An Imperial State at War

Britain From 1689-1815

Lawrence Stone

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134546022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The study of eighteenth century history has been transformed by the writings of John Brewer, and most recently, with The Sinews of Power, he challenged the central concepts of British history. Brewer argues that the power of the British state increased dramatically when it was forced to pay the costs of war in defence of her growing empire. In An Imperial State at War, edited by Lawrence Stone (himself no stranger to controversy), the leading historians of the eighteenth century put the Brewer thesis under the spotlight. Like the Sinews of Power itself, this is a major advance in the study of Britain's first empire.

1

Introduction

Lawrence Stone

One may well ask why it is only in the 1980s and early 1990s that the emergence of the modern state out of the crucible of prolonged European warfare on an unprecedented scale has become once more a growing focus of historical attention. If one looks back at the trends in historiography over the past thirty years, it is clear that the rush to social history was a mixed blessing. It certainly produced works of outstanding quality and opened up many new fields of enquiry into the past. Unfortunately, however, as Brewer points out, this asking of new questions was accompanied by a neglect – indeed, in some cases a positive denigration – of critically important older areas of historical enquiry. The most important of these was the evolution of the state as a quasi-independent agent, especially in its capacity to levy taxes and make wars.

This period of neglect is now over. Brewer has noted that the collapse of Marxism as a viable political and economic system has inevitably discredited it as an explanatory model for understanding history, thus opening the way to a new look at the state. Nor was Foucault much help in reorientating history towards the state. Although he was obsessed with power relations in history, he confined his attention to secondary institutions like the family, hospitals or prisons, or to ethical concepts, such as those governing sexual behaviour. The waning of his influence upon history has also facilitated a revival of interest in the state as a semi-independent historical variable. As a result, political scientists, historical sociologists and historians are all now more interested in the state, its definition, its composition, its method of working and its political and military power. It was in response to these rediscovered preoccupations that in November 1990 the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton sponsored a colloquium on The Eighteenth-Century British State and Empire. This subject was chosen because John Brewer’s recent book on The Sinews of Power, and the rather earlier articles of Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien on public finance, had drawn attention to the neglect of the formidable fiscal and military-power aspects of a state that had hitherto been regarded as weak, undertaxed, understaffed, underfunded and relatively liberal. The result of their work has been to remind historians that after 1689 the British state made a dramatic return to the European stage as a major player in the game of power politics – after 250 years of virtual absence, ever since the battle of Agincourt. Admittedly, its military record continued to be patchy, with its greatest successes occurring at the beginning of the period, at Blenheim in 1705, and at the end, at Waterloo in 1815. Its naval achievements, however, which culminated at Trafalgar in 1805, were unsurpassed, and defeats at sea were few.

When one considers this phenomenon, various questions immediately arise. How was all this achieved? At what cost in money and men? Who paid for it, and how was the money extracted? Who fought, either voluntarily or because they were forced to do so? We have been reminded by Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf that war is above all a matter of logistics – how to feed, equip and supply an overwhelming force on the field of battle. How did an early modern bureaucracy manage such tasks? What objectives did the leadership have in mind? What policies were adopted to gain world supremacy, first in a long and inconclusive struggle for control of the seas with the Dutch, running from about 1650 to 1680, and then in the far longer and larger second Hundred Years War with the French, running from 1689 to 1815? How much did it attract popular support? How far did it meet with resistance and scepticism at home? What were the objectives of this expansion of British power, and how did its victims, the natives, respond? What effect did almost endless war have on the society, the social structure and social values? Did it hurt or hinder the growth of the capital market, the domestic economy and overseas trade? What happened to unemployment and poor relief when so many adult male breadwinners were suddenly swept away to go and fight, or were suddenly demobilized? And, last, how did the experience of prolonged war alter ideas about matters like crime, nationalism and xenophobia? Or about mercantilism or the ethics of genocide? Was British nationalism fuelled by fear of France or hatred of popery, or were the two indistinguishable?

