Over the span of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, national armies and navies saw an astonishing increase; and more importantly, the supporting bureaucratic and fiscal apparatuses too grew, traces D. N. Ghosh in ‘Business and Polity: Dynamics of a changing relationship’ (www.sagepublications.com).
By-products of the rapid expansion of the fiscal military state were the financiers, writes Ghosh in a chapter titled ‘Fiscal revolution: Grip of financiers.’ A consortium of bankers, ‘monied men’ investors, speculators, and stock jobbers were living off the states’ need to borrow money to fund their wars, he adds.
In England, for instance, the financiers were commonly viewed as the true power behind the ministry and the monarch, and were also accused of making private fortunes at the nation’s expense, by lending the state their own and other people’s money, and by the overt espousal of a belligerent and therefore expensive foreign policy, informs a snatch in the book, citing John Brewer’s ‘The Sinews of Power, War, Money and the English State 1688-1783.’
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Among the many valuable historical narratives in Ghosh’s book is a section that speaks of how the years of greatest financial crises were also ‘the years of greatest sales.’ The reference is to the sale of knighthoods, baronetcies, peerages, and other types of honours.
There were also sales of offices and titles, and these offered ‘a quick road to social respectability for the wealthy and upwardly mobile mercantile families.’ Shockingly, ‘revenues from the sale of offices for the French monarchy reached 55 per cent of the ordinary revenues during 1630-34.’
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No different was the sale of trade privileges and monopolies, which ‘reached a peak in the 1630s when the monopolies on starch, coal, salt and soap raised 80,000 pounds a year, and between 200,000 and 300,000 pounds for the monopolists…’
Instructive reference.
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