The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

This dilemma was made worse by Dutch vulnerability to the landward threat from Louis XIV’s France from the late 1660s onwards. Since this danger was even greater than that posed by Spain a century earlier, the Dutch were forced to expand their own army (it was 93,000 strong by 1693) and to devote ever more resources to garrisoning the southern border fortresses. This drain upon Dutch energies was twofold: it diverted vast amounts of money into military expenditures, producing the upward spiral in war debts, interest repayments, increased excise duties, and high wages that undercut the nation’s commercial competitiveness in the long term; and it caused a severe loss of life during wartime to a population which, at about two million, was curiously static throughout this entire period. Hence the justifiable alarm, during the fierce toe-to-toe battles of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13), at the heavy losses caused by Marlborough’s willingness to launch the Anglo-Dutch armies into bloody frontal assaults against the French.23

The English alliance which William III had cemented in 1689 was simultaneously the saving of the United Provinces and a substantial contributory factor in its decline as an independent Great Power – in rather the same way in which, over two hundred years later, Lend-Lease and the United States alliance would both rescue and help undermine a British Empire which was fighting for survival under Marlborough’s distant relative Winston Churchill. The inadequacy of Dutch resources in the various wars against France between 1688 and 1748 meant that they needed to concentrate about three-quarters of defence expenditures upon the military, thus neglecting their fleet – whereas the British assumed an increasing share of the maritime and colonial campaigns, and of the commercial benefits therefrom. As London and Bristol merchants flourished, so, to put it crudely, Amsterdam traders suffered. This was exacerbated by the frequent British efforts to prevent all trade with France in wartime, in contrast to the Dutch wish to maintain such profitable links – a reflection of how much more involved with (and therefore dependent upon) external commerce and finance the United Provinces were throughout this period, whereas the British economy was still relatively self-sufficient. Even when, by the Seven Years War, the United Provinces had escaped into neutrality, it availed them little, for an overweening Royal Navy, refusing to accept the doctrine of ‘free ships, free goods’, was determined to block France’s overseas commerce from being carried in neutral bottoms.24 The Anglo-Dutch diplomatic quarrel of 1758–9 over this question was repeated during the early years of the American Revolutionary War and eventually led to open hostilities after 1780, which did nothing to help the seaborne commerce of either Britain or the United Provinces. By the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic struggles, the Dutch found themselves ground ever more between Britain and France, suffering from widespread debt repudiations, affected by domestic fissures, and losing colonies and overseas trade in a global contest which they could neither avoid nor take advantage of. In such circumstances, financial expertise and reliance upon ‘surplus capital’ was simply not enough.25

In much the same way, albeit on a grander scale, France also suffered from being a hybrid power during the eighteenth century, with its energies diverted between continental aims on the one hand and maritime and colonial ambitions on the other. In the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, this strategical ambivalence was not so marked. France’s strength rested firmly upon indigenous materials: its large and relatively homogeneous territory, its agricultural self-sufficiency, and its population of about twenty million, which permitted Louis XIV to increase his army from 30,000 in 1659 to 97,000 in 1666 to a colossal 350,000 by 1710.26 The Sun King’s foreign-policy aims, too, were land-based and traditional: to erode still further the Habsburg positions, by moves in the south against Spain and in the east and north against that vulnerable string of Spanish-Habsburg and German territories Franche-Comté, Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, and the southern Netherlands. With Spain exhausted, the Austrians distracted by the Turkish threat, and the English at first neutral or friendly, Louis enjoyed two decades of diplomatic success; but then the very hubris of French claims alarmed the other powers.