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Seventy years ago the history of eighteenth-century Britain seemed fairly simple. The Whig model as propounded by Macaulay and Trevelyan predominated, and all the emphasis was on the decentralized, amateurish character of the state, whose functionaries were, and acted like, gentlemen rather than professional civil servants. The main characteristics of the post-Glorious Revolution state were a parliamentary monarchy; personal liberty protected by the Bill of Rights and the common law; limited religious toleration of all Protestants; and, above all, a devotion to the protection of private property. The theorists behind this system were Locke, who spelt out the contract theory of the state, the prime purpose of which was the protection of property, and who was a persuasive advocate of religious toleration; Harrington, who saw political power as a natural product of property ownership; and Montesquieu, who believed that the English state was characterized above all by a separation of powers.

In the 1930s Sir Lewis Namier revealed that the elite who ran the state in the mid-eighteenth century were lacking any motives other than the self-interest of themselves, their relatives and their clients.¹ The political structure was exposed as riddled with corruption, nepotism and factional feuding. Clashes over ideological issues about the rights of property or the role of religion or the limits of political participation were alleged to be subordinated to these intrigues of faction, while no one really counted except that tiny minority of adult elite males who made up the political nation.

By the 1960s E. P. Thompson was busy turning this elitist picture upside-down. He felt only contempt for the great Whig families, whom he denounced as robbers and banditti; and he described the society in bipolar terms as deeply fissured between ‘patricians’ and ‘plebeians’.² In retrospect it is clear that this brilliant opening-up of the social complexities of the eighteenth century revolutionized our understanding. More recently, however, it has also become clear that Thompson’s bipolar model was more or less right over power relationships, but wrong over the social structure. He seriously underestimated the role of the state as a semi-autonomous entity and contrived largely to ignore the growing role in both society and politics of the ‘middling sort’.

Just as this reassessment of the social structure was going on, in the 1960s, J. H. Plumb brought the state back to centre stage, and reorientated historical focus on a new problem, the causes of the shift from physical violence, political instability and rage of party which characterized English politics in the seventeenth century, to the stability and relative calm which predominated from the 1720s through to the 1780s or later.³ He also pointed to an astonishing expansion of the electorate in the late seventeenth century, as Whigs and Tories fought fierce battles at the hustings; and an equally remarkable shrinkage once the ‘rage of party’ was stilled after 1720. Plumb failed, however, to offer a bridge to link his world to that of E. P. Thompson. It was left to John Brewer to point out that in the 1760s a large and vocal extra-parliamentary following among the ‘middling sort’ had been built up by John Wilkes, which for a while offered a serious challenge to the aristocratic political establishment.⁴ The wide political involvement of the middling sort and even the poor in eighteenth-century national politics has been further demonstrated by Kathleen Wilson, while Linda Colley and others have revealed the survival within the English political system of the Tory party. Occasionally, it was even able, in alliance with rebellious ‘country whigs’, to defeat important government bills, the most striking example being the rejection by Parliament in 1733 of Walpole’s Excise Bill.

More recently still, Peter Borsay and others have demonstrated the remarkable cultural vitality of provincial cities in the eighteenth century, whose amenities catered not only to local gentry, but also to the middling sort.⁵ As a result of this reassessment of the political and social scene, the middling sort have come into their own historiographically, thereby creating a united propertied class, distinct from the plebeians. This is shown by the fact that the volume by Paul Langford in the Oxford History of England for this period is entitled A Polite and Commercial People. The balance of historical interest has thus shifted first to Macaulay’s and Namier’s Whig aristocracy and their clients; then to E. P. Thompson’s disaffected plebeians; and now to John Brewer, Peter Borsay and Paul Langford’s middling sort. The upshot of this debate seems to be that although the political and social structures were still dominated by the aristocracy, as Namier claimed, and John Cannon and others, such as myself, still claim, both the amorphous but growing middling sort and even the voiceless proletariat at times held sharply different political, religious and economic views which could occasionally influence the delicate structure of aristocratic politics. The concept of a rising tide of luxury, expressed by a passion for consumerism, has dominated recent historical writings about eighteenth-century English society and culture. In this respect the middling sort were not only makers and consumers of growing economic affluence; they also became important consumers of cultural artefacts, such as novels, assembly rooms and the theatre.

