In the midst of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Luise-Dorothée, Duchess of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, wrote in October 1758 in a letter to Voltaire: “You can bet a hundred to one that none of the belligerent powers will win in this turmoil and there will only be some dishonourable private individuals like some food entrepreneurs or money dealers who will benefit.”1 The Seven Years’ War can in fact be considered as a cultural laboratory, which created hitherto unimagined opportunities from an economic point of view as well.2 The global conflict thus provides numerous insights into the way in which early modern war entrepreneurs and war profiteers worked, as well as into the dynamics of financial crises and bankruptcies.3
In the usage of the early modern period, army suppliers usually operated under the French term ‘entrepreneur’. The Zedler lexicon thus defined the entrepreneur as someone “who takes on a certain delivery of clothing, grains, horses, etc.”4 Works especially devoted to this emerged in the literature on military theory, “to serve as guide to those who intend to become entrepreneurs”.5 In modern terminology, the army supplier or military entrepreneur can be
Contemporaries in the 18th century already noticed how the art of war was developing into a mercantile art of trade.8 Precisely a globally interconnected conflict like the Seven Years’ War increased the need for logistical structures such as only major merchants involved in long-distance trade provided. Globally expanded markets did not only bring new opportunities for profits, however, but also new risks and challenges. Obtaining relevant information or controlling monetary flows thus became more exacting.9 The tight intertwining of early modern warfare and economics involved a process of co-evolution of the ‘striving for infinity’ (Unendlichkeitsstreben) of the prince and of the ‘capitalist entrepreneur’ to which Werner Sombart already called attention: “Enlarging an army and capital accumulation” are indeed, according to Sombart, “related processes: amassing quantities: extending the sphere of power beyond one’s personal, individual assets: breaking through the physical and mental limits of the individual being, etc., etc.”10 The recent research on the ‘contractor state’ emphasises that contracting out the task served, above all, to increase efficiency in the procurement of militarily important goods for the army. On account of their capabilities and networks, private entrepreneurs simply took care of the provision of militarily important resources more
The profiteers of the Seven Years’ War discussed in detail in what follows include men such as Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–82) as grain supplier of the Prussian army, the intendant of Nouvelle-France François Bigot (1703–78), and the Scottish businessman Sir Lawrence Dundas (1710/12–81). Related examples of entrepreneurs will be discussed in what follows, in order to show how the war enabled whom to make profits and how civil and military profit strategies and markets played into one other. Moreover, the example of the Affaire du Canada, an almost two-year-long trial (1761–63) in Paris involving charges that the Crown brought against the actors who were attributed responsibility for the loss of Canada, will allow us to examine what potential limits were set to war-entrepreneurship and how its deviant forms could be sanctioned by the princely state.
1 Army Suppliers and Bankers in Prussia
1.1 Schimmelmann: Porcelain and Slave Trade
In 2008, in the course of the postcolonial reassessment of the culture of remembrance of German colonial history, one of the most dazzling personalities of 18th-century entrepreneurship, whose social rise is closely linked to the history of the Seven Years’ War, also became the target of criticism: Heinrich Carl Schimmelmann (1724–82).13 He is regarded by researchers as the “the most
Schimmelmann came from a Pomeranian merchant family and as a young man he first ran some businesses that ended in bankruptcy: among others, a transport business on the Elbe River.16 In the Second Silesian War (1744–45), he turned up as a Prussian army supplier, was robbed by Saxon Uhlans in a spectacular action, but then got everything restored to him after the 1745 Peace of Dresden. Schimmelmann settled in Dresden, married, and got involved in trade in colonial goods with sugar, coffee, and tobacco.17 He already took advantage of the previous situation of war here, purchasing devalued Saxon treasury bonds (debentures), which could be redeemed by Prussian subjects at their full value. Schimmelmann invested the resulting profits in a sugar refinery owned by the Berlin trading company Splittgerber & Daum, which we will meet again later. In Dresden, he first leased the excise tax on coffee in 1753 and then petitioned for a monopoly on sugar production in early 1756. But the Seven Years’ War began soon after, and in August 1756 Prussian troops invaded Saxony.18 The Prussians were counting on Schimmelmann’s local economic expertise, and on 19 September 1756, the King appointed him Prussian Privy Councillor (Geheimer Rat). His job was to ensure the provisioning of the Prussian army, which was supposed to be organised not only by way of requisitioning of grain, but also purchasing it.19 Along with his staff of 30, Schimmelmann managed to purchase cheaply from frightened peasants all over Saxony and to amass a fortune from the profit margin: the literature speaks of 1.5 million thalers.20 In the long run, however, another coup of the young entrepreneur
