Pepijn Brandon

“The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)

ABSTRACT The Batavian Revolution of 1795 that overthrew the old stadtholderly regime of the Dutch Republic was followed by a period of intense political conflict in which popular mobilization played a key role. Among revolutionary elites, the main dividing line between moderates and radicals occurred around questions concerning the reorganization of the state apparatus and the writing of a new constitution. A full rejection of the federative model of the state that had characterized the former Dutch Republic became central to the repertoire of the radical faction in the National Convention. However, instances of protest and rebellion from below, often supported by the radicals in the Convention, generally remained conspicuously local in focus. This clash between national ideals and highly localized realities remains one of the central paradoxes of the Batavian Revolution. The form in which this process unfolded was peculiar to the trajectory of the Batavian Revolution, which more than any of its counterparts became centered on constitutional issues. But severe tensions between programs for the rationalization of state bureaucracy along nationalizing lines and popular support for far-reaching local autonomy existed in each of the Atlantic Revolutions. In January 1797, radical democrats in Leiden attempted to find an organizational form to solve this problem. They called for a national gathering of representatives from local revolutionary clubs and neighborhood assemblies. The response by the moderate provincial and national authorities was remarkably swift, and the initiative was repressed before the meeting could take place. Examining the failure of this unique attempt to bridge the divide between local popular mobilization and national revolutionary programs, as well as the discussion that followed this failure, can help us understand the possibilities and limitations of Batavian radicalism.

Marxism and the 'Dutch Miracle': The Dutch Republic and the Transition-Debate

The Dutch Republic holds a marginal position in the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, despite its significance in the early stage of the development of global capitalism. While the positions of those Marxists who did consider the Dutch case range from seeing it as the first capitalist country to rejecting it as an essentially non-capitalist commercial society, all involved basically accept an image of Dutch development as being driven by commerce rather than real advances in the sphere of production. Their shared interpretation of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, however, rests on an interpretation of Dutch economic history that does not match the current state of historical knowledge. Rereading the debate on the Dutch trajectory towards capitalism in the light of recent economic historiography seriously challenges established views, and questions both major strands in the transition-debate.

‘The whole art of war is reduced to money’: remittances, short-term credit and financial intermediation in Anglo-Dutch military finance, 1688–1713

The literature on the financial revolution and the rise of the English fiscal-military state frequently gives the impression that a singular set of reforms emanating from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 changed the entire landscape of English army finances, allowing a fundamental shift from patchwork solutions based on short-term credit and managed through a system of wholesale venality to a solid system of long-term funded loans raised on an impersonal market. This article focuses on the crucial role that merchant networks and the personal connections of financial intermediaries continued to play in international troop payments arranged by the English state through the Dutch Republic. Even when the English or Dutch treasuries could find the necessary money to pay and provision the troops in time, getting the money to the military commanders in the field or to their distant suppliers often depended on long and complex credit lines. Short-term loans acquired in making military expenditure - consisting of unpaid bills to suppliers, payments advanced by officials and officers, and temporary loans contracted by financial intermediaries - as well as the widespread reliance on commercial credit in the form of bills of exchange as a way to transfer funds effectively formed the life thread of army finance. The ability to finance the military in times of exploding costs and permanent emergencies without defaulting rested not only on the capacity to draw on financial resources at home, but also on the strength of commercial and financial networks abroad. In doing so, closeness to the centres of emerging international financial capitalism seems to have been of greater importance than a specific set of institutional innovations.

Introduction: maximising revenues, minimising political costs : Challenges in the history of public finance of the early modern period

Taxation is accepted as a fact of modern life, despite recurring political conflict over the nature and direction of fiscal policies. Most financiers regard obligations issued by the state as a safe investment option. Neither taxation nor state obligations were taken for granted during much of the history of public finance, however, at least not before the early 1800s. The ‘tax state’ developed in fits and starts, driven by the exigencies of warfare, which provided the main rationale for raising state income. Although wartime fiscal innovations eventually facilitated the rise of an efficient military state, the options available for implementing such improvements and preferences for specific fiscal or financial instruments varied greatly across early modern states. Focusing on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this introduction presents a framework for assessing these differences and introduces the other articles in this special issue.