The chief strategical problem for France was that although massively strong in defensive terms, she was less well placed to carry out a decisive campaign of conquest: in each direction she was hemmed in, partly by geographical barriers, partly by the existing claims and interests of a number of Great Powers. An attack on the southern (that is, Habsburg-held) Netherlands, for example, involved grinding campaigns through territory riddled with fortresses and waterways, and provoked a response not merely from the Habsburg powers themselves but also from the United Provinces and England. French military efforts into Germany were also troublesome: the border was more easily breached, but the lines of communication were much longer, and once again there was an inevitable coalition to face – the Austrians, the Dutch, the British (especially after the 1714 Hanoverian succession), and then the Prussians. Even when, by the mid-eighteenth century, France was willing to seek out a strong German partner – that is, either Austria or Prussia – the natural consequence of any such alliance was that the other German power went into opposition and, more important, strove to obtain support from Britain and Russia to neutralize French ambitions.

Furthermore, every war against the maritime powers involved a certain division of French energies and attention from the continent, and thus made a successful land campaign less likely. Torn between fighting in Flanders, Germany, and northern Italy on the one hand and in the Channel, West Indies, Lower Canada, and the Indian Ocean on the other, French strategy led repeatedly to a ‘falling between stools’. While never willing to make the all-out financial effort necessary to challenge the Royal Navy’s supremacy,* successive French governments allocated funds to the marine which – had France been solely a land power – might have been used to reinforce the army. Only in the war of 1778–83, by supporting the American rebels in the western hemisphere but abstaining from any moves into Germany, did France manage to humiliate its British foe. In all its other wars, the French never enjoyed the luxury of strategical concentration – and suffered as a result.

In sum, the France of the ancien régime remained, by its size and population and wealth, always the greatest of the European states; but it was not big enough or efficiently organized enough to be a ‘superpower’, and, restricted on land and diverted by sea, it could not prevail against the coalition which its ambitions inevitably aroused. French actions confirmed, rather than upset, the plurality of power in Europe. Only when its national energies were transformed by the Revolution, and then brilliantly deployed by Napoleon, could it impose its ideas upon the continent – for a while. But even there its success was temporary, and no amount of military genius could ensure permanent French control of Germany, Italy, and Spain, let alone of Russia and Britain.

France’s geostrategical problem of having to face potential foes on a variety of fronts was not unique, even if that country had made matters worse for itself by a repeated aggressiveness and a chronic lack of direction. The two great German powers of this period – the Habsburg Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia – were also destined by their geographical position to grapple with the same problem. To the Austrian Habsburgs, this was nothing new. The awkwardly shaped conglomeration of territories they ruled (Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, Hungary, Milan, Naples, Sicily, and, after 1714, the southern Netherlands – see Map 5) and the position of other powers in relation to those lands required a nightmarish diplomatic and military juggling act merely to retain the inheritance; increasing it demanded either genius or good luck, and probably both.

Thus, while the various wars against the Turks (1663–4, 1683–99, 1716–18, 1737–9, 1788–91) showed the Habsburg armies generally enhancing their position in the Balkans, this struggle against a declining Ottoman Empire consumed most of Vienna’s energies in those selected periods.27 With the Turks at the gates of his imperial capital in 1683, for example, Leopold I was bound to stay neutral toward France despite the provocations of Louis XIV’s ‘reunions’ of Alsace and Luxembourg in that very year. This Austrian ambivalence was somewhat less marked during the Nine Years War (1689–97) and the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), since Vienna had by that time become part of a gigantic anti-French alliance; but it never completely disappeared even then. The course of many later eighteenth-century wars seemed still more volatile and unpredictable, both for the defence of general Habsburg interests in Europe and for the specific preservation of those interests within Germany itself following the rise of Prussia. From at least the Prussian seizure of the province of Silesia in 1740 onward, Vienna always had to conduct its foreign and military policies with one eye firmly on Berlin. This in turn made Habsburg diplomacy more elaborate than ever: to check a rising Prussia within Germany, the Austrians needed to call upon the assistance of France in the west and, more frequently, Russia in the east; but France itself was unreliable and needed in turn to be checked by an Anglo-Austrian alliance at times (e.g., 1744–8). Furthermore, Russia’s own steady growth was a further cause of concern, particularly when czarist expansionism threatened the Ottoman hold upon Balkan lands desired by Vienna. Finally, when Napoleonic imperialism challenged the independence of all other powers in Europe, the Habsburg Empire had no choice but to join any available grand coalition to contest French hegemony.

