Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the
Eighteenth Century offers a new approach to the relationship
between warfare and state construction. Historians looking at how
war funding impinged on state development, and how state growth
made wars more significant, have tended to downplay the role of
military-provisioning entrepreneurs. Written off as corrupt and
selfish, these entrepreneurs jarred with the received view of a
rationally growing and modernising state. This volume shows that
the state-entrepreneur relationship was much more fluid and
constant than previously thought. The state was not able to enforce
a top-down military supply policy; at the same time it benefited
from the entrepreneurs' collaboration and their shared mercantilist
ambitions. The entrepreneurs' mobilisation of military supplies was
crucial for extending state authority and helped to knit together
national and colonial markets. But this fluid state-entrepreneur
relationship gradually became shrouded in privileges and
monopolies, not so much ideology driven or imposed by the
entrepreneurs but rather as an arrangement exploited by the state
to boost its control over them, whittling down middlemen and
ensuring the solvency and creditworthiness of the chosen few. This
arrangement spiralled into a risky inter-dependence and cramped
entrepreneurial competition. Rafael Torres Sanchez furnishes new
insights into the role of military entrepreneurs in debates about
warfare and state construction.
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