Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV'S France

Rowlands, Guy

doi:10.1093/fh/crr059

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Where intermediation was weak, trade was lacking, exchange rates were volatile, or money was scarce, the costs of organising transactions through bills of exchange could become prohibitive. Thus, in the later phases of the War of the Spanish Succession, the French treasury paid 8 to 9 per cent in transaction costs simply for transferring funds internally, between Paris and Strasbourg, and bills on Lille were discounted around 4 per cent (Rowlands 2011, p. 511). By adding the Dutch side of the picture, it becomes clearer how personal networks centring on the heart of European financial capitalism aided military finance.…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The whole art of war is reduced to money’: remittances, short-term credit and financial intermediation in Anglo-Dutch military finance, 1688–1713

Brandon

2018

Financial History Review

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The literature on the financial revolution and the rise of the English fiscal-military state frequently gives the impression that a singular set of reforms emanating from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 changed the entire landscape of English army finances, allowing a fundamental shift from patchwork solutions based on short-term credit and managed through a system of wholesale venality to a solid system of long-term funded loans raised on an impersonal market. This article focuses on the crucial role that merchant networks and the personal connections of financial intermediaries continued to play in international troop payments arranged by the English state through the Dutch Republic. Even when the English or Dutch treasuries could find the necessary money to pay and provision the troops in time, getting the money to the military commanders in the field or to their distant suppliers often depended on long and complex credit lines. Short-term loans acquired in making military expenditure – consisting of unpaid bills to suppliers, payments advanced by officials and officers, and temporary loans contracted by financial intermediaries – as well as the widespread reliance on commercial credit in the form of bills of exchange as a way to transfer funds effectively formed the life thread of army finance. The ability to finance the military in times of exploding costs and permanent emergencies without defaulting rested not only on the capacity to draw on financial resources at home, but also on the strength of commercial and financial networks abroad. In doing so, closeness to the centres of emerging international financial capitalism seems to have been of greater importance than a specific set of institutional innovations.

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Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The whole art of war is reduced to money’: remittances, short-term credit and financial intermediation in Anglo-Dutch military finance, 1688–1713

Brandon

2018

Financial History Review

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“…First came Bourbon troops from 1701 to 1706 out of Toulon, Marseille, and Naples, preferring the safety of the beaches of Alassio, Vado, Savona, Sampierdarena, and Finale (controlled by the Spanish-Bourbons) over the danger of Alpine passes. 16 Following the defeat of the French at the Battle of Turin in 1706 and the subsequent evacuation of French troops from Northern Italy, German-speaking soldiers (Austrians, Hessians, Prussians) came next, embarking in Genoa's ports for the conflict's next flashpoint, Iberia. But Allied defeats at Almanza (1707) and Brihuega (1710) combined with shifts in the diplomatic climate brought an end to the war, resulting in mass evacuations in 1713 of these same Allied troops back through Sampierdarena to the German-speaking lands.…”

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‘The place for such business’: The business of war in the city of Genoa, 1701-1714

Martoccio

2021

War in History

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Scholars long have examined the early modern European business of war – the recruitment, supply, and payment of combatants by non-native contractors. With such attention on who conducted this commerce, however, scholars have ignored where the business of war took place. As Peter Wilson and Marianne Klerk recently have argued in this journal, war business was often conducted in politically autonomous cities. This article takes their findings further by showing how naval contractors and army victuallers conducted the business of war in substantially different spatial settings in one fiscal-military hub, Genoa, during one conflict, the War of Spanish Succession.

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’A man of particular ability’: A Jewish-Genoese military contractor in the fiscal-military system

Martoccio

2021

Business History

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In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in feeding and arming European armies from 1500 to 1800. Yet they have ignored the problems these merchants faced when they cast outside national borders to urban centres far from the battlefield, a multi-national mobilisation of resources known as the 'fiscal-military system' . This article uses a case-study of one Jewish merchant, Jacob Levi, from the port of Genoa to explore the essential brokerage role of ethnic-religious minorities in the early modern fiscal-military system. With knowhow built through his private businesses as well as a network of his co-religious, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as Levi's records show, other war matériel accompanied grain, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that Levi transited through the port in these years.On 29 May 1705, the Genoese prayed for a Jew to save them from annihilation. The threat had arrived four days earlier when a French convoy of four Men-of-War, three merchant ships, seven barques, and twenty tartanes (small ships) appeared outside the Mediterranean port carrying all manner of war matériel for the French army in Lombardy − 10,630 cannon balls, 3528 bombs, 24 cannon wheels, 482 bandoliers, 116 barrels and 114 bales of musket shot, 340 bales of cartridge paper, 7 barrels of nails, 4 barrels of flints, 8600 rock hammers, 400 pick axes, 158 bales of hatchets and spades, 23,980 pickaxe handles, 1800 pairs of shoes, 313 bales of woollen goods, and 18,346 baskets of wheat. 1 Such a fleet, while large, was not unusual; since the mid-sixteenth century, the ostensibly-neutral maritime republic had served as a critical military logistics centre, and for the last four years it had played a 'an essential role' role in supplying the French army in northern Italy fighting the War of Spanish Succession (1701)(1702)(1703)(1704)(1705)(1706)(1707)(1708)(1709)(1710)(1711)(1712)(1713)(1714). Indeed, the ongoing struggle over the Spanish throne between Louis XIV's France and his opponents from the Grand Alliance of Great Britain, the United Provinces, Austria, and Savoy arguably could be called Europe's first great resource war as these two Europe-spanning coalitions supplied armies from Iberia to Bavaria and everywhere in between. 2 But even by Genoese standards, six ships in the convoy -the L'Angelo Gabrielle, S. Andrea, Il Fortunato Rinaldo, and three smaller vessels -carried an especially volatile cargo: 3933

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Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV'S France

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

‘The whole art of war is reduced to money’: remittances, short-term credit and financial intermediation in Anglo-Dutch military finance, 1688–1713

‘The whole art of war is reduced to money’: remittances, short-term credit and financial intermediation in Anglo-Dutch military finance, 1688–1713

‘The place for such business’: The business of war in the city of Genoa, 1701-1714

’A man of particular ability’: A Jewish-Genoese military contractor in the fiscal-military system

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