The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740-1815

Hamish Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893530
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740-1815 examines a key development in modern European history: the origins and emergence of a competitive state system.

H.M. Scott demonstrates how the well-known and dramatic events of these decades - the emergence of Russia and Prussia; the three partitions of Poland; the continuing retreat of the Ottoman Empire; the unprecedented territorial expansion of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, halted by the final defeat of Napoleon - were part of a wider process that created the modern great power system, dominated by Europe's five leading states.

Enhanced by maps and a chronology of principal events, this comprehensive and accessible textbook is fully up-to-date in its coverage of recent scholarship. Unlike many other treatments of this period, Scott extends his beyond the French Revolution of 1789 in order to demonstrate how events both before and after this great upheaval merged to produce the central political development in modern European history.

This book addresses the crucial phase in the emergence of the modern international system which, with the subsequent addition of the USA, Japan and Russia, has prevailed until the present day.

CHAPTER 1

The European states in 1740

France

In the mid-eighteenth century France was clearly Europe’s leading state. Though her dominance was less complete than during the later seventeenth century, it was still considerable. It rested upon her abundant demographic and economic resources, far superior to any other single country, together with the ability of the French monarchy to mobilise men, materials and cash from her large population, rich agriculture and buoyant commerce: the contemporary yardsticks for international power. Louis XIV had ruled over three times as many subjects as his Spanish or English counterparts, and while territorial expansion and political consolidation had allowed France’s principal eighteenth-century rivals, Austria and Britain, to catch up, this had merely reduced the substantial French lead. At mid-century France’s population was around 25 million; half a century later it had risen to almost 30 million. This was twice that of Austria and almost three times that of Britain. Only Russia, among Europe’s leading powers, could rival France’s demographic strength during these decades.

The French economy was also strong and vibrant, advancing impressively during the eighteenth century. The grain-growing plains of northern France were especially productive, and peasant agriculture prospered, reflecting the country’s favourable climatic and geographical location. The commercial sector had also flourished, deliberately encouraged by state policy, particularly during the ascendancy of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s celebrated economic and financial minister. Though the decades around 1700 had witnessed a significant economic decline, largely due to the warfare of the period, the return of peace after 1714 had been followed by renewed expansion. This had been especially striking along the western seaboard, which became the most dynamic sector in the economy. By the 1730s commerce was expanding so rapidly, encouraged by favourable government policies, that it appeared that France might soon overtake her British rival as a trading nation.

These abundant resources had made France early modern Europe’s leading power. During the seventeenth century a strengthening of royal government had significantly increased the King’s ability to raise revenues and soldiers, which were then used to enhance France’s international position. Though the tax system had glaring faults, at least to later observers, it provided the ruler with far greater revenues than any other government enjoyed. It has been fashionable during recent decades to question the extent of Louis XIV’s power and to highlight the real and undoubted limitations upon absolute monarchy. At the time, however, the French King’s régime had been the envy of most European rulers, who copied his administration, fiscal system, army, palaces and style of monarchy. During the second half of his long reign, Louis XIV had been almost continuously at war, fighting powerful coalitions in the Nine Years War (1688/89–97) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13/14). France’s survival against considerable odds testified to her intrinsic military and financial strength. During the 1690s the French had fielded around 300,000 men, and raised considerable sums through taxation and borrowing both during this war and its successor. This massive effort had significant and enduring consequences. During the generation after the Spanish Succession conflict, the fiscal and financial pressure had contributed significantly to France’s pacific foreign policy. When Louis XIV died in 1715 the interest-bearing public debt was slightly over 1700 million livres. This figure was increased by a further 700 million livres by the disastrous failure of John Law’s efforts in 1718–20 to introduce a paper currency, reduce the national debt and expand the credit market. By the 1730s, however, the economic expansion under way assisted in a financial recovery, and the national debt had been reduced.

These were among the key achievements of the long ministry of Cardinal Fleury (1726–43), which saw a notable resurgence of French power. The former tutor of the young Louis XV (1715–74), who had succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, Fleury achieved his position through his influence over the teenage king. He retained power through his own skill and the success of his policies. Though he never held the formal title, Fleury was the most politically long-lived and, probably, the most successful first minister of eighteenth-century France, dying in office in his ninetieth year. Subtle and determined, and ruthless when necessary, he followed fundamentally cautious and pacific policies: in many ways he resembled his English counterpart, Sir Robert Walpole (see below, p. 18). Fleury provided stable and effective government, while continuing a rapid and important build-up of the French navy begun in the early 1720s (essential after two decades of damaging neglect) and presiding over a noted commercial and financial recovery. He also restored the Bourbon monarchy’s prestige within France and its diplomatic leadership of Europe.

