Historians have long debated the effects of war on state formation in early modern Europe. Did military competition increase rulers' power over their subjects and forge more modern states, or did the strains of war break down political and administrative systems? This book seeks a rounded answer to these questions by comparing England and the Netherlands in the age of warrior princes such as Henry VIII and Charles V. It examines the development of new military and fiscal institutions, but goes beyond them to ask how mobilization for war changed political relationships throughout society. Towns in England, such as Norwich, York, Exeter, and Rye, are compared with towns in the Netherlands, such as Antwerp, Leiden, 's-Hertogenbosch, and Valenciennes, to see how the magistrates' relations with central government and the urban populace were modified by war. Great noblemen from the Howard and Percy families are set alongside their equivalents from the houses of Croÿ and Egmond to examine the role of recruitment, army command, and heroic reputation in maintaining the power of the nobility. The wider interactions of subjects and rulers in wartime are reviewed to measure how effectively war extended princes' claims on their subjects' loyalty and service; their ambitions to control news and public opinion and to promote national identity; and their ability to manage the economy and harness religious change to dynastic purposes. The book presents picture of societies and polities tested and shaped by the pressures of ever more demanding warfare.

While the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe has ranged widely, the participants have not answered its most fundamental question to the satisfaction of most historians. The difficulty has been how to assess whether war was more important than other factors as a driver of state formation. In practice it is more fruitful to study the role of war within a multi-causal model, but to do this the interaction between war and other factors such as judicial, religious, ideological, and social change must be studied, preferably in detail but in comparative context. A t first sight it might be thought that the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe is quite wide enough already. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries between history, sociology, and political science. It subsumes the ever more ramified debate on the 'military revolution' thesis first propounded by Michael Roberts in 1955 and elaborated by Geoffrey Parker in 1988. 1 It has spread its influence geographically: from at least Parker's intervention it has been tied to the origins of European global dominance, and recently attention has been focused on what eastern European developments can tell us that western European cannot, and on why China did not have the same sort of state-building military revolution as Europe. 2 Discussion has drawn in the fourteenth century as the proposed site for an infantry revolution, the fifteenth century as the scene of a gunpowder revolution, the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the locus for a more convincing all-round military revolution than Roberts's, and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the 1 M.

This chapter concludes the book by testing its findings against various models for the process of state formation in early modern Europe. In England and the Netherlands, it seems that war did shape the state in significant ways not only in the development of taxation, armies, and navies, but also in changing political relationships of many sorts. War was not the sole force for the concentration of power, but interacted with judicial, religious, ideological, and social drivers. Many differences in the impact of war, not only between the two polities but between different parts of each polity, can be attributed to geopolitics. Others highlight the differences in the political institutions each polity had inherited; the differences in the economic and social configuration of the two societies; the different dynastic traditions of the Habsburg and Tudor houses; or the different dynamics of their respective multiple monarchies.

This chapter concludes the discussion of towns by drawing out the similarities and differences between the impact of war on towns in England and the Netherlands, stressing the geographical and political variations within each polity. Towns in the Netherlands were more independent than their English equivalents, yet in some respects, war brought them more directly under princely tutelage. The processes that developed the prince's ability to deploy urban resources for war, however, might also consolidate urban communities and the power of their magistrates over them, and might result in a concentration of power in provincial states, where urban leaders might combine to direct military policy in the interests of their towns.

This chapter examines the impact of war on the economic and political structures of urban life and civic finances. Wartime destruction and interruptions to trade posed challenges to the management of urban economies, but offered comparative advantages to towns in more peaceful areas or able to claim privileges in return for their loyalty. War drove up civic expenditure everywhere, but the effects were most dramatic in the Netherlands in the 1480s and 1490s, where many towns were driven by their indebtedness into closer tutelage by princely officials. Yet war also served to consolidate the powers of town councils over the townsfolk and the surrounding countryside. Especially in the Netherlands, it promoted the concentration of power in the hands of a smaller oligarchy of magistrates more prepared than the wider citizenry or the guilds to meet the prince's demands.