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THE CARING FISCAL-MILITARY STATE DURING THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756–1763*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2009

ERICA CHARTERS
ERICA CHARTERS*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, 45–7 Banbury Rd, OxfordOX2 6PE; [email protected]
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Abstract

This article re-examines the concept of the fiscal-military state in the context of the British armed forces during the Seven Years War (1756–63). This war, characteristic of British warfare during the eighteenth century, demonstrates that British victory depended on the state caring about the wellbeing of its troops, as well as being perceived to care. At the practical level, disease among troops led to manpower shortages and hence likely defeat, especially during sieges and colonial campaigns. During the 1762–3 Portuguese campaign, disease was regarded as a sign of ill-discipline, and jeopardized military and political alliances. At Havana in 1762, the fear, reports, and actual outbreaks of disease threatened American colonial support and recruitment for British campaigns. Throughout the controversial campaigns in the German states, disease was interpreted as a symptom of bad governance, and used in partisan criticisms concerning the conduct of the war. Military victory was not only about strategy, command, and technology, but nor was it solely a question of money. Manpower could not simply be bought, but needed to be nurtured in the long term through a demonstration that the British state cared about the welfare of its armies.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 921 - 941
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, Dr William Ashworth, Prof Laurence Brockliss, Prof. Mark Harrison, Dr Holger Hoock, and especially Ms Joanna Innes for their comments on drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the Huntington Library, CA, for a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship, which allowed me to complete research for this article.

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58 Boston Evening-Post, 2 Aug. 1762.

59 Boston Gazette, 6 Sept. 1762.

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71 The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the year 1760 (London, 1761), p. 51.

72 [I. Mauduit], Occasional thoughts on the present German war (4th edn, London, 1762), pp. 23–4.

73 A cabinet meeting discussing the ill-management of hospitals in Germany (at which Barrington would have been present) did not take place until mid-May 1761: W. Cavendish, The Devonshire diary: William Cavendish, fourth duke of Devonshire, memoranda on state of affairs, 1759–1762, ed. P. D. Brown and K. W. Schweizer (London, 1982), entry for 11 May 1761, p. 97; Barrington to Drummond, 21 Nov. 1766, W. Barrington, An eighteenth-century secretary at war: the papers of William, viscount Barrington, ed. T. Hayter (London, 1988), pp. 334–5; see also BL, Add. MS 73632 regarding Barrington on ending the selling of surgeon posts during the 1770s.

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78 Ibid., p. 138.

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