For the two decades after the peace settlement of 1713–14, France had been eclipsed politically. Economic and demographic decline, partly caused by the extended wars of Louis XIV’s final decades, together with their financial and fiscal legacies, had made peace and recovery essential. The problem of the French succession had been even more important. The extreme youth of Louis XV, born only in 1710, had made a Regency essential and this had lasted until 1723, while the risks to the young King and thus to the French succession posed by childhood illnesses were considerable. Only in 1729, with the birth of a first son to Louis and his Polish wife, Maria Leszczyńska, was the succession secured in the male line. These internal preoccupations had produced a muted and pacific French foreign policy during the later 1710s and 1720s, when Versailles acquiesced in and, partly, supported a period of British ascendancy.

During the 1730s, however, Cardinal Fleury had ended France’s dangerous isolation and had regained the leading European position which French population and resources always justified. This was accomplished more through successful diplomacy, exemplified by French mediation of the Russo–Austrian War with the Ottoman Empire (see below, pp. 21, 23), rather than by military force, though the Cardinal was always prepared to fight when this was essential and involved few risks. France’s recovery was largely accomplished by the so-called War of the Polish Succession (1733–38), in which she successfully attacked a weakened Austria. It was a conflict fought principally in the Rhineland and the Italian peninsula, far from the country which gave it its name: though the fighting did ensure that the Saxon ruler Augustus III (1733–63) succeeded his father on Poland’s throne and in this way consolidated the Russian yoke (see below, p. 28). Fleury’s main objective in this struggle was the duchy of Lorraine on France’s north-eastern frontier. Its duke since 1729, Francis Stephen, was the intended husband of Charles VI’s daughter, Maria Theresa, heir to the vast Habsburg inheritance. France was unwilling to see this border-duchy, a traditional focus of her anxieties, pass to a member of the ruling family of her Austrian adversary. Lorraine in enemy hands endangered France’s eastern frontier and for this reason had been occupied on several occasions, most recently during the War of the Spanish Succession. Military and diplomatic pressure upon Vienna during the War of the Polish Succession forced Francis Stephen to renounce his homeland of Lorraine, receiving in exchange the Italian Grand Duchy of Tuscany, whose Medici dynasty had died out in 1737. He ruled this as a personal possession, and not as part of the sprawling Habsburg Monarchy, and never forgave France for evicting him from his beloved Lorraine. This passed to Stanislas Leszczyński, the father-in-law of Louis XV and also former King of Poland (1704–09); efforts to restore him to the Polish throne during the 1730s had been unsuccessful. Leszczyński’s acquisition of a ruling dignity indirectly strengthened the position of his daughter, the Queen of France: earlier there had been suggestions that, as the child of a monarch without a throne, she was not a suitable bride for Louis XV. When Leszczyński died in 1766, the territory was integrated into the French monarchy.

Fleury’s acquisition of the reversion upon Lorraine further strengthened France’s eastern frontier and so completed the work of her diplomacy since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Seventeenth-century French foreign policy had been dominated by efforts to reduce her strategic vulnerability, with her Habsburg enemy encircling her territory and no defensible frontier. A series of annexations during the second half of the century had closed the ‘gates’ into French territory one by one. Foremost among these gains had been areas of Alsace (1648), Roussillon (1659), Franche-Comté (1679) and Strasbourg (1681), together with a series of small annexations from the Southern Netherlands (1668; 1679), then under Spanish rule. These had created more defensible frontiers, and their value had been enhanced when the master fortress-builder, Marshal Vauban, had fortified them. Louis XIV’s annexations had been successfully defended in the wars of 1688–97 and 1701–14, which had demonstrated that France’s strategic position was far stronger. Her frontiers had hardly been breached during the Spanish Succession conflict and would not be breached again before the French Revolution. Against that, however, eighteenth-century France faced far stronger obstacles beyond her own frontiers to any future expansion, for example, in the Southern Netherlands, now ruled by Austria but with Dutch garrisons in the so-called ‘Barrier’ fortresses, and in Milan, ruled directly from Vienna, than when these areas had been under Spanish sway. This compact territorial position, which contrasted sharply with that of some of her rivals, was a further source of France’s international strength.

That power ultimately rested upon abundant demographic and economic resources, supported by a relatively efficient administrative system; her impressive army, much reduced in size since its seventeenth-century heyday, but still the continent’s leading military force; and her traditions of political leadership, rooted as these were in the age of Louis XIV. In 1757 the Cardinal de Bernis, then France’s foreign minister, would declare that her objective should be to ‘play in Europe that superior role which suits her seniority, dignity and grandeur’. Such ideas would long be influential within France’s military and diplomatic establishment, for whom she was primarily a continental military power whose principal enemy was Austria. This exemplified a wider point about the eighteenth-century states system. It was precedent-conscious and rooted in political traditions which were the product of past events and previous conflicts. Europe’s leading states in 1740 and the relations between them were influenced in important ways by developments during previous decades. In the case of the French monarchy the dominant traditions were anti-Habsburg and therefore continental. During the quarter-century after 1740, however, such assumptions would be seriously challenged by the demands of a world-wide struggle with the rising British state.