The coalition war against Louis XIV at the beginning of the eighteenth century and those against Bonaparte at its end probably give us less of an insight into Austrian weakness than do the conflicts in between. The lengthy struggle against Prussia after 1740 was particularly revealing: it demonstrated that for all the military, fiscal, and administrative reforms undertaken in the Habsburg lands in this period, Vienna could not prevail against another, smaller German state which was considerably more efficient in its army, revenue collection, and bureaucracy. Furthermore, it became increasingly clear that the non-German powers, France, Britain, and Russia, desired neither the Austrian elimination of Prussia nor the Prussian elimination of Austria. In the larger European context, the Habsburg Empire had already become a marginal first-class power, and was to remain such until 1918. It certainly did not slip as far down the list as Spain and Sweden, and it avoided the fate which befell Poland; but, because of its decentralized, ethnically diverse, and economically backward condition, it defied attempts by succeeding administrations in Vienna to turn it into the greatest of the European states. Nevertheless, there is a danger in anticipating this decline. As Olwen Hufton observes, ‘the Austrian Empire’s persistent, to some eyes perverse, refusal conveniently to disintegrate’ is a reminder that it possessed hidden strengths. Disasters were often followed by bouts of reform – the rétablissements – which revealed the empire’s very considerable resources even if they also demonstrated the great difficulty Vienna always had in getting its hands upon them. And every historian of Habsburg decline has somehow to explain its remarkably stubborn and, occasionally, very impressive military resistance to the dynamic force of French imperialism for almost fourteen years of the period 1792–1815.28

Prussia’s situation was very similar to Austria’s in geostrategical terms, although quite different internally. The reasons for that country’s swift rise to become the most powerful northern German kingdom are well known, and need only be listed here: the organizing and military genius of three leaders, the Great Elector (1640–88), Frederick William I (1713–40), and Frederick ‘the Great’ (1740–86), the efficiency of the Junker-officered Prussian army, into which as much as four-fifths of the state’s taxable resources were poured; the (relative) fiscal stability, based upon extensive royal domains and encouragement of trade and industry; the willing use of foreign soldiers and entrepreneurs; and the famous Prussian bureaucrats operating under the General War Commissariat.29 Yet it was also true that Prussia’s rise coincided with the collapse of Swedish power, with the disintegration of the chaotic, weakened Polish kingdom, and with the distractions which the many wars and uncertain succession of the Habsburg Empire imposed upon Vienna in the early decades of the eighteenth century. If Prussian monarchs seized their opportunities, therefore, the fact was that the opportunities were there to be seized. Moreover, in filling the ‘power vacuum’ which had opened up in north-central Europe after 1770, the Prussian state also benefited from its position vis-à-vis the other Great Powers. Russia’s own rise was helping to distract (and erode) Sweden, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire. And France was far enough away in the west to be not usually a mortal danger; indeed, it could sometimes function as a useful ally against Austria. If, on the other hand, France pushed aggressively into Germany, it was likely to be opposed by Habsburg forces, Hanover (and therefore Britain), and perhaps the Dutch, as well as by Prussia itself. Finally, if that coalition failed, Prussia could more easily sue for peace with Paris than could the other powers; an anti-French alliance was sometimes useful, but not imperative, for Berlin.