Although the city council of the Hanseatic city refused to give Schimmelmann citizenship, the entrepreneur, nonetheless, set up business there with his own staff in a centrally located palace with its own trading office (Kontor). In 1758, Schimmelmann’s brokers publicly auctioned off a large part of the porcelain stocks at prices including substantial profit margins.25 This did not do any long-term harm to his contact with Prussia; Schimmelmann continued to be too important as army supplier. His next field of activity as a war profiteer would be manipulation of coinage. In 1755, Frederick II had already leased the Prussian mints to Jewish monetary entrepreneurs.26 Schimmelmann now got himself involved and entered negotiations with these so-called Münzjuden
Schimmelmann, who had in the meanwhile become a millionaire, was wooed by the Prussian, Saxon, and Danish courts, but preferred at first to stay in the Hamburg area. In 1759, he acquired a property with a magnificent palace for 180,000 thalers in Ahrensburg, which was Danish at the time, and he lived like a prince, with a residence in Hamburg and a small ‘royal seat’ in Ahrensburg. In 1761, while the palace was being renovated, Schimmelmann travelled with his family to Copenhagen, where Foreign Minister Bernstorff had great admiration for “this famous entrepreneur who made almost one and half million in the present war”.29 In no time, Schimmelmann rose from chamberlain to General Commercial Intendant to the Danish Crown. In 1762, the Seven Years’ War flared up again in Danish northern Germany, as Tsar Peter III pondered going to war against Denmark; thanks to his quick overthrow, however, this remained a minor episode and the war came to an end in 1763 with the Peace of Hubertusburg.30 For Schimmelmann, this brought a phase as war profiteer to a close, but his social and economic rise knew no bounds.
In Denmark too, the parvenu made a display in terms of courtly prestige by acquiring a residence in Copenhagen in 1761 and the Lindenborg estate near Aalborg in 1762.31 He was subsequently accorded the rank of a hereditary baron or Freiherr and made a knight of the Order of Dannebrog. The Danish king had taken over the West Indies Guinean Company in 1755 and thus possessed four plantations on the Virgin Islands in the Danish West Indies. Since
1.2 Von Brenkenhoff: Horse Trade
Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff (1723–80) was born the son of a Saxon cavalry officer, but he soon lost his parents and ended up in the custody of Leopold I of Anhalt-Dessau as a page.34 Brenkenhoff remained in the service of the Dessauers also under the latter’s successors and gained experience in agriculture, hydraulics, and administration. His first biographer, August Gottlieb Meißner, called the Seven Years’ War a “coincidence that allowed him to earn more in a few days than he probably otherwise could have expected from the hard work of many years or even of his whole life.”35 During the siege of Prague, Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau (1712–60), the fifth son of the Old Dessauer, allegedly asked him: “Whether he was inclined to take over the deliveries for the army? But before he could make up his mind, Schimmelmann had
1.3 Splitgerber: Trader and Banker
David Splitgerber was the son of a miller and founded the trading company Splitgerber & Daum in Berlin in 1712.44 The firm experienced a gradual rise under the ‘Soldier King’ Frederick William I thanks, among other things, to arms trade and provisioning of the court. As crown prince Frederick II was already in debt to Splitgerber & Daum, but he settled all his debts when coming to power.45 Under Frederick II, the company experienced a rapid rise, which was essentially due to the three Silesian Wars: Turnover rose from 641,000 thalers (1738) to 804,000 thalers (1740) and reached over 4 million thalers in 1762.46 Profits from the Seven Years’ War of 1 million thalers were transferred to a reserve account. Crucial factors were the procurement of cash for the army and, like in Schimmelmann’s case, involvement in the ‘coin business’ with Jewish monetary entrepreneurs like Herz Moses Gompertz (1716–60), Moses Issac (1708–99), Daniel Itzig (1723–99) and Veitel Heine Ephraim (1703–75). After the death of Gottfried Adolf Daum, Splitgerber transformed the firm into a family business and in 1745 hired the Alsatian Johann Jacob Schickler (1711–75) and in 1748 the Berliner Friedrich Heinrich Berendes (1729–71), both of whom became his sons-in-law and co-owners of the company.47 Splitgerber acquired, among other things, the Palais Beauvryé on today’s Pariser Platz in Berlin in 1741 and the Schickler House on Dönhoffplatz (1746), and he owned country estates and knightly estates in Lichterfelde and Strahlau and a baroque garden adjacent to the city’s fortifications (1748). He succeeded in developing a close business relationship with the King, who made him into a multitasker. He acted as a victuals supplier, as well as a trader in arms and raw materials, and as a banker. In July 1740, he delivered grain from the Baltics, England, and the Netherlands for 400,000 thalers; in the first Silesian War, he procured “saltpetre, powder,
It is striking that none of the well-known Prussian war profiteers came from the western provinces. There were good reasons for this, according to Horst Carl, since the pieces did not come together here, “neither for supplying war materials nor for coin transactions”, since “a merchant class disposing of sufficient capital” for “business on this sort of scale” was simply lacking.52 How the allied army in northwest Germany organised its provisioning is the subject of the following section.
