Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective by BAILEY STONE Read Free Book Online Page B

states saw the enormous and unparalleled wealth
    available through trade and colonization as decisively suited for power-
    political purposes. For the uniquely ambitious French, who coveted conti-
    nental glory perhaps even more than maritime laurels, such largesse could
    fuel campaigns of conquest. For the fundamentally more defensive British,
    the danger was, as ever, that a power such as France, if dominant on the
    Continent, could destroy them, not only by denying them European mar-
    kets for their trade, but also by cutting them off from the naval stores
    (timber, hemp, and so on) lacking which no more British ships could ply
    the seas. Hence, mercantile wealth signified for London a precious means
    whereby France’s continental foes might be subsidized in wartime, thus
    contributing to the diffusion – and ultimate frustration – of the French
    war effort.
    In this “Second Hundred Years’ War” the British had over the French
    two interrelated and (as it turned out) insuperable advantages. First, as we
    have already noted, the islanders achieved an unparalleled harmonization
    of state and elite interests, of political and economic objectives. And this
    had crucial implications for government finances. The confirmation of the
    constitutional limits set upon the crown in the wake of the Glorious Revo-
    lution meant that state finance, previously considered royal in nature, came
    to be thought of as parliamentary instead. The mediation of private interests
    in Parliament engendered a sense of the public’s interest that stamped the
    20 On these issues, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 21–22; and Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies , pp. 134–35.
    The ancien régime
    23
    revenue departments as out of bounds to private interests. Moreover, their
    budgetary duties forced the parliamentarians to face debt and deficit year
    after year.21 And with Parliament ensconced at the center of political life
    in the kingdom, men with capital indirectly subsidized public policies by
    investing in the Bank of England, founded (significantly) just six years after
    James II fled British shores. The bank flourished, and by the mid-eighteenth
    century had assumed management of long- and short-term state debt. That
    interest rates declined throughout the century was ascribable to many fac-
    tors, but surely one of them was confidence in a regime held consistently
    to account for its policies and procedures. It would prove exceedingly dif-
    ficult for any controller-general of finances in absolutist France to borrow
    money on royal account at interest rates competitive with those across the
    Channel. Representative governance, then, paid fiscal dividends that over
    the long haul nonrepresentative governance, however “splendid,” could
    not match.
    The second great advantage possessed by the British derived from their
    insular geography. Protected as they were from the threat of sudden inva-
    sion by land that had long bedeviled their French opponents, they could
    afford to draw down their military defenses between wars and, most perti-
    nently, focus their armament efforts in wartime upon their navy. This factor
    was pivotal. Whichever fleet could command the seas could control access
    to naval stores in the Baltic, to markets for exports, to sources of imports
    in Europe and the Levant, and to colonies and commercial entrep ôts in
    the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Moreover, such control of
    the seas would feed on itself, for it would deny to the losing side in this
    confrontation the long hours of experience on the high seas failing which
    no navy could establish competitive standards of seamanship, gunnery, and
    tactics. Hence the importance of the statistics Paul Kennedy has recently
    cited suggesting the relative sizes of the British and French fleets of this era.
    In 1689, Louis XIV’s government could