Fourteen years ago, Professor John Brewer published a book that destroyed the prevailing interpretation of English political culture in the eighteenth century, constructed forty years before by Sir Lewis Namier.1 According to Namier, Hanoverian politics, at any rate in the 1760s, were largely devoid of ideology, and were confined to factional bickering over appointments and pensions among a tiny political elite of squires and noblemen.2 To Namier the only people who mattered historically were a tight little closed world of wealthy families, and their friends and dependents. But Brewer showed conclusively that not only were there at times powerful ideological issues at stake, but also that people of the middling sort, such as merchants, tradesmen, clerks, and small freeholders, who were officially excluded from the political process, were very successful in making their voices heard.

This was a dramatic and true revision of the historical record. Today, however, it has now become so much a part of the conventional wisdom that there is a tendency to lose sight of the fact that Namier had identified a basic historical truth. In all times and places politicians spend a large part of their energies on infighting for the spoils of office, and English politicians in the mid-eighteenth century were unusual only in being peculiarly obsessed with these narrowly self-serving concerns.

In his new book, Brewer attacks a second influential view about the eighteenth-century English state, which goes back all the way to the great Whig historians like Macaulay and Trevelyan. Until about 1975 historians had tended to compare the English state of the eighteenth century with that of its main rival, France, and to conclude that the former had a small, weak, decentralized structure of power, with a tiny bureaucracy and only a very small and closely watched standing army. It was ruled at the center by a handful of great aristocratic families, who not only controlled many seats in the House of Commons, but also provided a loose direction, through statute legislation, over the amateur gentry who managed the many-sided business of local government, administration, and justice. Internal order was maintained not so much by force as by an ideology of social deference, a relatively equitable sharing of tax burdens in times of crisis, and above all a uniquely generous and comprehensive system of poor relief. The result was a remarkable absence of violent social conflict, and a steady decline in both homicides and hangings.

The first limitations on the powers of the English state over its subjects were set by the Bill of Rights, by the decisions of liberal-minded judges, and above all by the stubborn reluctance of the landed elite in Parliament to give the officials who were appointed by the king and his ministers sufficient funds or authority to develop a large home-based standing army. One MP said at the time: ” ‘Tis money that makes a Parliament considerable, and nothing else.” One of Brewer’s great contributions is that he closely examines the reality of this truism.

A further limitation on the capacity or even desire of the central government to act decisively was what came to be called Old Corruption. The administration was cluttered with a great many sinecure offices and pensions, which were largely monopolized by the rich and influential. Appointments to office were made not on merit but by purchase and sale (as in the army) or thanks to personal patronage (as in the navy). Income came not from salaries but from fees or bribes extracted from clients. These administrative weaknesses were endemic to all early modern bureaucracies, which were defined by Max Weber as an ideal type he called “patrimonial” as opposed to “modern.” In England, sale of offices was small, largely restricted to the judiciary and the army, but the level of corruption in high financial offices remained very high in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

In addition to the brakes imposed on centralized government by Parliament and a patrimonial bureaucracy, the English were also peculiarly obsessed by a desire for economic and personal freedom. England (and later Britain) was unique in Europe for its lack of tolls and of trade barriers between cities and between provinces. Belief in the free market as the great engine of economic prosperity was enshrined in the late eighteenth century in Adam Smith’s influential handbook The Wealth of Nations. Finally there was a widespread ideology of the “freeborn Englishman” (or Briton), most forcefully expressed in the opening lines of the patriotic song Rule Britannia. This was an ideology of defiant individualism particularly favored by the prickly and often arrogant gentry who ruled the countryside. Both contemporaries and modern historians have believed that as a result of these trends, laws, and beliefs, England was the most free, most loosely governed, and the most prosperous society in Europe.

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Few observers commented on the paradox that this rich, luxury-loving, allegedly under-taxed and undoubtedly under-governed consumer society somehow managed, over a period of one hundred and twenty-five years, from 1689 to 1815, to defeat in one war after another the most powerful of Europe’s ancien régimes—that of France. This was achieved despite the fact that France had five (falling to three) times the population of Britain and about twice the GNP.3 Second, by 1763 England had seized by force the largest empire seen in the West since the fall of Rome, including North America and Canada, to say nothing of a string of naval and commercial bases running from Antigua to Bombay through Gibraltar and Minorca. Although Britain lost half of its empire—America—twenty years later, after 1760 it had already begun to make alliances with Indian elites to conquer and then plunder huge and immensely wealthy parts of the disintegrating Mogul empire in India.

