Guy Rowlands

At the start of the eighteenth century Louis XIV needed to remit huge sums of money abroad to support his armies during the War of the Spanish Succession. For this essential task the French government turned to the services of a number of leading international bankers, men who could provide foreign exchange on a vast scale through a multitude of European financial centres. However, the demand for foreign exchange was unprecedented and the remittance system was utterly opaque, with government ministers ignorant of its workings and almost impotent before its power. As a consequence, the bankers’ highly secretive activities proved ruinously expensive to the French state. This book explains how the bankers moved French money across much of Europe for Louis XIV, how the foreign exchange system was overloaded, and why the demands of war led in 1709 to a massive banking crash the French state could not prevent.

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.

The 'personal rule' of Louis XIV witnessed a massive increase in the size of the French army and an apparent improvement in the quality of its officers, its men and the War Ministry. However, this is the first book to treat the French army under Louis XIV as a living political, social and economic organism, an institution which reflected the dynastic interests and personal concerns of the king and his privileged subjects. The book explains the development of the army between the end of Cardinal Mazarin's ministry and the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. During this period the army was reshaped, not simply through the assurance of adequate money supply, the promulgation of reforming edicts and the imposition of tighter ministerial control. Rather, of greater significance was the awareness of Louis XIV and his ministers of the need to pay careful attention to the condition of the king's officers, and to take account of those officers' military, political, social and cultural aspirations.

In response to the decision by Edinburgh City Council to mount a new plaque on the Melville Monument in Edinburgh, in December 2021 the association "History Reclaimed" published this challenge to the Council's plaque and castigation of Henry Dundas.

The 2016 Canal Plus drama on Louis XIV, "Versailles", has once again thrust the Sun King and his great palace into public attention. But what significance does this seat of the old regime French government have for us today? Guy Rowlands looks at why Versailles was created; how it became the greatest centre for influence trading - international and domestic - in the western world by 1700, comparable to Brussels and Washington in the 21st century; and how it became a byword for corrupt and indifferent elites by the time of the Revolution less than a century later.

The military and strategic decline of great powers often goes hand in hand with their financial decline. This is normally talked of in terms of the sapping of the economic and financial base by military and strategic overstretch, specifically an overburdening of an economy that is already showing signs of underlying weakness. But sometimes there is also a problem of the transfer of vast sums of money out of the country because of strategic needs and priorities. This blog entry looks at just how this can happen, and how governments in such trouble can make matters far worse by misguided fiscal, monetary and credit expedients over which they have little real control; and it homes in on a striking case study - the final decades of the long reign (1643-1715) of Louis XIV of France, when catastrophic financial decline paved the way for even more radical and dangerous expedients promoted by John Law and which culminated in the Mississippi Bubble....

The debate over the UK's relationship with the EU and its EU partners has been given greater impetus with the certainty of a referendum by late 2017. Historians for Britain, a group campaigning for renegotiation based upon a recognition of the specific historical nature and past of the UK, has come under strong attack from a number of fellow historians for arguing that in some key respects the UK is different from almost all our EU partners. This blog post is a response to those attacks and has been graciously hosted by the Historians for History group at Royal Holloway University of London.

In 2015 I signed up for the pressure group Historians for Britain. This arose from a deep conviction, fostered by several years living in France and Germany, that the UK is different from most of the rest of the EU, and the UK needs to push for major reform of the EU. But it would be a mistake of historic proportions for the UK to vote to leave the EU in June 2016 - Britain's place is inside a reformed and flexible Union, and I am happy to back the big tent organisation Historians for Britain IN Europe. Close reading of the proposals and ideas emanating from the Vote Leave campaign, and their supporters, reveals that they fail to engage not only with the geopolitical dangers that would arise from a Brexit; they also fail to engage with the crucial issue of the service industries, which now make up 80% of the UK economy. At a time when the UK has a chance to open up cross-border EU trade in services - which is the best chance for UK economic growth for the next 15 years - Brexit would cut our service industries off from their best hope of exports and expansion. At the same time UK goods manufacturers would find their export opportunities shrinking, not growing, and France - historically hostile to British trade and especially to the City of London for over 300 years - would seize the opportunity of Brexit to damage the UK's commercial strength. Brexit is economically illiterate, and - as with all episodes in history when trade shrinks or is prevented from expanding - it threatens to depress government revenues for decades to come. The UK would be a weaker, poorer place outside the EU.

A personal academic tribute to the late Revd Prof Richard Bonney, who died in August 2017, focussing on his profound importance for French and European financial history, notably in the 16th and 17th centuries. This paper was delivered at an "in memoriam" panel at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of French History, held at the University of Warwick, on 9th July 2018.