Throughout today's world, bureaucratic authority remains as much an ideal type as it was for Max Weber when he formulated it more than a century ago. Weber envisioned it as structured, efficient, disciplined, and disinterested—in short, as “rational.” Yet in many countries today, bureaucracy is riddled with corruption, nepotism, and outright theft, founded on partisan or sectarian interests, and woefully inept. Still, even in its most horrible manifestations, it can present itself as a potent sign of “modernity” and freedom from the grip of the past.

The central argument of Aaron Graham's Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702–1713 is that the English fiscal-military state of the late seventeenth century and its post-1707 British successor did not strictly conform to the ideal of Weberian bureaucratic authority. The genius of the British state, as John Brewer in Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (1990) and other scholars have pointed out, was its ability to raise huge sums of money in order to wage war, but this was achieved through a very small bureaucracy. Graham has now painstakingly reconstructed the byzantine workings of one vital branch of the British state: the army Pay Office in the period of the War of the Spanish Succession. Graham focuses on two contemporary paymasters of the forces, Charles Fox, and James Brydges. The checkered career of Brydges is particularly well documented through the Stowe Papers in the Huntington Library, and it has attracted many scholars. Graham, however, is the first to detail Brydges's assiduous efforts to scrape together enough money to clothe and feed the British troops and their allies in what has become known, misleadingly, as Marlborough's War.

The first two chapters present fast-moving, highly readable accounts of how the British state funded war through a mixture of private and public enterprise. Graham depicts not a growing bureaucratic state, but one that depended for its credit, both at home and abroad, on informal ties as well as on the firmer glue of party politics. Graham underlines the importance of private remittance contractors, who provided the Pay Office with bills of exchange drawn on their foreign contacts or who sent bills abroad to be sold on local exchanges to those who wanted to obtain credit in Britain. Bills of exchange carried with them a discount, effectively an interest rate that gave the contractors their profit on the transaction. The credit system depended on that profit and above all on trust between the contractors and their connections. Within Britain itself, and among British merchant communities abroad, political allegiances facilitated trust and eased the process of exchanging bills. Fox and Brydges were both tories and employed party connections to the advantage of their office in finding credit for a conflict that raged through Spain, Portugal, and Italy, as well as the southern Netherlands and northern France.

In the chapters that follow, Graham gives extremely detailed accounts of how the two paymasters raised money. Because his predecessor, Lord Ranelagh, had left him a murky financial mess, Fox retrenched, giving little independence to individual contractors and instead relying on short-term loans from the Bank of England. This “rational” approach (in the Weberian sense) left the finances of the allied armies on a precarious footing. Brydges, by contrast, constructed a delicate web of credit manipulation based on his own personal and party contacts. Whether this succeeded better than Fox's methods in every instance may not be as clear as Graham would have us believe. Leading the allied army in the southern Netherlands, the Duke of Marlborough was handsomely supplied with funds by Brydges. The army in the Iberian Peninsula, however, experienced frequent shortages, and in Italy Brydges does not seem to have been able to establish stable credit links. The military consequences are only sketched in here, but they included heady successes in northern Europe and devastating setbacks in the south. Like most British historians, Graham tends to privilege the northern theater of war, which may give a slightly skewed perspective. Louis XIV saw this as a dynastic war about the Spanish Succession, not as an economic struggle over the wellbeing and prosperity of the kingdom of France, which he was prepared to sacrifice in order to pursue his family ambitions. The Duke of Marlborough's military brilliance and Brydges's network of northern European contractors ultimately could not win a conflict that depended on victories in Spain.

Brydges certainly tried hard. He drew on the credit of Jewish merchants, Italian bankers, and even some Jacobite exiles who were strangely willing to maintain the British army in a struggle in which their acknowledged king was fighting on the French side. Graham's meticulously researched narratives of credit arrangements offer remarkable glimpses into the mentality of moneyed men, who wrote fervently of their devotion to “Queen Anne's service” but constantly whined about the risk to their personal fortunes. Some of these twisted tales of international borrowing are bafflingly complex, as if devised by a demented bank manager. Nevertheless, they support a compelling argument about the utter dependence of the fiscal-military state on the foibles of individual creditors. Graham discourages us from perceiving these men as corrupt, but readers may wonder just how high a discount might rise before greed outweighed service.

The book ends with a fascinating comparison between British public finance and that of France and the Dutch Republic. Party affiliations, according to Graham, stimulated the credit markets in Britain and its Dutch ally, but not in France, where state borrowing was based on clientage groups and patronage networks rather than on ideological ties between the center and the provinces. While his conclusion opens up more questions than it can answer, Graham has left historians of the British state with an important challenge: Within the maze of contractual relations and partisan clusters that was the British state, can an emerging ideal of bureaucratic authority be discerned at all?