Third, Britain occupied and expropriated most of the land in Ireland after 1689; it first absorbed Scotland in 1707 and then brutally crushed all further resistance there after 1745. As a result the picture of a libertarian, weakly governed England is misleading. One of Brewer’s central points is that while there was considerable liberty in England, despotism was exported to Ireland, India, and, to a lesser extent, America. To pay for these efforts, between half and three quarters of the public revenue was being spent on war during the eighteenth century.

Brewer stresses the many forces that were leading to a centralization of external power in England during the eighteenth century. One was the growing nationalist sentiment that bound the country together, though whether this nationalism was “English” or “British” was never very clearly defined, and tended to vary from region to region. There was also a popular jingoism that favored belligerent and expansive territorial conquests for empire. Brewer also makes the point that eighteenth-century England, despite its liberties, was in significant ways the most centralized state in Europe. Owing in part to its origins in conquest in 1066, it had long since abolished internal trade barriers, enforced a single currency, and established nationwide legal systems. During the eighteenth century there developed the conception of the unfettered sovereignty of the king in Parliament, thanks to which the executive, the king, and a majority party could—and still can—impose legislation over the whole country on any matter. This represented a concentration of power that in fiscal affairs far exceeded the limited and fragmented authority of Louis XIV, and that was wholly unaffected by submission to a small and easily corrupted electorate every seven years.

But Brewer particularly emphasizes the importance of money, which has always provided the materials of war. By doing so, and by stressing the enormous military power that money made possible, he has forced historians to rethink the nature of the early modern British state. He shows convincingly how Britain’s military and naval power depended on its capacity to tax and borrow, and how both were directly related to its economic prosperity, its administrative and banking institutions, its social structure, and above all its Parliamentary political organization. Public finance is not usually a stimulating subject; the eyes tend to glaze over when faced with rows of statistics about tax revenues, loans, and expenditures. But the destiny of nations hinges upon such esoteric matters, as can be seen by a brief look at England, France, and America.

Take England first. For three centuries before 1688, the English state had been unable to raise adequate revenues from taxes, as a result of which it was no more than a marginal player in the European power game, without a single major land victory to its credit between Agincourt in 1415 and Blenheim in 1704. Even at sea her record was not impressive. For example, in 1588 the Spanish Armada was primarily defeated by bad planning and bad weather, rather than by any feats of arms by the English navy.

Building on the work of other scholars before him, Brewer has demonstrated convincingly that after 1660 a handful of bureaucratic reformers carried out a “financial revolution,” which at last provided the English state with a highly efficient fiscal system. Parliamentary taxes provided the secure state income upon which to float a great raft of permanently funded government debt at a very low interest. The management of this debt was handled by the Bank of England and copied from the Dutch, and many of the creditors were Dutch. Thereafter it did not matter much that the English state owed far more than the French, since it could always borrow more, much to the astonishment of English politicians.

Walpole in the 1730s, Pelham in the 1740s, and the younger Pitt in the 1780s were all pacifists, not out of conviction, but from fear that the investors in the public funds would not forever go on laying the golden eggs with which to finance new wars. In 1741, Pelham remarked that “our credit has supported itself almost to a miracle; how else could we have furnished them [allied German states supplying mercenary troops, such as Hesse] with such vast sums of money?” In 1742, a British ambassador observed that “the rapidity with which the loan for next year was filled indicated both the great riches of our country and the great confidence the monied men have in the Administration.”4 It was this new found capacity to raise huge sums on funded debt at low interest that enabled England to emerge from an era of relative military obscurity to win the dominant place on the world stage that it held for just over a century, from 1815 to 1945. Even so, between 1750 and 1820, debt servicing in peacetime amounted to about half of net government expenses.5

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There were several reasons why investors felt that they could rely on “certain and punctual payments” by the British state. One was a tax system that included a land tax on property, a selective excise tax on some easily controlled internal products, mostly alcohol, and customs duties on imports. The burden was accepted because the taxes were more or less fairly assessed on all classes. Unlike in France, there were no large exemptions made for high office or high status. The rich paid a land tax, which was heavy during the two great threats to national security from Louis XIV and Napoleon, but fairly light in between.6 The poor were largely immune from the tax collector, and all taxes acquired legitimacy by being approved by Parliament. Enforcement was in the hands of a tightly regulated and more or less honest civilian bureaucracy rather than, as in France, by semi-militarized gangs whose depredations were virtually beyond the reach of the law. Thus it was England’s peculiar political, social, and administrative structure that made possible the fiscal system, which in turn made possible the public debt, which provided the money with which to conquer the British Empire.

