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Wars and State-Making Reconsidered - The Rise of the Developmental State*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2017

Steve Pincus  and
James Robinson
Steve Pincus
Affiliation:
Yale University
James Robinson
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Abstract

This article argues that the term “fiscal-military state” is a misnomer, particularly when applied to one of the paradigmatic cases of early modern state formation, Britain. Britain devoted a significantly smaller proportion of government revenues to military expenses than any other European state. Moreover, its overall expenditure included important non-military elements and massive investment in colonial development, a fact that standard accounts fail to take into consideration. The existing fiscal historiography also ignores large swaths of other types of state activity. Finally, the article argues that the British state—and quite probably other early modern states—was not forged in warfare. If war did not make the British state, this would explain why the British state was less narrowly focused on making war.

Type
War and the State in the Eighteenth Century
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 9 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l'EHESS 2017 

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Footnotes

*

The research on which this article is based was conducted with the aid of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The authors would like to thank Catherine Arnold, Natalie Basinska, Margaret Coons, and Alex Fisher.

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104. Our comparative intuitions accord with those of Innes, Inferior Politics, 76–77.