The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

178 Chapter Fire

The grandiose character and ultimate failure of the Le Creusot-

Indret plan for supplying the French navy with cheap and numerous

heavy guns was entirely characteristic of the way things went in the

French navy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The

difficulty was that the army came first. Only sporadically did French

policy put major effort into building up a great navy. Colbert had done

so between 1662 and 1683 in order to defeat the Dutch. He suc­

ceeded so well that even when England joined Holland against the

French in 1689, the French navy initially proved itself superior to the

combined Dutch and English fleets. But French naval resources were

stretched close to their limits when the war began. It therefore proved

impossible to increase the size of the navy very much in the course of

hostilities, whereas in England both the means and will to outbuild the

French were present. After 1692, when fifteen French ships of the line

were destroyed at the Battle of La Hogue, English-Dutch naval supe­

riority to the French became unmistakable.

Two years later the French turned to a cheaper (for the government)

form of naval war, i.e., to privateering. This was a fateful decision. The

English, in effect, went the opposite way, inventing an efficient cen­

tralized credit mechanism for financing war by founding the Bank of

England in 1694. At exactly the same time, under the pressure of a

financial crisis provoked by bad harvests, the French government as­

signed the financing of naval enterprise to private investors, i.e., to

privateers. Continued state expenditure on the navy had come to

seem impossibly costly. The result was to assure Great Britain of

relatively easy naval superiority throughout the early eighteenth cen­

tury. This allowed Great Britain to come close to sweeping French

commerce from the seas during the Seven Years War. English vic­

tories, in turn, drastically reduced the resources available within

France to finance privateering, whereas within England commercial

interests gained such a strategic position in Parliament that resistance

to naval appropriations was effectually blunted.^46

Trade, 2d ed. (London, 1854), pp. 122–23; Arthur Henry John, The Industrial Develop­
ment of South Wales (Cardiff, 1950), pp. 24–36, 99 ff. An assured large-scale market
helped entrepreneurs to overcome the start-up costs in what, to begin with, was almost
uninhabited country. It offers on British soil an example of a much wider phenomenon:
for, as we have just seen, state arms contracts often provided a basis for establishing new
and relatively expensive technology on new ground: Russia’s Urals, Prussia’s Spandau,
France’s Le Creusot, are parallel examples of this same phenomenon.

46. Two excellent books cast much light on this fateful turn in state policy and power
    balances: John Ehrman, The Nary in the War of William III, 1689–1697: Its State and
    Direction (Cambridge, 1953), and Geoffrey Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power,
    1688–1697; From the Guerre d'Escadre to the Guerre de Course (The Hague, 1974).