But the English taxpayer paid a high cost for his country’s military and naval successes. According to the latest comparative data, which are admittedly of shaky reliability, in about 1810, toward the end of the largest and most expensive war in history, England was paying in taxes about 12 percent of its GNP, and in 1812–1815 about 18 percent. This was two or three times the proportion paid in France.7 But since two thirds of this taxation for war fell on the rich, the burden was seen as just.8

If efficient public finance was the major cause of Britain’s military successes, inefficient public finance was the proximate cause of France’s spiral down from defeat to Revolution. By 1716, the French public debt was already larger in relation to annual taxation than that of England would be a century later.9 When it came to borrowing beyond his means, Louis XIV was the Ronald Reagan of his age, although running a deficit in peacetime was a regular habit of the French ancien régime. What made the French tax system so inadequate was that it was thwarted at every turn by France’s peculiar political and social system. Loyalty of different interest groups or whole provinces to the central state was maintained by grants of special privileges and tax exemptions to each group and province. As a result, the state was largely unable to tax industry and commerce, or even the great landlords, and was therefore forced to squeeze what it could out of those least able to pay, namely the small peasants whose incomes and productivity were growing only very slowly, if at all.

Unable to raise enough money from taxes, the French state was obliged to pay for war not only by short-term loans at high rates of interest, but also by selling more and more tax-exempt hereditary offices. As elsewhere in Europe, this practice of the sale of hereditary offices had become common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, since it was the only way fledgling early modern states could finance great wars at a time when they were still too weak to impose taxation. It caused a permanent and cumulative drain on future government finances to pay the salaries of thousands of superfluous officials. The result is known as the “tax-office state,” a phrase that is applicable to much of the third world today, where bloated bureaucracies exist merely to provide employment and thus discourage rebellion.

The cumulative result of these fiscal failures over two centuries precipitated the summoning of the Estates General in 1789, and so opened the way to the French Revolution. The French state was thus in the end destroyed by fiscal collapse, caused by the “patrimonial” political and administrative system which had so long kept it going.

America provides a third example of the critical importance of public finance. When the London politicians perceived that the British would not willingly be taxed any more heavily to pay for war, they were induced after 1760 to try to force the American colonists to pay for the defense of their own precarious frontiers. This was not an unreasonable demand, but it was made tactlessly and arrogantly, and without stopping to think whether the financial benefit would exceed the political cost. The attempt ran up against the cherished principle of no taxation without representation—itself a legacy of the English Glorious Revolution—and led directly to the American Revolution and the consequent loss to Britain of its American colonies. Boring and recondite though it may be, public finance thus clearly matters, and Brewer is right to make it the prime concern of his book.

The Sinews of Power is not flawless. Since the book only covers the period between 1688 and 1783 it leaves out the traumatic climax to the story of the great hundred-and-twenty-year conflict with France, the prolonged and staggeringly expensive struggle between 1793 and 1815. This means that the most impressive fiscal achievements of the English state remain unexplored. All earlier wars had been paid for predominantly by borrowing: according to one calculation not used by Brewer, up to 75 percent of the cost of war between 1702 and 1783 was raised by loans, left to be repaid by future generations.10 The younger Pitt, however, was opposed to such profligacy, and finally managed to push through an income tax. As a result, only 40 percent of the cost of the wars between 1793 and 1815 was paid for by loans on the future, despite the fact that they were by far the most expensive wars ever fought.11

Brewer also fails to tell his readers enough about how politicians and the public perceived these wars at the time. We need to know more about the support given by different parts of English society for a land war in Europe to secure the Low Countries from occupation by any great power, and to preserve the balance of power; for a sea war to open up commerce; and for the creeping territorialism that created the new Empire in India. To do this would involve a more careful treatment of the prevailing culture, ideology, and mental attitudes of the British public. John Bull is nowhere mentioned, and there is no discussion of that spirit of fierce, vainglorious nationalism so evident in 1763. Nor are we told whether there was a countervailing philosophy of Little England—or Little Britain—arising out of the old antistatist ideology of the partisans of “Country.” And how did the politicians and professional administrators regard the state they served? Did they all agree with the plainspoken brutality of Robert Walpole: “I believe…that force is necessary for the support of government”? How far, and when, did there evolve a loyalty to the principle of public service for its own sake, rather than for personal advantage? Was Robert Walpole the last English politician to make a huge fortune out of the holding the highest office? And if so, why? Brewer discusses these matters briefly, but we still do not know all the answers.