Within this advantageous diplomatic and geographical context, the early kings of Prussia played the game well. The acquisition of Silesia – described by some as the industrial zone in the east – was in particular a great boost to the state’s military-economic capacity. But the limitations of Prussia’s real power in European affairs, limitations of size and population, were cruelly exposed in the Seven Years War of 1756–63, when the diplomatic circumstances were no longer so favourable and Frederick the Great’s powerful neighbours were determined to punish him for his deviousness. Only the stupendous efforts of the Prussian monarch and his well-trained troops – assisted by the lack of coordination among his foes – enabled Frederick to avoid defeat in the face of such a frightening ‘encirclement’. Yet the costs of that war in men and material were enormous, and with the Prussian army steadily ossifying from the 1770s onward, Berlin was in no position to withstand later diplomatic pressure from Russia, let alone the bold assault of Napoleon in 1806. Even the later recovery led by Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the other military reformers could not conceal the still inadequate bases of Prussian strength by 1813–15.30 It was by then overshadowed, militarily, by Russia; it relied heavily upon subsidies from Britain, paymaster to the coalition; and it still could not have taken on France alone. The kingdom of Frederick William III (1797–1840) was, like Austria, among the least of the Great Powers and would remain so until its industrial and military transformation in the 1860s.

*

By contrast, two more distant powers, Russia and the United States, enjoyed a relative invulnerability and freedom from the strategical ambivalences which plagued the central European states in the eighteenth century. Both of these future superpowers had, to be sure, ‘a crumbling frontier’ which required watching; but neither in the American expansion across the Alleghenies and the great plains nor in the Russian expansion across the steppes did they encounter militarily advanced societies posing a danger to the home base.31 In their respective dealings with occidental Europe, therefore, they had the advantage of a relatively homogeneous ‘front’. They could each pose a challenge – or, at least, a distraction – to some of the established Great Powers, while still enjoying the invulnerability conferred by their distance from the main European battle zones.

Of course, in dealing with a period as lengthy as 1660 to 1815, it is important to stress that the impact of the United States and Russia was much more in evidence by the end of that era than at the beginning. Indeed, in the 1660s and 1670s, European ‘America’ was no more than a string of isolated coastal settlements, while Muscovy before the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725) was almost equally remote and even more backward; in commercial terms, each was ‘underdeveloped’, a producer of timber, hemp, and other raw materials and a purchaser of manufactured wares from Britain and the United Provinces. The American continent was, for much of this time, an object to be fought over rather than a power factor in its own right. What changed that situation was the overwhelming British success at the end of the Seven Years War (1763), which saw France expelled from Canada and Nova Scotia, and Spain excluded from West Florida. Freed from the foreign threats which hitherto had induced loyalty to Westminster, American colonists could now insist upon a merely nominal link with Britain and, if denied that by an imperial government with different ideas, engage in rebellion. By 1776, moreover, the North American colonies had grown enormously: the population of two million was by then doubling every thirty years, was spreading out westward, was economically prosperous, and was self-sufficient in foodstuffs and many other commodities. This meant, as the British found to their cost over the next seven years, that the rebel states were virtually invulnerable to merely naval operations and were also too extensive to be subjected by land forces drawn from a home island 3,000 miles away.

The existence of an independent United States was, over time, to have two major consequences for this story of the changing pattern of world power. The first was that from 1783 onward there existed an important extra-European centre of production, wealth, and – ultimately – military might which would exert long-term influences upon the global power balance in ways which other extra-European (but economically declining) societies like China and India would not. Already by the mid-eighteenth century the American colonies occupied a significant place in the pattern of maritime commerce and were beginning the first hesitant stages of industrialization. According to some accounts, the emergent nation produced more pig iron and bar iron in 1776 than the whole of Great Britain; and thereafter, ‘manufacturing output increased by a factor of nearly 50 so that by 1830 the country had become the sixth industrial power of the developed world’.32 Given that pace of growth, it was not surprising that even in the 1790s observers were predicting a great role for the United States within another century. The second consequence was to be felt much more swiftly, especially by Britain, whose role as a ‘flank’ power in European politics was affected by the emergence of a potentially hostile state on its own Atlantic front, threatening its Canadian and West Indian possessions. This was not a constant problem, of course, and the sheer distance involved, together with the United States’ isolationism, meant that London did not need to consider the Americans in the same serious light as that in which, say, Vienna regarded the Turks or later the Russians. Nevertheless, the experiences of the wars of 1779–83 and of 1812–14 demonstrated all too clearly how difficult it would be for Britain to engage fully in European struggles if a hostile United States was at her back.

