the assumptions of the structural realist account. Back.
Note 35: Ibid. pp. 51–52. Back.
Note 36: Ibid. pp. 53–54. Back.
Note 37: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 113. Back.
Note 38: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy , pp. 55–57. Back.
Note 43: It is interesting to consider the extent to which the French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century had promoted this conflict among the dynastic sovereigns. Decades of the sixteenth century had, for France, been filled with the calamity of several Wars of Religion. The long-term peace and toleration they hoped would follow were ended by the treacherous actions of the crown in sponsoring the assassination of Protestant notables gathered for a wedding in the royal household (in the 1572 St. Bartholomew Massacre). The religious wars were renewed. At their end, the death of the last Valois king left the Bourbon, Calvinist prince, Henri de Navarre, in line as the leading contender for the French crown under Salic law. Henri’s accession as Henry IV was followed in short order by his reconversion to Catholicism (essential if he expected to reign securely over a country that was still overwhelmingly Catholic). His reign did make a full French religious reconciliation possible, however, and official state intolerance of Protestantism finally ended with the promulgation of the 1598 Edict of Nantes. The conflict, and its termination at the accession of a man of pragmatic religious conduct, set a pattern of French pragmatism on the matter of alignment in accordance with confessional factors. See Greengrass, The French Reformation, and Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State: 1440–1610. Back.
Note 44: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy, pp. 73–78. Back.
Note 45: Schwiezer, “The Seven Years’ War: A System Perspective,” p. 242. Back.
Note 46: Dickinson, “Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 43. Back.
Note 47: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy , p. 100. Back.
Note 48: Black, “Chatham Revisited,” p. 38. Back.
Note 49: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy, p. 101. Back.
Note 52: Schweizer, “The Seven Years War, A System Perspective,” p. 248. Back.
Note 53: It is equally problematic, contra Marx, to speak of the “objective interests” of a socioeconomic class, and for similar reasons, but this is a topic for another book. Back.
Note 54: Aron, Peace and War, p. 285. Back.
Note 55: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy, pp. 131–32. Back.
Note 56: Ibid. pp. 137–39. Back.
Note 59: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 114. Back.
Note 60: Corbett, England and the Seven Years’ War, Vol. II, Corbett provides the English language text of the treaty in the appendix to his second volume, pp. 377–90. Back.
Note 61: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 114. Back.
Note 62: Ibid. See his comments on p. 98. Back.
Note 63: Eldon, England’s Subsidy Policy, p. 160. Back.
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