The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (17 page)

     T
he signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees did not, of course, bring to an end the rivalries of the European Great Powers, or their habit of settling these rivalries through war. But the century and a half of international struggle which occurred after 1660 was different, in some very important respects, from that which had taken place in the preceding hundred years; and, as such, these changes reflected a further stage in the evolution of international politics.

The most significant feature of the Great Power scene after 1660 was the maturing of a genuinely
multipolar
system of European states, each one of which increasingly tended to make decisions about war and peace on the basis of “national interests” rather than for transnational, religious causes. This was not, to be sure, an instant or absolute change: the European states prior to 1660 had certainly maneuvered with their secular interests in mind, and religious prejudice still fueled many international quarrels of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the chief characteristic of the 1519–1659 era—that is, an Austro-Spanish axis of Habsburg powers fighting a coalition of Protestant states, plus France—now disappeared, and was replaced by a much looser system of short-term, shifting alliances. Countries which had been foes in one war were often to find themselves partners in the next, which placed an emphasis upon calculated
Realpolitik
rather than deeply held religious conviction in the determination of policy.

The fluctuations in both diplomacy and war that were natural to this volatile, multipolar system were complicated by something which was not new, but was common to all ages: the rise of certain states and the decline of others. During this century and a half of international rivalry between Louis XIV’s assumption of full authority in France in 1660–1661 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender after Waterloo in 1815, certain leading nations of the previous period (the Ottoman Empire, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden) fell back into the second rank, and Poland was eclipsed altogether. The Austrian Habsburgs, by various
territorial and structural adjustments in their hereditary lands, managed to remain in the first order; and in the north of Germany, Brandenburg-Prussia pulled itself up to that status from unpromising beginnings. In the west, France after 1660 swiftly expanded its military might to become the most powerful of the European states—to many observers, almost as overwhelming as the Habsburg forces had appeared a half-century earlier. France’s capacity to dominate west-central Europe was held in check only by a combination of maritime and continental neighbors during a series of prolonged wars (1689–1697; 1702–1714; 1739–1748; 1756–1763); but it was then refashioned in the Napoleonic era to produce a long line of Gallic military victories which were brought to an end only by a coalition of four other Great Powers. Even in its defeat in 1815, France remained one of the leading states. Between it in the west and the two Germanic countries of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire in the east, therefore, a crude trilateral equilibrium slowly emerged within the European core as the eighteenth century unfolded.

But the really significant alterations in the Great Power system during that century occurred on the
flanks
of Europe, and even farther afield. Certain of the western European states steadily converted their small, precarious enclaves in the tropics into much more extensive domains, especially in India but also in the East Indies, southern Africa, and as far away as Australia. The most successful of these colonizing nations was Britain, which, domestically “stabilized” after James II was replaced by William and Mary in 1688, steadily fulfilled its Elizabethan potential as the greatest of the European maritime empires. Even its loss of control over the prosperous North American colonies in the 1770s—from which there emerged an independent United States of formidable defensive strength and considerable economic power—only temporarily checked this growth of British global influence. Equally remarkable were the achievements of the Russian state, which expanded eastward and southward, across the steppes of Asia, throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, although sited on the western and eastern margins of Europe, both Britain and Russia had an interest in the fate of the center—with Britain being involved in German affairs because of its dynastic links to Hanover (following George I’s accession in 1714) and Russia being determined to have the chief voice in the fate of neighboring Poland. More generally, the governments in London and St. Petersburg wanted a balance of power on the European continent, and were willing to intervene repeatedly in order to secure an equilibrium which accorded with their interests. In other words, the European states system was becoming one of
five
Great Powers—France, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, Britain, and Russia—as well as lesser countries like Savoy and declining states such as Spain.
¹

Why was it that those five Powers in particular—while obviously not possessing exactly the same strengths—were able to remain in (or to enter) the “major league” of states? Purely military explanations are not going to get us very far. It is hard to believe, for example, that the rise and fall of Great Powers in this period was caused chiefly by changes in military and naval technology, such as might benefit one country more than another.
*
There were, of course, many small-scale improvements in weaponry: the flintlock rifle (with ring bayonet) eliminated the pikeman from the battlefield; artillery became much more mobile, especially after the newer types designed by Gribeauval in France during the 1760s; and the stubby, shorter-ranged naval gun known as the carronade (first built by the Carrón Company, of Scotland, in the late 1770s) enhanced the destructive power of warships. There were also improvements in tactical thought and, in the background, steady increases in population and in agricultural output which would permit the organization of far larger military units (the division; the corps) and their easier sustenance upon rich farmlands by the end of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that Wellington’s army in 1815 was not significantly different from Marlborough’s in 1710, nor Nelson’s fleet much more advanced technologically than that which had faced Louis XIV’s warships.
²

