5

Strains on Europe’s

Bureaucratization of Violence,

1700–1789

European rulers remarkable suc­

cess in bureaucratizing organized violence and encapsulating it within
civil society continued to dominate European statecraft through­
out the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. The vic­
tories Europeans regularly achieved in conflicts with other peoples
of the earth during this period attested the unusually efficient charac­
ter of European military arrangements; and such successes, in turn,
facilitated the steady growth of overseas trade which helped to make
the costs of maintaining standing armies and navies easier for Euro­
peans to bear. Hence European rulers, especially those located to­
wards the frontiers of European society, were in the happy and un­
usual position of not having to choose between guns and butter but
could instead help themselves to more of both, while their
subjects—at least some of them—were also able to enrich themselves.
No doubt a long succession of good harvest years and the spread of
American food crops, mainly maize and potatoes, to European soil had
more to do with the prosperity of the first half of the eighteenth
century than any merely governmental action. But the acceptability of
Old Regime military-political patterns was surely enhanced, for all
concerned, by the economic growth that set in all across the face of
Europe, from Ireland in the west to the Ukrainian plains in the east,
during the comparatively peaceful decades that followed the end of
the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714.
Nevertheless, in the second half of the eighteenth century, sharp
challenges to existing political-military patterns in Europe made them­
selves felt. One fundamental factor in the mounting disequilibrium
was the onset of rapid population growth after about 1750. In coun­
tries like France and England this meant that rural-urban balances
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