Bringing the Contractor Back In: The Thirty Years’ War and the Fiscal-Military State
This paper challenges the notion that the military revolution of the sixteenth century was the crucial determinant in the emergence of centralized fiscal-military states in central Europe. Instead, I argue that warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is best characterized by the notion of the ‘contractor state’ which relied on professional military entrepreneurs (“mercenaries”) to wage war. I do so by investigating the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which was one of the largest and most destructive conflicts of pre-industrial Europe involving nearly all of its major powers and exhibiting unprecedented increases in army size. Based on novel, granular urban revenue and expenditure data the paper shows that financial contributions were extracted locally by military entrepreneurs and that these exceeded centrally-collected imperial contributions. In sum, the paper argues that theories of state formation need to move beyond tracing centralization, and instead consider how forms of contracting shape state formation and state capacity.
Victoria Gierok is a lecturer in economic history at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.
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