Introduction

The publication of John Brewer’s e Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, in 1988, marked a historiographical watershed.1 Introducing the concept of a ‘fiscal-military state’ organised primarily around the need to raise money for the conduct of war, and which therefore spent the vast majority of government revenue either directly on naval and military departments or on the interest payments on money borrowed for the purposes of waging war, Brewer’s book offered a new and convincing interpretation of the steady rise of Britain (or England) to great power status in the eighteenth century. Since then, successive studies – inspired in part by e Sinews of Power – have confirmed some parts of this model and challenged others, stressing in particular the continued importance of private contractors and local elites to fiscal and military effectiveness, the limitations of bureaucratic reform and the adaptions needed to embed the state into the ‘metropolitan provinces’ of Scotland and Ireland, and their respective localities. In bringing together the most recent work on this topic, this volume argues that there were multiple ‘fiscal-military states’ within the British Isles between 1660 and 1783, distinguished by their geographical location, their public or private status, their fiscal or military focus and their degree of embeddedness within various civil and commercial societies. Acknowledging the continued importance of ‘Weberian’ bureaucratic reform and central diktat, this volume also argues that state structures were empowered by repeated negotiation between central authorities and local interest groups, whose active cooperation or tacit consent enabled it to operate.