EKH Seminar - Victoria Gierok

Victoria Gierok at Oxford University will present a seminar titled:

Bringing the Contractor Back In: The Thirty Years’ War and the Fiscal-Military State

Victoria Gierok webpage (victoriagierok.com)

Abstract:

This paper challenges the notion that the military revolution of the sixteenth cen- tury was the crucial determinant in the emergence of centralized fiscal-military states in central Europe. Instead, it argues that warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is best characterized by the notion of the ‘contractor state’ which relied on professional military enterprisers (“mercenaries”) to wage war. It does so by inves- tigating the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which was one of the largest and most destructive conflicts of pre-industrial Europe involving nearly all of its major powers. Based on novel, granular data the paper proves that urban financial contributions were extracted by military enterprisers and that these exceeded centrally-collected imperial contributions. In consequence, average household wealth declined by 37 percent during this period and urban debt crippled long-run investment.