War, capital, and the Dutch State is the trade edition of the doctoral dissertation that Pepijn Brandon defended at the University of Amsterdam in 2013. In the book, Brandon tells a major story about state formation in Europe during the early modern period. The common view, building heavily on the work of Charles Tilly, is that warfare inevitably leads to the formation of centralised states with developed bureaucracies. Brandon convincingly demonstrates that the early modern reality was more complex than this abstraction. He shows that warring states used composite ways of organising warfare that ranged along a continuum from ‘traditional’ warfare that depended on markets, to ‘modern’ warfare organised by states. According to Brandon, not a single state in early modern Europe relied on ‘modern’ solutions alone. While providing some examples for other countries, Brandon illustrates this point chiefly by analysing the Dutch Republic between 1588 and 1795. As an important but decentralised state, the Republic is ideally suited for addressing questions about how decentralised states could be successful militarily, and why state institutions were not centralised.
The book consists of five chapters, besides an introduction and conclusion. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 provide relatively little new information to scholars familiar with Dutch history, but are nevertheless important to the structure of Brandon's argument. Three groups or brokers involved in ‘market’ warfare are introduced in chapter 1: merchant warriors; merchant administrators; and intermediaries. Brandon places the merchant warriors (the Dutch East and West India Companies, for example) into his brokerage framework in chapter 2, and in chapter 5 he connects debates about the Republic's organisational structure to his model of state formation. A strong aspect of these, and indeed all the chapters, is their thorough grounding in early modern thought, bolstered by extensive quotation of contemporary sources. There is also important new data (pp. 123–35) on navy revenue and expenditure. These data serve to rehabilitate the Republic's eighteenth century by demonstrating that the navy's revenues remained substantial and elastic. Brandon is able to show that revenues were spent mostly on operational costs instead of being wasted through corruption and mismanagement, as maritime historians have long assumed. Substantial prosopographical research documents the links between merchants and the navy.
Chapters 3 and 4 have most to offer from the perspective of new historical information. Brandon shifts attention from the literature's usual focus on taxes and loans to the more practical, but no less crucial, aspects of managing, transferring and employing these funds. Chapter 3 looks at naval shipyards. Here Brandon emphasises the considerable degree of continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Market involvement and the navy's commercial outlook are demonstrated through merchants’ role in directing the navy; implementation of an advanced bookkeeping system; centralisation of shipyards and warehouses in one complex; the use of public tendering for procuring goods; and the gradual adoption of mathematical design in shipbuilding. Chapter 4 focuses on army and military solicitors, who were financial intermediaries involved in paying soldiers and purchasing goods. Brandon is able to shed light on these understudied intermediaries through the archives of two solicitors. In doing so, however, he could have emphasised more strongly the military solicitors’ highly efficient businesses. The margin between the interest rates at which they themselves borrowed and subsequently lent to the state ‘in all probability at most times fell below one percent’ (p. 240). Subtracting operating costs, this must have left a very modest margin for solicitors’ labour-intensive and highly risky business. Some solicitors did earn substantial sums of money during their careers, but primarily as a result of their enormous turnovers of many millions of guilders. Focusing more on solicitors’ modest profit margins would have allowed Brandon to explain the Republic's motivation for continued reliance on brokers even more forcefully.
Two aspects of the overarching argument might have been approached differently. First, Brandon weaves his analysis of warfare and state formation into a Marxist framework of capital and class. This reviewer did not see much value added in this approach. It resulted in dense and fairly long chapters, and the argument contra Tilly did not require an additional perspective. Second, the assumption behind chapter 5 seems to be that had the Republic been able to implement reforms of its political and military institutions, this would have enhanced its military capacity substantially. The persuasiveness of this argument could have been strengthened by a counterfactual thought experiment. What, for instance, would have been the gain in the number of men-of-war if production had been centralised at the Republic's most efficient naval shipyard in Amsterdam? Would this really have made much difference in the outcome of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784)? And what does this tell us about the importance of the Republic's tax base, which was small compared to that of England or France? Brandon touches upon the latter only on page 134, and does not address this fundamental issue further. His argument could have benefited from looking more explicitly at the efficiencies of decentralisation relative to the inefficiencies of centralisation. How, for instance, should we balance the gains of England's centralised military apparatus against the much lower per capita debt that the centralised state managed to raise compared to the decentralised Republic?
These criticisms aside, and as illustrated by the several prizes and distinctions Brandon received for his dissertation, this research clearly makes an important contribution to our thinking about warfare and state formation.
