The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

Explains how Louis XIV's reign ended in bankruptcy and France started on the road to revolution
Offers a total view of a state's financial situation, and shows how military financiers dominated French finances in the early eighteenth century
Explains how strategic overstretch can dramatically magnify the economic burdens on a state and society
Shows how governments can mishandle unfamiliar financial instruments

The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

Description

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.

The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

General Introduction
Part I: The strategic management of war and the financial chain of command
Introduction
1:Geostrategy, international politics, and the burden of war, 1688-1714
2:The king, his ministers, and the direction of financial policy
PART II: Raising money, finding money, making money: sourcing revenue in an age of crisis
Introduction
3:Taxing to the hilt? Structural weakness and falling revenues
4:Borrowing to the limit
5:Manipulating the coinage
6:Paper money and absolute monarchy
PART III: The degeneration of military funding and the rising costs of war
Introduction
7:The treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in the era of the Spanish Succession
8:The crisis of spending and appropriations in Louis XIV's personal rule
9:The overdraft of war: short-term debt and military finance
10:Rent-seeking in the military paymaster world
Conclusion
Select Bibliography

The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

Author Information

Guy Rowlands, Director of the Centre for French History and Culture, University of St Andrews

Guy Rowlands is Director of the Centre for French History and Culture and a Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV. Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661-1701 (2002), shich was co-winner of the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize (2003). Prior to his appointment at St Andrews he held teaching and research positions at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and Durham. His research interests span western European history between 1660 and 1800, with particular focus upon politics, war, and finance. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2007-08) and a Senior Research Fellow of the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust (2010-11).

The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

Reviews and Awards

"... a clear, lucid and easily comprehensible description of how military finance operated in the largest unitary European state of the eighteenth century ... will make this book one of the standard works of reference for all historians of French and European finance and state formation." - Aaron Graham, French History. Volume 27, Issue 3.

"In Guy Rowlands's scholarly and spirited new book, we dive into the underworld of French royal finance ... there can be few better guides to this underworld than Rowlands, who leads us to a deeply researched, thoroughly convincing explanation of the how and why of financial breakdown in this period." - Erik Goldner, H-France

"A lexical analysis of Rowland's writing makes the grim reality of the story he tells plain. ... Ostensibly focused on the financing of the war of the Spanish succession, this book has many ramifications." - Michael Hawcroft, French Studies

"this study provides a sure guide to a bureaucratic labyrinth and a convincing argument that the War of the Spanish Succession was even more of a disaster for France than has generally been believed." - Jotham Parsons, The Historian

"this book fills a crucial gap in the literature. One can only admire the author's ability to piece together disparate elements to document and discuss a number of important, if complex, issues. It will remain a must-read for all interested in Louis XIV's finance and one of Europe's most important conflicts." - Joel Felix, The Economic History Review

"Rowlands is meticulous and compelling in describing the gathering of the financial storm that hit France in the final years of Louis XIV's reign, and he employs a wealth of original material to document the interactions between the ministry and the officers of the royal treasury" - Julian Swann, English Historical Review

The Financial Decline of a Great Power

War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

Guy Rowlands

From Our Blog

The financial decline of great powers

By Guy Rowlands When great powers decline it is often the case that financial troubles are a key component of the slide. The vertiginous decline of a state's financial system under extreme pressure, year after year, not only saps the strength and volume of financial activity, it also proves extremely difficult to reverse, and the great risk is that a disastrous situation is worsened by misguided and ultimately catastrophic attempts on the part of a government to dig itself out of its hole.

Posted on February 26, 2013

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