Spain

France’s international position had been strengthened by the accession of Louis XIV’s younger grandson to the Spanish throne at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which removed the threat from the south, from across the Pyrenees. Philip V (1700–46) was Spain’s first Bourbon king. He had established his hold over Spain itself during the War of the Spanish Succession, but at the end of this struggle his inheritance from the last Habsburg monarch was partitioned. Madrid lost almost all its haphazard and far-flung empire in Europe, which had been difficult to defend or administer, but retained the far larger possessions overseas. Though the Philippines were an outpost of Spanish commercial imperialism in the Far East, the extensive overseas empire was primarily located in the Caribbean and on the mainland of Central and South America, where only the vast Portuguese colony of Brazil and extensive unsettled areas in the interior were not under Spanish rule. On the North American continent, Florida was a Spanish outpost and the source of tension with the new British colony of Georgia during the 1730s. The economic potential of this vast empire was enormous, though it was never fully realised. Its size alone made the Spanish monarchy potentially a leading European state. Madrid secured trade and, more importantly, income in the form of the royal share of the profits from gold and silver mining. During the first half of the eighteenth century, however, commerce with Spanish America grew only modestly, while the Crown’s income from treasure was usually less than that enjoyed by the last Habsburg King. It was nonetheless significant for the monarchy and was to increase from the later 1740s. The overseas empire, however, imposed heavy costs upon its Bourbon ruler, principally for defence and government, and these mounted as British pressure grew. It proved more and more difficult to protect the theoretical monopoly of trade with the empire from interlopers.

At mid-century, metropolitan Spain contained some nine million inhabitants; by the 1790s this figure would rise to 11.5 million. Her agriculture was more backward and her trade less buoyant than that of her powerful Bourbon neighbour. Philip V’s reign saw a series of reforming initiatives, largely on French models and sometimes implemented by French specialists. The cumbersome Councils through which Habsburg Spain had been governed, and the aristocrats who had dominated them, were eclipsed by a more streamlined central government of secretaries of state and a new administrative nobility. Regional autonomy was reduced, taxation was spread more evenly geographically, while the post of intendant was imported from France, where these administrators had been the loyal representatives of central government in the provinces. After initial failures, the system of intendants was successfully established in 1749. The armed forces were overhauled and, by the 1730s, an army of some 70,000 created, while a respectable navy was built up, principally during the ministry of the experienced and hardworking José Patiño (1726–36), who temporarily disguised the monarchy’s fundamental financial weakness.

The new Bourbon administrative élite provided the impetus behind these policies despite monarchical weakness. Philip V was notably vacillating and ineffective. A victim of mental illness, he was also a slave to sexual and religious excess. For long periods he withdrew from government and refused to meet ministers. During the 1720s and 1730s the resulting vacuum was filled by his Italian second wife, Elisabeth Farnese. Patiño’s dependence upon the Queen, to maintain himself in power, ensured that her dynastic ambitions were adopted by Madrid, thereby weakening Spain’s foreign policy. Farnese believed that her two sons by Philip V, Charles and Philip, would not succeed to the Spanish throne, which would pass to the surviving son of the King’s first marriage, the subsequent Ferdinand VI (1746–59). The Queen was determined to secure ruling titles and incomes for these two children, and looked to her native Italy to find these. During the 1730s Spanish troops fought there, as part of the War of the Polish Succession, and successfully conquered an appanage for her elder son, who became Charles VII (1738–59) of Naples and Sicily (subsequently the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’). During the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) Madrid would devote considerable resources to securing an Italian principality for the younger son, Philip.

The renewed preoccupation with the Mediterranean could be, and was, justified in Madrid as an attempt to recover its traditional position in the Italian peninsula, lost at the end of the Spanish Succession War. Farnese’s dynastic ambitions, however, ensured that Spain did not benefit from the surgery performed at Utrecht during the generation after 1713. Scarce financial and human resources were committed to Italy and not to the overseas empire, which was itself coming under British pressure. Despite the modest improvements brought about by its new élite, Bourbon Spain was a weakened and vulnerable power living uneasily on the substantial trophies of a glorious imperial past. This was at the heart of her fundamental dilemma in foreign policy. Alliance with Bourbon France and rapprochement with Hanoverian Britain each had their attractions and their advocates in Madrid, yet both had obvious drawbacks. During and immediately after the War of the Spanish Succession, the young Philip V had depended upon France’s support and had in effect been a satellite. This had been widely resented, and a deliberate and successful attempt had been made by Madrid to assert its political independence.