War and economy: Rediscovering the eighteenth-century military entrepreneur

Abstract The detrimental effects traditionally assigned to warfare in the development of pre-industrial economies have obscured the prominent role that military entrepreneurs played in economic development in this period. Historiography minimises the extent to which war and the concomitant strengthening of the central state provided a whole new range of opportunities for capital investment, a tendency that has been strengthened by the paradigm of Redlich’s ‘decline of the soldier-entrepreneur’ and the technological determinism of the debate on the Military Revolution among others. The aim of this introduction is to look into the background of this relative lack of interest and to reaffirm the mutual dependence of eighteenth-century state-formation and the business of war.

Een ‘War and Society’-geschiedenis van de Tachtigjarige Oorlog

In this review article, Pepijn Brandon discusses Petra Groen (ed.), De Tachtigjarige Oorlog. Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog 1568-1648 (The Eighty Years War: From Revolt to All-Out War 1568-1648). The main strength of this work lies in its outspoken endorsement of a ‘War and Society’ approach to the Dutch Revolt, freeing military history from its old-fashioned, often nationalist and militarist streak, and focusing attention on the interaction between the military struggle and society at large. However the possibilities for reinterpretation offered by this approach are not fully grasped, and the gaps in our knowledge of the Revolt that become apparent from this synthesis frequently remain under-explored. Why do we still know so little about the motivations of ‘ordinary soldiers’ in the rebel army? Were military factors the main determinant in the eventual separation between North and South? In what ways did war influence the character of the new state? A more consistent application of a ‘War and Society’ approach would help to integrate these old questions in a new interpretative framework. In dit recensie-artikel bespreekt Pepijn Brandon het onder redactie van Petra Groen verschenen De Tachtigjarige Oorlog. Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog 1568-1648. De kracht van deze overzichtsstudie ligt in de toepassing van een uitgesproken ‘War and Society’-benadering, die de militaire geschiedenis ontdoet van haar ouderwetse, vaak nationalistische en militaristische insteek en de aandacht richt op de samenhang tussen oorlog en maatschappij. Maar de mogelijkheden voor herinterpretatie die deze benadering van de Opstand biedt, worden niet volledig benut, en de lacunes in onze kennis die deze studie blootlegt, blijven vaak onbenoemd. Waarom weten we nog zo weinig over de motieven van ‘de gewone soldaat’ in het rebellenleger? Hoe doorslaggevend waren militaire factoren in de uiteindelijke scheiding tussen Noord en Zuid? En op welke manieren beinvloedde de oorlog het karakter van de nieuwe staat? Een consequente toepassing van de ‘War and Society’-benadering maakt het mogelijk deze oude vragen in te passen in een nieuw betoog.

The Dutch Republic as a Contractor State

Over the last two decades or so, naval historians have taken their place among the large number of scholars seeking to explore and explain the relationship between war and the development of the state from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. In particular, much attention has been focused on the reasons that underpinned Britain’s long-term success which saw it eventually emerge as the world’s unrivalled leading power by 1820, and many comparisons and contrasts have been made between the British “way in war” and the ways in war that were pursued by rival European powers and others. As this has happened, much consideration – indeed, perhaps too much consideration – has been devoted to the administrative, bureaucratic and economic factors that influenced the military performance of states, and it has been acknowledged that the British state was able to adapt its internal government systems and structures so that they could cope at least reasonably well with the heavy demands imposed by recurrent and increasingly global warfare. This is not to say that historians have advanced arguments in favour of some crude form of British “exceptionalism.” Rather, they have identified elements of state formation that were evident across Europe but perhaps most sharply and effectively formed in Britain. At the heart of the debate has been a discussion of the emergence of what is known as the “fiscal-military state” in Europe. Although much excellent work on British taxation, fiscal policy and government borrowing had already been done, most notably by P.G.M. Dickson, it was the publication in 1989 of John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1989) that gave renewed vigour to the debate about the characteristics and form of European states and their performance during times of war. Brewer’s book exploded several myths as it explored the British case in a wide-ranging manner, but at its core was a focus on the state’s ability to raise money by taxation and, especially, through public loans; and it exam-