2 “Commissaries and Contractors, Who Have Fattened … on the Blood of the Nation”: British and Hanoverians
Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of observation Clerks and factors from the East Indies loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from the American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers and jobbers of every kind, men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity, and presumption. Knowing no other criterion of greatness, but the ostentation of wealth, they discharge their
affluence without taste or conduct, through every channel of the most absurd extravagance.53
The Scottish physician and writer Tobias Smollet (1721–71) used this biting mixture of ridicule and ‘cultural sociology’ avant la lettre in 1771 to describe the nouveaux riches.54 In Great Britain, entrepreneurs got rich thanks to, among other things, the opportunities in the slave trade that were created during the war, the profits that the East India Company derived from the war or by acting as army suppliers in Germany, and they made no secret of it.55 John Kennion (1726–85) of Liverpool was thus another well-off slave trader who owed his initial capital to the war. In the 1750s, he had already invested in shares in slave ships and purchased sugar plantations in Jamaica; during the 1762 Havana Expedition, he was then responsible as commissary for supplying the armed forces with food, clothing, and munitions.56 On Cuba, he secured the concession for supplying the north of Cuba with slaves, which proved to be a lucrative business. Among the actors involved in supplying the British army, we can theoretically distinguish between commissaries and contractors, although the boundaries are fuzzy in practice. Contractors were merchants who were paid a certain amount of money for providing products, whereas commissaries were officers whose function was to procure the army’s supplies.57 Jeffrey Amherst, followed by Robert Boyd and Thomas Orby Hunters (c. 1716–69), served as commissaries; Lawrence Dundas (1712–81) or Richard Oswald (1705–84) acted as contractors, the latter in the dual role of contractor and commissary. These
2.1 Taylor: Paymaster
Many of the protagonists mentioned amassed considerable fortunes during the war: like, for instance, the paymaster Peter Taylor (1714–77), a former silversmith who spent five years as deputy paymaster in Germany during the war.63 His quick profits were a mystery even for his contemporaries. Thus, in March 1760, the Duke of Newcastle wrote to General John Mostyn (c. 1709–79): “By the by, the proceedings of this Mr. Taylor are something mysterious, the length of
2.2 Oswald: Slave Trader and Baker
One of the most powerful British contractors was the London merchant and slave trader Richard Oswald (1705–84).69 Oswald already supplied the Navy with tar and turpentine before the war; but his great hour as army supplier first arrived with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Many years of experience in “shipping and trade, plantation economy and slave trade” helped him and his partner John Mill to fulfil their contracts with “distinction”.70 When the British military involvement in the German territories expanded then in 1758, the
2.3 Uckermann: Army Supplier, Merchant, and Project Maker
If I am correctly judging Uckermann’s design, he wants to establish a monopoly of victuals at Kassel. For if I could procure freedom from excise for him, first no other merchant would be able to match his price, then, however, when he had mastered the trade, no soldier would be able to pay for his victuals. I cannot allow myself to be involved in this project.85
The misfortune stems from the indescribably wicked English commissariat, which partly out of clumsiness, but still more due to self-interested intentions and by way of deceitful entrepreneurs does not take suitable precaution and then, when there is hardship, pounces on the poor country … One’s heart bleeds when one considers that to make such people as Massau and Uckermann rich, so many thousands of the King’s loyal subjects have been reduced to beggary in proprio sensu.88
3 Profiteers on Trial: The Affaire du Canada
