Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713

Aaron Graham

[This book] offers an innovative and original reinterpretation of state formation in eighteenth-century Britain, reconceptualizing it as a political and fundamentally partisan process. Focussing on the supply of funds to the army during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), it demonstrates that public officials faced multiple incompatible demands, but that political partisanship helped to prioritize them, and to hammer out settlements that embodied a version of the national interest. These decisions were then transmitted to agents overseas through a mixture of personal incentives and partisan loyalties which built trust and turned these networks into instruments of public policy. However, the process of building trust and supplying funds laid officials and agents open to accusations of embezzlement, fraud, and financial misappropriation. In particular, although successive...