The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw many ambitious European rulers develop permanent armies and navies. War and the State in Early Modern Europe examines this military change as a central part of the political, social and economic transformation of early modern Europe.
This important study exposes the economic structures necessary for supporting permanent military organisations across Europe. Large armed forces could not develop successfully without various interest groups who needed protection and were willing to pay for it. Arguing that early fiscal-military states were in fact protection-selling enterprises, the author focuses on:
* Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden
* the role of local elites
* the political and organisational aspects of this new military development

Jan Glete

Preface, Prologue, 1. The rise of the fiscal-military state, 1500-1700, 2. Explaining the fiscal-military state, 3. The Spanish monarchy: the first fiscal-military state, 4. The Dutch republic: a bourgeois fiscal-military state, 5. Sweden: a dynastic fiscal-military state, 6. The fiscal-military state and the transformation of Europe, Notes, Select bibliography, Index