Indeed, the most significant changes occurring in the military and naval fields during the eighteenth century were probably in
organization
, because of the enhanced activity of the state. The exemplar of this shift was undoubtedly the France of Louis XIV (1661–1715), where ministers such as Colbert, Le Tellier, and others were intent upon increasing the king’s powers at home as well as his glories abroad. The creation of a French war ministry, with intendants checking upon the financing, supply, and organization of troops while Martinet as inspector general imposed new standards of training and discipline; the erection of barracks, hospitals, parade grounds, and depots of every sort on land, to sustain the Sun King’s enormous army, together with the creation of a centrally organized, enormous fleet at sea—all this forced the other powers to follow suit, if they did not wish to be eclipsed. The monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state is clearly a central part of the story of “nation-building”; and the process was a reciprocal one, since the enhanced authority and resources of the state in turn gave to their armed forces a degree of
permanence
which had often not existed a century earlier. Not only were there “professional,” “standing” armies and “royal” navies, but there was also a much more developed infrastructure of war academies, barracks, ship-repair yards, and the like, with administrators to run them.
Power was now
national
power, whether expressed through the enlightened despotisms of eastern Europe, the parliamentary controls of Britain, or the later demagogic forces of revolutionary France.
³
On the other hand, such organizational improvements could be swiftly copied by other states (the most dramatic example being Peter the Great’s transformation of Russia’s army in the space of a couple of decades after 1698), and by themselves provided no guarantee of maintaining a country’s Great Power position.

Much more important than any of these strictly military developments in explaining the relative position occupied by the Great Powers in the years 1660–1815 were two other factors,
finance
and
geography
. Taken together—for the two elements frequently interacted—it is possible to gain some larger sense of what at first sight appears as a bewildering pattern of successes and failures produced by the many wars of this period.

The importance of finance and of a productive economic base which created revenues for the state was already clear to Renaissance princes, as the
previous chapter
has illustrated. The rise of the
ancien régime
monarchies of the eighteenth century, with their large military establishments and fleets of warships, simply increased the government’s need to nurture the economy and to create financial institutions which could raise and manage the monies concerned.
⁴
Moreover, like the First World War, conflicts such as the seven major Anglo-French wars fought between 1689 and 1815 were struggles of endurance. Victory therefore went to the Power—or better, since both Britain and France usually had allies, to the Great Power coalition—with the greater capacity to maintain credit and to keep on raising supplies. The mere fact that these were
coalition
wars increased their duration, since a belligerent whose resources were fading would look to a more powerful ally for loans and reinforcements in order to keep itself in the fight. Given such expensive and exhausting conflicts, what each side desperately required was—to use the old aphorism—“money, money, and yet more money.” It was this need which formed the background to what has been termed the “financial revolution” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
⁵
when certain western European states evolved a relatively sophisticated system of banking and credit in order to pay for their wars.

There was, it is true, a second and nonmilitary reason for the financial changes of this time. That was the chronic shortage of specie, particularly in the years before the gold discoveries in Portuguese Brazil in 1693. The more European commerce with the Orient developed
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the greater the outflow of silver to cover the trade imbalances, causing merchants and dealers everywhere complain of the scarcity of coin. In addition, the steady increases in European commerce, especially in essential products such as cloth and naval stores, together with the tendency for the seasonal fairs of medieval Europe to be replaced by permanent centers of exchange, led to a growing regularity and predictability of financial settlements and thus to the greater use of bills of exchange and notes of credit. In Amsterdam especially, but also in London, Lyons, Frankfurt, and other cities, there arose a whole cluster of moneylenders, commodity dealers, goldsmiths (who often dealt in loans), bill merchants, and jobbers in the shares of the growing number of joint-stock companies. Adopting banking practices which were already in evidence in Renaissance Italy, these individuals and financial houses steadily created a structure of national and international credit to underpin the early modern world economy.

Nevertheless, by far the largest and most sustained boost to the “financial revolution” in Europe was given by war. If the difference between the financial burdens of the age of the Philip II and that of Napoleon was one of degree, it still was remarkable enough. The cost of a sixteenth-century war could be measured in millions of pounds; by the late-seventeenth century, it had risen to
tens
of millions of pounds; and at the close of the Napoleonic War the outgoings of the major combatants occasionally reached a hundred million pounds
a year
. Whether these prolonged and frequent clashes between the Great Powers, when translated into economic terms, were more of a benefit to than a brake upon the commercial and industrial rise of the West can never be satisfactorily resolved. The answer depends, to a great extent, upon whether one is trying to assess the
absolute
growth of a country as opposed to its
relative
prosperity and strength before and after a lengthy conflict.
⁶
What is clear is that even the most thriving and “modern” of the eighteenth-century states could not immediately pay for the wars of this period out of their ordinary revenue. Moreover, vast rises in taxes, even if the machinery existed to collect them, could well provoke domestic unrest, which all regimes feared—especially when facing foreign challengers at the same time.

Consequently, the only way a government could finance a war adequately was by borrowing: by selling bonds and offices, or better, negotiable long-term stock paying interest to all who advanced monies to the state. Assured of an inflow of funds, officials could then authorize payments to army contractors, provision merchants, shipbuilders, and the armed services themselves. In many respects, this two-way system of raising and
simultaneously
spending vast sums of money acted like a bellows, fanning the development of western capitalism and of the nation-state itself.