Cooperation with Britain, by now Spain’s principal colonial rival, had its attractions. The problem was that the British had conquered Gibraltar and the Mediterranean island of Minorca during the Succession struggle, and had retained them at the peace. Minorca was a particularly important naval base, and London appeared unwilling to return either, as Spain periodically demanded. Succeeding generations of British statesmen, from the Earl of Stanhope to William Pitt the Elder and even the Duke of Bedford were prepared to return either or both of these, provided they secured an appropriate gain in return, but were unable to obtain the price they wanted from Madrid. This was an enduring source of Anglo-Spanish tension and thus a factor promoting a Spanish alignment with France. That was also suggested by dynastic loyalty and by the need for support from the much stronger French monarchy in the colonial confrontation with Britain. Bourbon cooperation, evident in the First Family Compact signed in 1733, was more essential than ever when Spain and Britain went to war in 1739 (see below, pp. 39–44). Yet, throughout the eighteenth century, the undoubted special relationship between the two leading Bourbon monarchies did not exclude periods when Madrid exhibited considerable political independence from France. Spain was never again to be the political satellite she had been during the Succession conflict.

Britain

Britain was the pre-eminent opponent of the Bourbons. She had emerged as a major European state during the wars of 1688–1714, through her leadership of the coalitions against Louis XIV. Central to this was the succession of the Dutch Stadtholder William III to the British thrones after his successful invasion in 1688–89. Britain’s enlarged European role at this period came from William III’s fears of the threat of French hegemony and his determination to employ British resources to defeat this. This brought the ‘British state’ decisively onto the continental stage as a military power as well as a diplomatic and naval one, during two hard-fought wars which set limits to France’s dominance. During this struggle, England, which ruled Wales and Ireland, concluded an incorporating union with Scotland in 1707, creating a ‘British state’ for the first time. It was to be another hundred years before a parliamentary union with Ireland was imposed in 1801. William III’s aims were pursued, after his death in 1702, by the government of Queen Anne (1702–14), and largely accomplished in the settlement which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The Peace of Utrecht provided that the thrones of France and Spain were never to be united in one person, and partitioned the Spanish monarchy, while creating more effective obstacles to French power in the Southern Netherlands and in north Italy. Britain gained Gibraltar and Minorca, and secured the slave contract, the asiento, together with the right to send an annual ship of 500 tons to the fair at Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Panama. The actual territorial gains made at Utrecht were relatively small, but colonial possessions were to be less important sources of Britain’s dominance during the eighteenth century than trading stations, commercial concessions and naval might.

In other ways, too, the wars of 1688–1714 had been crucial for Britain’s spectacular eighteenth-century emergence as a European and world power. During the 1690s she had acquired a modern financial system, as the need to fund William III’s campaigns brought about nothing less than a financial revolution, which owed much to the example of the Dutch Republic. A National Debt (1693) and the Bank of England (1694) were created, and these were underwritten by the parliamentary and constitutional settlement which had followed the 1688–89 revolution. This established the cheap and reliable credit system which financed Britain’s eighteenth-century wars, which was so widely admired on the continent and was one source of her commercial, industrial and political supremacy. Investors could put their funds in government loans, confident that these would be repaid since they were guaranteed by parliament, and both the merchant community and the landed interest invested heavily in government stock. Credit was important to Britain’s war-effort during the eighteenth century. During the Spanish Succession conflict it had provided just over 30 per cent of expenditure, while by the American War this figure rose to 40 per cent. Yet taxation, more than borrowing, financed warfare at this period, as would become particularly clear during the wars of 1792–1815.

Here again, the 1690s had seen a crucial change. In 1692 the Land Tax, a direct charge on landed property, was introduced. During the wars of 1688–1714 it provided most revenue; thereafter its contribution was eclipsed by indirect taxation, in the form of customs dues and, in particular, the Excise. A dramatic expansion of the fiscal bureaucracy facilitated the collection of the revenue and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Author’s acknowledgements
• Dates, distances and place names
• Introduction: Europe’s emerging Great Power System
• 1 The European states in 1740
• 2 The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748
• 3 The Diplomatic Revolution and the origins of the Seven Years War, 1748–1756
• 4 The Seven Years War, 1756–1763
• 5 The eighteenth-century international system
• 6 The transformation of the European System, 1763–1775
• 7 Russian dominance in Eastern Europe, 1775–1795
• 8 The Anglo-Bourbon struggle overseas and in Europe, 1763–1788
• 9 Europe and the French Revolution, 1789–1797
• 10 France’s expansion in Europe, 1797–1807
• 11 Napoleonic Europe, 1807–1815
• Conclusion: The eighteenth-century origins of the nineteenth-century Great Power System
• Chronology of principal events
• Bibliographical essay
• Index