The Sinews of Power
The Sinews of Power did not, however, emerge out of a historiographical vacuum. Instead it drew on an impressive body of work which had, since the 1960s, challenged the existing orthodoxies that viewed eighteenth-century Britain as under-taxed and under-bureaucratised, at least as compared to its continental rivals, notably France but also Prussia. Especially significant was a 1976 comparative study of British and French taxation by Patrick OâBrien and Peter Mathias, which highlighted the relative incidence of taxation in eighteenth-century Britain and France, and OâBrienâs article on the greater per capita weight of British taxation between 1660 and 1815, published almost contemporaneously with The Sinews of Power in the Economic History Review in 1988.2 Together these works helped to reinvigorate the study of the stateâs military and fiscal roles in the emergence of a powerful British imperial state in the eighteenth century.
These were not entirely new historiographical developments, and separate studies had long since made it clear that the state had not been a negligible presence within the British Isles in the eighteenth century. Work on the Customs service by Elizabeth Hoon and the excise and salt offices by Edward Hughes had already identified an extensive and reasonably intensive series of revenue hierarchies.3 P.G.M. Dicksonâs magisterial 1967 study of the âFinancial Revolutionâ between 1688 and 1756 showed that a sophisticated system of public finance operated within and between this world, allowing the British state to raise increasingly large amounts of money, while studies of the British Treasury by Henry Roseveare, Stephen Baxter and J.E.D. Binney revealed bureaucratic elaboration as new structures emerged to take on these new functions.4 Both Geoffrey Holmes and Gerald Aylmer had already identified a wider process of administrative growth that began under the English Republic during the 1650s, and had produced by the 1730s a class of professional and experienced public officials isolated from the immediate dictates of both politics and patronage.5
The same had been observed on the other side of the fiscal-military state, as naval and military officers and men became more permanent and professional than the more temporary forces of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Studies of the navy by John Ehrman and Daniel Baugh had already pointed out that naval infrastructure expanded during the eighteenth century, while other works by David Syrett, Arthur Bowler and Norman Baker had highlighted the considerable increase in both naval and military activity of the British state during the American Revolutionary War.6 Geoffrey Holmes had similarly discussed the processes of professionalisation among naval and military officers from the end of the seventeenth century, as they took on new standards of professional behaviour, education and competency.7 This transformation was made manifest in shifting patterns of behaviour, as officers moved away from a martial culture focussed on personal honour and reputation towards forms of behaviour centred on duty, obligation, restraint and competence. New cultural stereotypes such as Captain Plume in George Farquharâs The Recruiting Officer (1706), who declared that he would not duel to defend his personal honour, but for a new recruit for the Queenâs army âIâll fight knee-deepâ, encapsulated this change.
Although Brewer and OâBrien therefore broke new ground in some respects, this had a disproportionate impact because it had already been prepared. The Sinews of Power, for example, drew heavily on existing studies even as it situated the growth of a bureaucratic excise service squarely within Weberian models of efficient administration, and completed rather than challenged Dicksonâs work on public finance by suggesting that the creation of a firm revenue base had underpinned the extraordinary rise in public borrowing after 1688.8 Thus the importance of The Sinews of Power was that it consolidated an enormous body of existing scholarship that had begun, in a piecemeal fashion, to undermine the foundations of historical orthodoxy, and supplied a simple and relatively robust model that placed them into context. Scattered evidence of administrative development in England â and England was Brewerâs explicit focus â could now be understood as a wider process that began after 1688 and gradually percolated through the fiscal and military components of the British state for the next 90 years, laying the foundations of Britainâs improbable imperial power. Moreover, further chapters emphasised that this had been carried out within the framework of a parliamentary democracy, rather than by imposing these developments upon an unwilling populace. The heavy presence of military officers and financial officials in Parliament demonstrated that the state was under political control, and the infusion of parliamentary authority into increasingly intrusive and demanding state structures provided them with unimpeachable legitimacy.