*

The rise of czarist Russia had a much more immediate impact upon the international power balance. Russia’s stunning defeat of the Swedes at Poltava (1709) alerted the other powers to the fact that the hitherto distant and somewhat barbarous Muscovite state was intent upon playing a role in European affairs. With the ambitious first czar, Peter the Great, quickly establishing a navy to complement his new footholds on the Baltic (Karelia, Estonia, Livonia), the Swedes were soon appealing for the Royal Navy’s aid to prevent being overrun by this eastern colossus. But it was, in fact, the Poles and the Turks who were to suffer most from the rise of Russia, and by the time Catherine the Great had died in 1796 she had added another 200,000 square miles to an already enormous empire. Even more impressive seemed the temporary incursions which Russian military forces made to the west. The ferocity and frightening doggedness of the Russian troops during the Seven Years War, and their temporary occupation of Berlin in 1760, quite changed Frederick the Great’s view of his neighbour. Four decades later, Russian forces under their general, Suvorov, were active in both Italian and Alpine campaigning during the War of the Second Coalition (1798–1802) – a distant operation that was a harbinger of the relentless Russian military advance from Moscow to Paris which took place between 1812 and 1814.33

It is difficult to measure Russia’s rank accurately by the eighteenth century. Its army was often larger than France’s; and in important manufactures (textiles, iron) it was also making great advances. It was a dreadfully difficult, perhaps impossible country for any of its rivals to conquer – at least from the west; and its status as a ‘gunpowder empire’ enabled it to defeat the horsed tribes of the east, and thus to acquire additional resources of manpower, raw materials, and arable land, which in turn would enhance its place among the Great Powers. Under governmental direction, the country was evidently bent upon modernization in a whole variety of ways, although the pace and success of this policy have often been exaggerated. There still remained the manifold signs of backwardness: appalling poverty and brutality, exceedingly low per capita income, poor communications, harsh climate, and technological and educational retardation, not to mention the reactionary, feckless character of so many of the Romanovs. Even the formidable Catherine was unimpressive when it came to economic and financial matters.

Still, the relative stability of European military organization and technique in the eighteenth century allowed Russia (by borrowing foreign expertise) to catch up and then outstrip countries with fewer resources; and this brute advantage of superior numbers was not really going to be eroded until the Industrial Revolution transformed the scale and speed of warfare during the following century. In the period before the 1840s and despite the many defects listed above, Russia’s army could occasionally be a formidable offensive force. So much (perhaps three-quarters) of the state’s finances was devoted to the military and the average soldier stoically endured so many hardships that Russian regiments could mount long-range operations which were beyond most other eighteenth-century armies. It is true that the Russian logistical base was often inadequate (with poor horses, an inefficient supply system, and incompetent officials) to sustain a massive campaign on its own – the 1813–14 march upon France was across ‘friendly’ territory and aided by large British subsidies; but these infrequent operations were enough to give Russia a formidable reputation and a leading place in the councils of Europe even by the time of the Seven Years War. In grand-strategical terms, here was yet another power which could be brought into the balance, thus helping to ensure that French efforts to dominate the continent during this period would ultimately fail.

It was, nonetheless, to the distant future that early nineteenth-century writers such as de Tocqueville usually referred when they argued that Russia and the United States seemed ‘marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe’.34 In the period between 1660 and 1815 it was a maritime nation, Great Britain, rather than these continental giants, which made the most decisive advances, finally dislodging France from its position as the greatest of the powers. Here, too, geography played a vital, though not exclusive, part. This British advantage of location was described nearly a century ago in Mahan’s classic work The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890):