War, Money, and the Nation-State Let us now
Citations (1)
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers whole source · open book
The post-1450 waging of war was intimately connected with “the birth of the nation-state.”88 Between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, most European countries witnessed a centralization of political and military authority, usually under the monarch (but in some places under the local prince or a mercantile oligarchy), accompanied by increased powers and methods of state taxation, and carried out by a much more elaborate bureaucratic machinery than had existed when kings were supposed to “live of their own” and national armies were provided by a feudal levy. There were various causes for this evolution of the European nation-state. Economic change had already undermined much of the old feudal order, and different social groups had to relate to each other through newer forms of contract and obligation.
chapter: War, Money, and the Nation-State