Brewer may be exaggerating when he claims that the key offices for carrying on war, the Excise Office to raise the money, the Treasury to distribute it, and the Navy Office and Admiralty to spend it, were to an impressive extent efficient and immune to the “Old Corruption” that was the norm in other branches of government. For example, one has only to look at the huge country house of Duncombe Park, erected by the first two (hereditary) Receivers-General of the Excise, Sir Charles and Thomas Duncombe, to have doubts about the degree of success Parliament really had in curbing corruption in the Excise Office. One can also ask how Sir George Downing, the speculative builder of Downing Street, and the two Foxes, Stephen and Henry, acquired their huge fortunes from holding high office in financial departments. Moreover, although it is clear that the administrative system was designed to make cheating very difficult, excise men were not exactly respected figures in eighteenth-century folklore. They were looked upon rather as traveling salesmen were in the 1930s, as predatory, venal, and lecherous seducers of lonely housewives whose husbands were out at work. If we dismiss tax collectors as exceptions to a rule of diligent probity, one can still ask why, in the navy, officers were appointed through patronage, and in the army through a systematized sale of offices. Brewer himself admits that hereditary office-holding proliferated in the Treasury and the Navy Board. None of this sounds very “modern,” or particularly meritocratic or efficient.

Although Brewer certainly discusses the debate between the landed and the monied interests up to 1715, doubts, fears, criticisms, and open opposition to war thereafter have only a minor part in his story. Yet in 1749, Lord Bath observed, “the Army causes Taxes; the Taxes cause Discontents, & the Discontents are Alleged to make an Army necessary. Thus you go in a circle.” In 1761, just as England was winning one victory after another in the Seven Years’ War, a gloomy Tory commented:

our expenses to carry on the war are beyond conception, millions after millions must and will be raised, and not a word said about it; and it is difficult, however, to know how we shall be able to carry on the war much longer, or how to make a safe and honourable peace.12

One would like to know how many influential gentry felt the same way.

Nevertheless, Brewer has unquestionably written an extremely important book. Although other scholars have anticipated him in working out the details of the financial revolution, he is the first to bring to the center of attention the formidable fiscal and war-making capacities of the eighteenth-century British state. Brewer has thus twice changed the direction of British historiography: once, in 1976, when he destroyed the Namierite mythology of rule by a narrow self-centered elite; and with this book now, when he destroys the old Whig myth of a weak state. A handful of talented historians may change their discipline once. Brewer has now done it twice.

He also explains how and why the English managed to preserve their domestic liberties, while ruthlessly crushing opposition elsewhere—as in Ireland and Scotland—and conquering a world-wide empire. He convincingly argues that in fact the two went together, that the peculiar events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 led not only to a prolonged war with France, but also made possible the development in England of a Dutch banking system and of parliamentary control of the purse and the army. The British state was able to borrow almost without limit for violent military and naval aggression to conquer markets and sea lanes, and to crush all rivals. And yet at the same time the close control of Parliament over both taxation and the standing army encouraged internal prosperity and preserved domestic freedom and tranquility. It was a remarkable feat, and the comparison with Periclean Athens, so dear to contemporary Whigs, perhaps has a ring of truth to it. Only fifth-century Athens, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and late-twentieth-century America have managed to pull it off.

Brewer defines this historically rare political structure as “the fiscal-military state.” But this is surely a meaningless tautology, since all states the world has ever seen have raised taxes and fought wars. One of the things that made eighteenth-century Britain unique is not mentioned by Brewer: local government in England raised and distributed large sums of money—about 1 percent of the GNP—for a very extensive welfare system of relief for those who otherwise could not support themselves. One estimate is that in about 1810 a million English citizens were on the poor-relief rolls, many of them the wives and children of men away at the war. Thus the state both paid the husbands to fight and kept the wives and children from starving.13 I would therefore suggest that the eighteenth-century British state is better defined as the first “warfare-welfare state” of the modern world, a model that has become the norm in advanced societies in the twentieth century.

This Issue

March 15, 1990