The Spending of States: Military Expenditure During the Long Eighteenth Century: Patterns, Organisation, and Consequences, 1650-1815

This book aims to bring state expenditure into the debate over the construction of modern states. It has traditionally been argued that the differences in state development could be put down to the state's particular systems and methods for raising warfare resources. Historians have long stressed that the different levels of state development on a world level should be explained in terms of the origin and management of fiscal and financial resources. But this historical research did not pay the same attention to how that income was spent. This book aims to redress the balance by focusing on expenditure. As the book shows, there were glaring inter-state differences in expenditure management and analysis that may help to explain the patchy development of modern states. A wide-ranging trawl of national cases, all centred on the long eighteenth century, shows the consequences of different expenditure policies and management methods on the underlying state and economy. This book offers a broad panorama of national cases to show how warfare expenditure could become a source of problems for some states and a source of opportunities and growth for others.