In the last few years, there have been two new shifts of historiographical focus. Both divert attention away from the old debate about the relationship of power and property inside eighteenth-century England and towards crucial political and military developments taking place elsewhere. The first is the evolution of the concept of the nation from England and Wales to Great Britain. Too little attention has been paid to the fact that Britain in the eighteenth century was little more than a somewhat precarious and recently formed federal political unit. A viable state is not necessarily coincidental with a nation, the latter being defined by a sense of community in a common culture and patriotic feeling shared by both rulers and ruled. A nation is thus the product of a state of mind, not merely of rule by a unitary state. It has been described, cynically but accurately, by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘a people who share a common misconception as to their origins, and a common antipathy towards their neighbours’. This definition holds true for both England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, but Great Britain would fail to pass the test. The union of 1707 was indeed a marriage, but one merely of convenience. Wales had long been absorbed by England, and presented no special problems; but Scotland was a different matter, and it took the crisis of war on the English side and the desire to gain access to the English market on the Scottish side to drive them into reluctant union in 1707. Even so, the union still left Scotland with its own church and its own legal system, and for a long while did little to reduce mutual suspicions or create a sense of common national identity. Moreover, two serious Jacobite rebellions were launched from northern Scotland in 1715 and 1745, before the Highlands were brutally pacified once and for all by military force. As for Ireland, it continued to be a militarily occupied colony full of English troops and run by a minority of Protestant English landlords ruling over a Catholic Irish peasantry. Only rapidly growing prosperity softened the edges of this situation; but it was not enough to stop a large-scale rebellion in 1798. The savage repression which followed paved the way for a gerrymandered union in 1800, which by itself did nothing to help untangle the religious and social problems of that unhappy country, much less to create a sense of national unity with England.⁶

The second recent historiographical innovation has been to draw attention to how and why this ramshackle federal state, if not nation, plunged into continental warfare in 1689, and after 126 years managed to create a world-wide overseas commercial, and in the end territorial, empire.⁷ This great military and naval effort created a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the revolution of 1688 and its aftermath in the 1690s consolidated a uniquely decentralized political system in which local government, law enforcement, tax collecting, supervision of the militia, drafts into the armed forces and so on were largely left to the discretion and loyalty of amateur local landed gentlemen and clergy, acting in their capacities as Justices of the Peace, Collectors of Taxes, Colonels of the local Militia, and so on. This political elite was deeply suspicious of a standing army, fiscally conservative, dedicated to personal liberty (for themselves) and at the same time passionately anti-Catholic and anti-French. On the other hand, because of both Louis XIV’s support for the deposed monarch, James II, and the Dutch preoccupations of the new monarch, William III, the state was drawn immediately into a major continental war with France. This turned out to be only the start of a century and a quarter of intermittent warfare from 1689 to 1815, during half of which time the two nations were actually at war. The contest was for world supremacy, and the winner only emerged at the end of an unprecedentedly massive and prolonged war with France from 1793 to 1815, with the decisive British victories of Trafalgar at sea and Waterloo on land.

To pay for these wars, Britain became the most heavily taxed state in Europe, thanks to what was, by eighteenth-century standards, a fairly efficient fiscal system, and above all to a remarkable capacity to borrow at cheap rates most of the money needed. Final victory over France, a country which in 1700 had a population four-and-a-half times that of Britain, was won not so much by military prowess, technological innovation or diplomatic skill as by overwhelming financial superiority. At bottom, victory in war was a question of money, not men, since money could always be used to hire men and Europe was full of mercenaries willing to serve a reliable paymaster.

