The Sinews of Power

Voici un ouvrage traitant de l'Angleterre du XVIIIe siècle.



The Sinews of Power
War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783
John Brewer

This powerful interpretation of English history provides a completely new framework for understanding how Britain emerged in the eighteenth century as a major international power.

John Brewer’s brilliant analysis makes clear that the drastic increase in Britain’s military involvement (and success) in Europe and the expansion of her commercial and imperial interests would not have happened without a concurrent radical increase in taxation, along with a surge in deficit financing and the growth of a substantial public administration. Warfare and taxes reshaped the English economy, and at the heart of these dramatic changes lay an issue that is still very much with us today: the tension between a nation’s aspirations to be a major power and fear of the domestic consequences of such an ambition—namely, the loss of liberty.

Voici également une analyse permettant d'aller plus loin.

Le livre de John Brewer, The Sinews of Power, a profondément marqué l’historiographie, en proposant la notion d’État militaro-fiscal pour éclairer la nature de l’État anglais et de ses relations avec la société au XVIIIe siècle. Il s’agit de comprendre l’étonnante transformation d’un État capable de soutenir un effort de guerre de plus en plus lourd et coûteux, grâce à une augmentation radicale de la fiscalité et de la dette publique, et au développement d’une administration civile vouée à gérer cet effort fiscal et militaire d’ampleur inédite, et ce tout en préservant les fameuses « libertés anglaises ». L’interprétation donnée par John Brewer s’est avérée à la fois efficace et heuristique.

he Sinews of Power by John Brewer marked a very important turning point in the historiography. In this book, John Brewer argues that the creation of a fiscal-military state was the single most important transformation in English government between the domestic reforms of the Tudors and the major administrative changes in the 19th century. He reconstructs the rapid changes of the late Stuart era : the drastic increase in the amount and incidence of taxation, the development of government Britain’s military involvement in Europe, the radical rise of government borrowing on an unprecedented scale, and the growth of a substantial public administration. Brewer argues that these developments, far from being inevitable, were the direct consequence of the political and diplomatic crisis which surrounded the Glorious Revolution. The analytical model offered in this book proves indeed very powerful.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporaine-2018-4-page-162.htm

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madame antoine