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French subsidies played a central role in European politics from Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494 until the French Revolution. French kings attempted to frustrate what they viewed as a Habsburg bid to pursue universal monarchy. During the seventeenth century, the French monarchy would embrace the payment of subsidies on a different scale than previously, using alliances in which subsidies played a prominent role to pursue crucial aspects of royal policy. Louis XIII made alliances promising subsidies to support the United Provinces’ resumed war against the king of Spain, and for the Danish, Swedish, and various German princes to fight against the Holy Roman Emperor. Louis XIV continued some of these subsidies and used subsidies as a tool in order to implement his own politics. When Louis XIV appeared to Dutch and some English statesmen as aspiring to Universal monarchy, the Dutch and particularly the English used the tool of subsidies to frustrate the French monarch. During the eighteenth century, principally the French and the British, but also the Austrians, used subsidies to procure allies and attempt to maintain the balance of power. The subsidy system prompted significant debates about the legal, political, and moral implications, and was sometimes a source of political conflict between competing power groupings within states. The book argues that participation in the French system of subsidies neither necessarily accelerated nor necessarily retarded state development; but such participation could undoubtedly change political dynamics, the creation of institutions, and the form of states that would emerge.
lords Ordainer went one step further in 1311 by seeking to deny altogether the king’s ability to make war or to leave the country without the consent of the baronage in Parliament. Equally, the king’s acknowledged right to purvey goods for the sustenance of his household was extended, under the pressure of war financing, into a quasi-national levy for victualling the royal armies. As a consequence, purveyance became another familiar target for the king’s opponents. The Petition of the Barons complained that purveyors were taking two or three times as much as the needs
of representative institution to mediate their demands for taxes, human resources, and materials. These forms of extraction can be labelled ‘fiscal’ and encompassed a wide variety of direct and indirect taxes paid in cash and kind, as well as forms of compulsory service extending from varieties of feudal levy through types of militia to different forms of conscription. Debt and forced loans were additional forms and played a substantial part in all war finance. These aspects have been widely studied as a dimension of the emergence of sovereign states, but this
Commerce in the Netherlands 1570–1680 (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 181. 30 Peter Wilson, ‘War Finance, Policy and Strategy in the Thirty Years’ War’, in Dynamik durch Gewalt? Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (1618–1648) als Faktor der Wandlungsprozesse des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Michael Rohrschneider and Anuschka Tischer (Münster: Aschendorff, 2018), pp. 229–250; Peter W. Klein, De Trippen in de 17e eeuw: Een studie over het ondernemerschap op de Hollandse stapelmarkt (Assen: Van Gorchum, 1965), pp. 205–208; ’t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence, p. 184. The
, 2014). 2 War Record of the St. John Ambulance Brigade and the British Red Cross Society in Leinster, Munster and Connaught, 1914–1918 (Dublin, 1919); Reports by the Joint War Committee and the Joint War Finance Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the
Esteban, ‘The British Balance of Payments, 1772–1820: India Transfers and War Finance’, The Economic History Review , 54 (2001) , 60, 66. 17 Devine, Scotland’s Empire , pp. 326–8; Devine, ‘Did Slavery Make Scotia Great?’, pp. 232–4. 18 T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Society: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1660–1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) , pp. 60–5. 19 Draper, ‘Scotland and Colonial Slave Ownership’, pp. 179–82; Devine, ‘Did Slavery Make Scotia Great?’, pp. 229–38. 20 Devine, Scotland’s Empire , pp. 330
Enthoven left no written record of her war work, so one can only speculate about her duties based on accounts from other Red Cross workers and from official documents. In 1921 the government published the 823-page Notes from Reports by the Joint War Committee and the Joint War Finance Committee of the British Red Cross and the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England on Voluntary Aid rendered to the Sick and Wounded at Home and Abroad and to British Prisoners of War 1914–19, which set out the development and eventual standardisation of services provided by the Red Cross
States-General and the French for similar exchange transactions represented a profit for the Hoeuffts and their associates. Banks and bills of exchange Historians of banking and finance have called attention to the manner in which war finance fostered institutional developments in the first half of the seventeenth century such as the chartered companies and exchange banks, for instance the Amsterdam Wisselbank.54 Merchants, including those who partially engaged in war finance, combined the use of these innovatory institutions with older forms of finance, such as the
their own boundaries was often constrained by the liquidity of the assets they could offer – which often required significant investments of capital and expertise. The payment and receipt of subsidies could have consequences that went far beyond the military and fiscal effects commonly referred to, affecting public opinion, political and economic relations, and social mobility.40 Yet in older histories of diplomatic relations or war finance, the subsidies’ part in state formation is usually discussed as a peripheral phenomenon in the context of a wider examination of
contributions provided a principal method of war financing in this era, they could be insufficient to allow effective offensive military action, or could fail entirely through over-extraction or popular resistance. This was true even for the emperor or imperial leagues that could pool the resources of multiple territories and princes – for individual princes the problem was far greater. Those intent on taking part in the conflict, therefore, were forced to depend on the financial resources of their officers or to seek external sources of funding from other European powers