Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century

Download Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019108672X
Total Pages : 507 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century by : Rafael Torres Sánchez

Download or read book Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century written by Rafael Torres Sánchez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191086711
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century by : Rafael Torres Sánchez

Download or read book Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century written by Rafael Torres Sánchez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats

Download Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004700854
Total Pages : 537 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats by :

Download or read book Officers, Entrepreneurs, Career Migrants, and Diplomats written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents

Download The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100058593X
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents by : Pepijn Brandon

Download or read book The Early Modern State: Drivers, Beneficiaries and Discontents written by Pepijn Brandon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650–1750

Download Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650–1750 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228020611
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (28 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650–1750 by : Matthew Neufeld

Download or read book Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650–1750 written by Matthew Neufeld and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Wood, Trade, and Spanish Naval Power (c.1740-1795)

Download Wood, Trade, and Spanish Naval Power (c.1740-1795) PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004689648
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (46 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Wood, Trade, and Spanish Naval Power (c.1740-1795) by : Rafał B. Reichert

Download or read book Wood, Trade, and Spanish Naval Power (c.1740-1795) written by Rafał B. Reichert and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download Britannia's Auxiliaries PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192536141
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Britannia's Auxiliaries by : Stephen Conway

Download or read book Britannia's Auxiliaries written by Stephen Conway and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies

Download Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000588173
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies by : Steven O’Connor

Download or read book Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies written by Steven O’Connor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Logistics

Download Logistics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Pen and Sword Military
ISBN 13 : 1399006029
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (99 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Logistics by : Jeremy Black

Download or read book Logistics written by Jeremy Black and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-10-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Sailors, Statesmen and the Implementation of Naval Strategy

Download Sailors, Statesmen and the Implementation of Naval Strategy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1837651205
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (376 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sailors, Statesmen and the Implementation of Naval Strategy by : Agustín Guimerá

Download or read book Sailors, Statesmen and the Implementation of Naval Strategy written by Agustín Guimerá and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the varied relationship between political leaders and naval experts, from the 16th to 21st centuries The shaping of national defence strategies is particularly difficult in the case of navies. Few political leaders have naval experience, in contrast to the case of armies where political leaders and army commanders have often shared similar social and professional backgrounds. Bringing together historical examples from Britain, the United States, Spain and France, the book provides insights into this key relationship.The authors highlight factors which have made for successful relationships between political leaders and naval experts, showing how changing circumstances have affected the dialogue and underlines the importance of good exchange of knowledge, expertise and understanding for successful policy making and strategic outcomes. Sea power continues to be crucial in the present world's increasingly unstable geopolitical situation, the mutual exchange of expertise between naval experts and political leaders is as important as ever, and the risk of political 'sea blindness' remains high. This book's historical examples provide good guidance on how to manage the relationship between political leaders and naval experts well.al leaders is as important as ever, and the risk of political 'sea blindness' remains high. This book's historical examples provide good guidance on how to manage the relationship between political leaders and naval experts well.al leaders is as important as ever, and the risk of political 'sea blindness' remains high. This book's historical examples provide good guidance on how to manage the relationship between political leaders and naval experts well.al leaders is as important as ever, and the risk of political 'sea blindness' remains high. This book's historical examples provide good guidance on how to manage the relationship between political leaders and naval experts well.

The War Within

Download The War Within PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319980505
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (199 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The War Within by : Joël Félix

Download or read book The War Within written by Joël Félix and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Sublime Post

Download The Sublime Post PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300280459
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Sublime Post by : Choon Hwee Koh

Download or read book The Sublime Post written by Choon Hwee Koh and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one—including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors—the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert. By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years' War

Download The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years' War PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197622607
Total Pages : 785 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (976 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years' War by : Trevor Burnard

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years' War written by Trevor Burnard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This handbook contains 38 essays that provide up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the globally important Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The volume carefully examines the three major areas of conflict in the war-Europe, South Asia, and the Americas-treating each theater as distinct from each other but often linked in ways that helped create a new geopolitics from the 1760s onward. Chapters trace the causes of the war in the interior of America; outline the triumphs of Britain and Prussia in fierce fighting across Europe; and explain how the British under the East India Company came to play an important role in South Asian politics and commerce. The handbook pays due attention to military conflict but does much more than this. It investigates social, cultural, and intellectual developments in a crucial period of reorientation during the mid-eighteenth century. The handbook is notably diverse in its authorship, with leading scholars on the Seven Years' War from Europe and South Asia as well as Britain and North America, providing perspectives from many areas outside an Anglo-American frame. It treats the Seven Years' War as a world-transformative event: important not only in its own right-in shaping commerce, politics, science, art, demography, religion, and gender during the conflict-but also central to the evolving history of South Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century"--

Merchant Cultures

Download Merchant Cultures PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004506578
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Merchant Cultures by :

Download or read book Merchant Cultures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The way merchants trade, think about business and represent commerce in art forms define merchant culture. The world between 1500 and 1800 encompassed different merchant cultures that stood alone and in contact with others. Culture, power relations and institutions framed similarities and differences and outlined the global outcome of these exchanges.

The Diplomatic Enlightenment

Download The Diplomatic Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004469095
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Diplomatic Enlightenment by : Edward Jones Corredera

Download or read book The Diplomatic Enlightenment written by Edward Jones Corredera and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century Spain drew on the Enlightenment to reconfigure its role in the European balance of power. As its force and its weight declined, Spanish thinkers discouraged war and zealotry and pursued peace and cooperation to reconfigure the international Spanish Empire.

Outsourcing Empire

Download Outsourcing Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691206198
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Outsourcing Empire by : Andrew Phillips

Download or read book Outsourcing Empire written by Andrew Phillips and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.

War, Power and the Economy

Download War, Power and the Economy PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317518233
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis War, Power and the Economy by : A. González Enciso

Download or read book War, Power and the Economy written by A. González Enciso and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War, Power and the Economy contains a comparative history of Great Britain, France and Spain, the three rival empires of the 1700s. It explores how the states prepared for war, what kind of economic means they had, what institutional changes they implemented, and how efficient this was. As such, the book presents the first comparative synthesis aiming to understand the outcome of the global confrontation in the eighteenth century. Faced with the challenge of paying for new and more costly wars, some countries found flexible ways to get more money and better supplies, whereas others did not. The development of freer colonial markets, the increase of consumption and its taxation, the problems of venal administration or the different systems of patronage with contractors, are some of the factors explaining the divergences that were made clear by 1815. This book explores political and economic dimensions of the eighteenth-century European state in order to explain why and how changes in power as an outcome of war depended upon the available means and the way they were obtained and used. The book takes the idea that making war or preparing for it obliged governments to make important changes in their institutions, so that during the eighteenth century the state in many ways formed itself through war efforts. Ultimately, this study aims to show how closely political and military success was entwined with economic interests. This volume is of great interest to those who study economic history, political economy and European history.