The British fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century

The 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.