ABSTRACT
War has often been the forcing ground of state formation, in both the short and long terms. The need to be prepared for war – for wars – has underpinned the emergence of what has been called the ‘fiscal-military state’ 1 while individual conflicts have been the making and breaking of individual states and empires. But what do we mean by shaping through war? It might simply indicate the acquisition or loss of territory. But it could also reflect the establishment of a new relationship between the various component parts of a state, which might, in turn, include the elaboration of new forms of government and/or a realignment of the social and political forces within the polity. Many of these processes were clearly in evidence in Europe in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, during both the Great Northern War and the War of the Spanish Succession and were ratified in the peace settlements that concluded them and embodied or established a new European order. In that sense, one could argue that peace rather than war shaped states although, of course, the peace was the outcome of the war. Among the many changes wrought by the latter conflict, for example, England and Scotland agreed to form a new British state from 1707 onwards, while the Savoyard state – the collection of territories ruled by the house of Savoy in northern Italy – assumed not only a new shape, reflecting the acquisition of new territories, but also a new identity as its prince, Duke Victor Amadeus II, acquired the greater dignity of king of what had been Spanish Sicily. Indeed, the peace triggered a wide-ranging overhaul of that state’s institutions both to reflect and to defend its greater extent and enhanced standing. 2
But the War of the Spanish Succession was above all, self-evidently, about the redefinition and restructuring of the Spanish empire or Monarchy, which – despite the supposed crisis and decline of Spain in the seventeenth century – remained the largest empire the world had yet seen, comprising in 1700 various territories distributed around the globe. Indeed, it was still expanding in the Americas and the Pacific in the last decades of the seventeenth century and was clearly a prize worth fighting for. 3 Some of the contenders for that prize in the war of succession – above all and most
of the Spanish Monarchy, which had been left to Philip of Anjou by the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II in 1700. The other side of this coin was that the war was largely responsible for a remarkable reshaping of Spain and its empire and the transition from a vast, supranational ‘Monarchy’ (or empire) to a smaller and more narrowly conceived Spanish state (or empire). 4
Bourbon propagandists at the time and later were inclined to see the advent of the Bourbons in the person of the erstwhile duke of Anjou – now Philip V-as transforming Spain in the sense of creating an absolute, centralised, modern, national polity. Later historians have echoed this verdict, not least in pointing to the new relationship established between 1707 and 1714 between the monarch and the Crown of Aragon. 5 In the following pages, however, I seek to suggest that while Philip was certainly an innovator, in some key aspects of both policy and practice, he sought to overturn the new territorial order agreed at Utrecht and to turn the clock back to 1700, recovering the entire inheritance bequeathed to him by the last Habsburg. In exploring this topic, we need to adopt a different chronological aspect and to take a longer view, ending not in 1713-1714 with Utrecht and Baden but in 1725 with the treaty of Vienna concluded between Philip and his erstwhile rival, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI (‘Charles III’ of Spain to those who embraced his claim in the succession struggle). 6 Since Philip’s revisionist, revanchist aspirations drew some support from those dispossessed by that collapse of empire that was confirmed in 1713-1714, we also need to look beyond court and peace congress and to consider the many private individuals whose fates were shaped by the peace settlement in that they lost office, pensions, homes and other properties and in many cases were forced into exile. Finally, the way in which some at least of the various treaties and territorial and other adjustments were communicated – and justified – to subjects after a long and demanding war also throws invaluable light on contemporary political culture, suggesting the continued importance of older modes of discourse in explanations given to a public audience.
