Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 181
the eighteenth century, when British naval administration started to
pay its bills with reasonable regularity, thanks to credits available to
the government through the Bank of England, British superiority to
the French in this respect became very marked. Easy credit made it
possible to expand the scale of British naval effort quite rapidly when
ever a war emergency required such action. Lacking comparable credit
arrangements, French administrators were completely unable to
match the remarkable elasticity that made naval power a particularly
supple and effective instrument of policy for eighteenth-century
British governments.^51
It is worth pointing out that contracts for supplying the British navy
with all the thousands of items that fighting ships and men required
tended to reinforce and expand the market mobilization of resources
within the British Isles, as well as in such outlying regions as New
England and the Canadian Maritimes where, from an early period, big
timber for masts had to be sought. The victuallers, who provided
meat, beer, and biscuit for the Royal Navy, had to feed a population of
anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 men by buying provisions inland and
delivering them to naval storehouses on the coast. In Ireland and
other remote parts of Great Britain, the navy victuallers did much to
stimulate the rise of commercial agriculture, while the spread of mar
ket relations into new regions and down the social scale within
Great Britain, in turn, sustained the tax and credit system that allowed
the navy to pay its bills more or less punctually.^52
The French navy never established such a feedback loop within
France as a whole. In and around the chief naval ports local suppliers
and contractors no doubt benefited from naval expenditures; but no
centralized source of credit gave naval expenditure the nationwide
force it acquired in Great Britain after 1694. High policy in the days
of Colbert and again between 1763 and 1789 might decide that a naval
buildup was called for. But general support for the heavy expenditures
such a program involved was not usually to be found among the
payment procedures were undependable. This reinforced strategical difficulties the
French faced in getting timber from the Baltic past their Dutch and British foes. Cf.
Paul Walden Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power, 1660—1789 (Toronto, 1956).
- In the War of Jenkins’ Ear, for example, British naval manpower rose from just
under 10,000 in 1738 to over 40,000 in 1741 and reached a peak of 60,000 in 1748.
After the war, in turn, naval personnel was cut back to 20,000 by 1749. Daniel A.
Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), p. 205.
- Cf. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, p. 171: “Maritime war did not
merely help her [Great Britain] to gain wealth, its progress directly increased wealth,
and the expensive fleet did not exhaust trade and industry.... Power and wealth reacted
upon each other, and increasing costs were met with increasing resources.”