THE BREWER PARADOX

It is only very recently that historians have begun to study this paradox of, on the one hand, the use of massive external military empire to block a rival hegemonic power and to create a maritime trading power and, on the other, the preservation of internal liberty and the rights of private property – a rare combination only paralleled by Periclean Athens and America from 1941 to the present day. Judith Schklar described eighteenth-century Britain as ‘a commercial, extensive, non-military, democracy disguised as a monarchy’.⁸ This is largely, but not entirely, correct. It was certainly ‘non-military’ in the sense that the English themselves fought as little as possible, preferring to hire mercenaries, mostly Germans or Austrians, to do the dirty work for them; and that the governing classes had a strong antipathy to a standing army and were very reluctant to have more than the bare minimum number of professional troops stationed on English soil necessary to put down the occasional public disturbance by the lower classes. In consequence, most were stationed in barracks or billets, in Ireland or the colonies. It is also true, however, that British politics and society were bound to be deeply affected by a prolonged war with France. In order to win, the ruling elite were prepared to spend immense amounts of treasure and also to run up the national debt on a scale comparable only to the activities of the Reagan–Bush administrations in the United States.

The British constitution was certainly representative, but the use of the word ‘democracy’ is hardly appropriate. Britain was certainly more loosely governed than the despotisms – some enlightened, some not – that prevailed on the continent. Yet, when after 1720 the ‘rage of party’ had spent itself, the electorate effectively shrank and the elite closed ranks again, so that political power was largely confined to nobles, gentlemen, bankers, merchants, industrialists, lawyers, higher clergy and other influential figures. In 1750 they amounted to about 20,000 adult males, out of a population of about 6 million persons. As for the monarchy, the Hanoverian kings could and did interfere with foreign policy, often in the narrow interest of Hanover, although there were strict limits to their power in the area. They could also occasionally dismiss a prime minister or force his resignation over an issue of personal principle, such as the dismissal of Pitt in 1801 over the granting of a measure of Catholic emancipation in Ireland.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the chapters of this book show very clearly that English society in the eighteenth century was not merely changing, as its society and economy expanded; the population still retained its ‘negative liberties’ against the state, as protected by law – as Wilkes triumphantly proved; and it preserved a limited toleration of worship for protestant dissenters, while quietly easing up on the penalties imposed on Roman Catholics. Moreover, from the 1760s onward the middling sort were making their own views known and at times policies had to be altered to meet their demands. The American War, in particular, nearly split the country in two. By European standards Britain before 1795 remained, as all visitors agreed, internally a strikingly open and liberal society, despite its massive war-making activities. Moreover, at sea Britain adopted a militarily ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Dedication page
• Notes on contributors
• 1 INTRODUCTION – Lawrence Stone
• 2 THE SINEWS OF POWER AND EUROPEAN STATE-BUILDING THEORY – Thomas Ertman
• 3 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STATE: Contexts and issues – John Brewer
• 4 SOCIETY AND THE ECONOMY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY – John Brewer
• 5 THE DOMESTIC FACE OF THE MILITARY-FISCAL STATE: Government and society in eighteenth-century Britain – Joanna Innes
• 6 EMPIRE OF VIRTUE: The imperial project and Hanoverian culture c. 1720–1785 – Kathleen Wilson
• 7 THE REACH OF THE STATE, THE APPEAL OF THE NATION: Mass arming and political culture in the Napoleonic Wars – Linda Colley
• 8 MARITIME STRENGTH AND ATLANTIC COMMERCE: The uses of ‘a grand marine empire’ – Daniel A. Baugh
• 9 UNION, STATE AND EMPIRE: The Britain of 1707 in its European setting – John Robertson
• 10 THE PROVINCES AND THE EMPIRE: Scotland, the American colonies and the development of British provincial identity – Ned C. Landsman
• 11 IRISH RESISTANCE TO EMPIRE? – Ned C. Landsman and Nicholas Canny
• 12 THE BRITISH MILITARY-FISCAL STATE AND INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE: India 1750–1820 – C. A. Bayly
• INDEX