Paul Kennedy - The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies; and I have witnessed how all the enterprises which were embarked on in my day were lacking for that reason alone. 91

This problem of pay and supply affected military performance in all sorts of ways: one historian has demonstrated that Gustavus Adolphus’s stunningly mobile campaigns in Germany, rather than being dictated by military-strategic planning in the Clausewitzian sense, reflected a simple but compelling search for food and fodder for his enormous force. 92 Well before Napoleon’s aphorism, commanders knew that an army marched upon its stomach.

But these physical restrictions applied at the national level, too, especially in raising funds for war. No state in this period, however prosperous, could pay immediately for the costs of a prolonged conflict; no matter what fresh taxes were raised, there was always a gap between governmental income and expenditure which could only be closed by loans – either from private bankers like the Fuggers or, later, through a formally organized money market dealing in government bonds. Again and again, however, the spiralling costs of war forced monarchs to default upon debt repayments, to debase the coinage, or to attempt some other measure of despair, which brought short-term relief but long-term disadvantage. Like their commanders frantically seeking to keep troops in order and horses fed, early-modern governments were engaged in a precarious hand-to-mouth living. Badgering estates to grant further extraordinary taxes, pressing rich men and the churches for ‘benevolences’, haggling with bankers and munitions suppliers, seizing foreign treasure ships, and keeping at arm’s length one’s many creditors were more or less permanent activities forced upon rulers and their officials in these years.

The argument in this chapter is not , therefore, that the Habsburgs failed utterly to do what other powers achieved so brilliantly. There are no stunning contrasts in evidence here; success and failure are to be measured by very narrow differences. 93 All states, even the United Provinces, were placed under severe strain by the constant drain of resources for military and naval campaigns. All states experienced financial difficulties, mutinies of troops, inadequacies of supply, domestic opposition to higher taxes. As in the First World War, these years also witnessed struggles of endurance, driving the belligerents closer and closer to exhaustion. By the final decade of the Thirty Years War, it was noticeable that neither alliance could field armies as large as those commanded by Gustavus and Wallenstein, for each side was, literally, running out of men and money. The victory of the anti-Habsburg forces was, then, a marginal and relative one. They had managed, but only just, to maintain the balance between their material base and their military power better than their Habsburg opponents. At least some of the victors had seen that the sources of national wealth needed to be exploited carefully, and not recklessly, during a lengthy conflict. They may also have admitted, however reluctantly, that the trader and the manufacturer and the farmer were as important as the cavalry officer and the pikeman. But the margin of their appreciation, and of their better handling of the economic elements, was slight. It had been, to borrow the later words of the Duke of Wellington, a ‘damned close-run thing’. Most great contests are.

The signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees did not, of course, bring to an end the rivalries of the European Great Powers, or their habit of settling these rivalries through war. But the century and a half of international struggle which occurred after 1660 was different, in some very important respects, from that which had taken place in the preceding hundred years; and, as such, these changes reflected a further stage in the evolution of international politics.

The most significant feature of the Great Power scene after 1660 was the maturing of a genuinely multipolar system of European states, each one of which increasingly tended to make decisions about war and peace on the basis of ‘national interests’ rather than for transnational, religious causes. This was not, to be sure, an instant or absolute change: the European states prior to 1660 had certainly manoeuvred with their secular interests in mind, and religious prejudice still fuelled many international quarrels of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the chief characteristic of the 1519–1659 era – that is, an Austro-Spanish axis of Habsburg powers fighting a coalition of Protestant states, plus France – now disappeared, and was replaced by a much looser system of short-term, shifting alliances. Countries which had been foes in one war were often to find themselves partners in the next, which placed an emphasis upon calculated Realpolitik rather than deeply held religious conviction in the determination of policy.

The fluctuations in both diplomacy and war that were natural to this volatile, multipolar system were complicated by something which was not new, but was common to all ages: the rise of certain states and the decline of others. During this century and a half of international rivalry between Louis XIV’s assumption of full authority in France in 1660–1 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender after Waterloo in 1815, certain leading nations of the previous period (the Ottoman Empire, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden) fell back into the second rank, and Poland was eclipsed altogether. The Austrian Habsburgs, by various territorial and structural adjustments in their hereditary lands, managed to remain in the first order; and in the north of Germany, Brandenburg-Prussia pulled itself up to that status from unpromising beginnings. In the west, France after 1660 swiftly expanded its military might to become the most powerful of the European states – to many observers, almost as overwhelming as the Habsburg forces had appeared a half-century earlier. France’s capacity to dominate west-central Europe was held in check only by a combination of maritime and continental neighbours during a series of prolonged wars (1689–97; 1702–14; 1739–48; 1756–63); but it was then refashioned in the Napoleonic era to produce a long line of Gallic military victories which were brought to an end only by a coalition of four other Great Powers. Even in its defeat in 1815, France remained one of the leading states. Between it in the west and the two Germanic countries of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire in the east, therefore, a crude trilateral equilibrium slowly emerged within the European core as the eighteenth century unfolded.

But the really significant alterations in the Great Power system during that century occurred on the flanks of Europe, and even farther afield. Certain of the western European states steadily converted their small, precarious enclaves in the tropics into much more extensive domains, especially in India but also in the East Indies, southern Africa, and as far away as Australia. The most successful of these colonizing nations was Britain, which, domestically ‘stabilized’ after James II was replaced by William and Mary in 1688, steadily fulfilled its Elizabethan potential as the greatest of the European maritime empires. Even its loss of control over the prosperous North American colonies in the 1770s – from which there emerged an independent United States of formidable defensive strength and considerable economic power – only temporarily checked this growth of British global influence. Equally remarkable were the achievements of the Russian state, which expanded eastward and southward, across the steppes of Asia, throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, although sited on the western and eastern margins of Europe, both Britain and Russia had an interest in the fate of the centre – with Britain being involved in German affairs because of its dynastic links to Hanover (following George I’s accession in 1714) and Russia being determined to have the chief voice in the fate of neighbouring Poland. More generally, the governments in London and St Petersburg wanted a balance of power on the European continent, and were willing to intervene repeatedly in order to secure an equilibrium which accorded with their interests. In other words, the European states system was becoming one of five Great Powers – France, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, Britain, and Russia – as well as lesser countries like Savoy and declining states such as Spain. 1