The Sinews of Power therefore addressed questions that had not always been asked but whose import now seemed obvious, and then offered a clear and convincing model to explain how and why the British fiscal-military state had developed. Its impact on scholarly debate was immediately apparent, and extended across disciplinary boundaries. Economists seeking to build on arguments first developed by Douglass North in the early 1980s about the importance of institutional growth found that both Brewerâs and OâBrienâs work provided an empirical basis for their theoretical arguments and assumptions about England or Britainâs precocious pace of development in the decades after 1688.9 The wide, if qualified, acceptance by historians of Brewerâs thesis could be seen in the contributions to the collective volume edited by Lawrence Stone entitled An Imperial State at War: Britain, 1689â1815, which explored the ramifications of Brewerâs arguments and probed his conclusions further, chronologically, spatially and thematically.10
Significantly An Imperial State at War expanded upon Brewerâs timeframe to include the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, thereby addressing the emphasis placed by some reviewers of The Sinews of Power on the decision to conclude in 1783.11 This date marked not just the conclusion of the American War but also the creation of numerous parliamentary commissions of enquiry whose reports queried the efficiency of the British fiscal-military state, including several key aspects of the excise service. Despite these and other caveats, including the lack of attention devoted to war, Brewerâs book has set the terms of much subsequent work, both on Britain and beyond, as can be seen in important collections on Britain and Germany, co-edited by Brewer himself, the series of volumes on European state formation edited by Richard Bonney as well as work by Christopher Storrs on Savoy.12 More recently, collaborations between British and Spanish scholars have led to important comparative works on the British and Iberian imperial states.13 Other historians have turned their focus inwards and examined the fiscal-military state at a local level or within other parts of the British and Irish archipelago, notably Thomas Bartlett and Charles Ivar McGrath on Ireland and Andrew Mackillop on Scotland.14 Meanwhile the wider imperial dimension has received some attention in the work of Christopher Bayly and Peter Marshall.15 The domestic English context has not been neglected either, and scholars such as Michael Braddick, Julian Hoppit, Joanna Innes and others have used Brewerâs framework to consider how the bureaucracy of the English state actually worked in partnership with Parliament in the eighteenth century.16
This edited collection, and the conference that preceded it, arose from a conviction that many of these works have, in framing themselves against the model presented by Brewer in The Sinews of Power, exposed some of its most important but hitherto undelineated limitations. Its geographical focus, for example, was on England and English developments, as was Dicksonâs earlier study of the Financial Revolution.17 Subsequent studies which examine the Irish and Scottish experiences of, and contributions to, the wider imperial fiscal-military state have suggested alternative models for state formation in Great Britain and Ireland.18 To borrow a phrase developed by Sean Connolly for Ireland and Huw Bowen for Wales, and since adapted by Andrew MacKillop for Scotland, these âmetropolitan provincesâ made vitally important contributions to the fiscal-military states of the British Isles, even if they could also be the sites of bitter contests within that state.19 The chapters in this book move beyond these recent studies by fully incorporating the experiences of the Irish and the Scots into the wider British picture, rather than by shining light on them in isolation, thereby building on the approach taken by those British historians such as David Hayton, Peter Marshall and Stephen Conway who have sought to integrate the histories of the three or four constituent components of these islands long before it became either fashionable or commonplace.20
If challenges have been posed to the exclusively English character of The Sinews of Power, Christopher Storrs has also noted that, in comparing the British fiscal-military state with its European counterparts, Brewer âto some extent caricatures the experience of the latterâ, and that consequently there âis a need for a more wide-ranging and up-to-date comparative study of the varieties of fiscal-military state in the âlong eighteenth centuryâ in Europeâ.21 This an area that has increasingly attracted attention, especially perhaps from fiscal historians who have been wary both of the problems caused by the over-reliance of earlier generations on the influential analysis of Joseph Schumpeter, itself produced in the particular and peculiar context of post-World War One Vienna, and by the insufficiency of the Anglo-Dutch model, as exemplified by Brewerâs work, to fully explain the complex pattern of continental developments.22 Some of most recent contributions to this field have instead stressed the need for a ...