Military corruption was particularly pronounced in the army of the country that suffered the greatest territorial losses in the Seven Years’ War: namely, France.92 During the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), the French monarchy had abandoned the régie system, i.e. central administration of army provisioning, and revived the institution of munitionnaires généraux.93 A group of around a dozen merchants thus acquired influence as monopolists. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, Étienne-François de Choiseul (1719–85) went back to the régie system, since trust in the private entrepreneurs had suffered badly.94 The provisioning of the French army in Germany was carried out by a special firm named Munitionnaires généraux des vivres de Flandres et d’Allemagne under director Jacques Marquet de Bourgade (1718–84). While it was done in such a way that, despite some critical voices, its profiteers were not exposed to any public sanctions, the government increasingly set its sights
3.1 François Bigot: Intendant of Nouvelle-France
François Bigot came from a family in Bordeaux that had already been well-established in the commercial and financial sector for many generations.100 The young Bigot began his career in naval administration and rose to the position of “resident commissary of the Marine” in Rochefort.101 On 1 May 1739, he was promoted to the position of Financial Commissary of Louisbourg,
On 21 September 1760, Bigot set off on his way back to France; on 17 November, he was arrested and put on trial in the case that made legal history as the Affaire du Canada.108 On 10 December 1763, the verdict was handed down: Bigot was banished and all his possession were confiscated. He was given a fine of 1.5 million livres. It was difficult for the government to obtain information
3.2 Joseph-Michel Cadet: Merchant Butcher, Businessman, and Purveyor General
Another member of Bigot’s ‘gang’, Joseph Michel Cadet, was born in Quebec and came from a well-connected family of merchant butchers.109 During the Seven Years’ War, he acted as purveyor general of the French army in Canada. In 1745, during the War of Austrian Succession, he had already begun supplying meat to the army. He accumulated so much capital during this time that he was able to act as a general contractor who charted his own ships and whose supply of goods was almost limitless. With the support of the French intendant François Bigot, on 25 October 1756, Cadet managed to negotiate a contract with the Crown that secured him the privileges of a general supplier for the next nine years. In it, Cadet undertook to provide each soldier in the field with a daily ration of “two pounds of bread, a quarter of a pound of dried peas, and either a pound of beef or half a pound of bacon”. There were other secret contracts lying behind this contract and a whole group of profiteers, including Péan, Intendant Bigot, and Governor Vaudreuil, benefited from them. Cadet initially got a one-fifth share, but in 1759 he secured a further one-fifth from partners who had withdrawn from the arrangement. During the war, Cadet assured the trade with the motherland using his own fleet of ships, half of which did not make it through, but thanks to which he, nonetheless, made an essential contribution to the resilience of Nouvelle-France up to 1759. At the same time, this was an affront to the French navy, since it did not succeed in
Cadet was now confronted by huge debt claims, which he paid in part by selling his real estate holdings in Quebec. But this did not prevent him from entering the French real estate business himself, sometimes surreptitiously, in a big way. Already at the start of 1767, he succeeded in acquiring various estates “consisting of ancient castles partly demolished, share-croppers’ houses, farms, water-mills, forests, arable lands, meadows, vineyards, thatched cottages, feudal dues … in Poitou, Maine and Touraine.”110 Much like his British colleagues, he spent half his time conducting business in the suburbs of Paris and half on his estate near Blois in the Loire Valley.111 Whether Cadet would have been “acclaimed as a hero and a public benefactor” in the event of French success in the Seven Years’ War, as John Francis Bosher claims, strikes me as rather questionable when comparison is made to the other war profiteers discussed, although the government would certainly not have been as persistent in making demands of him.
For even in victorious Great Britain, the government was on the tracks of the deviant commissaries and contractors. Already during the war, commissions were formed again and again to get to the bottom of possible irregularities.112 Opponents of military involvement in Germany fueled the British public debate. The greed of the commissaries was, for instance, informally sanctioned in plays like Samuel Foote’s comedy The Commissary (1765), which was modelled on Dundas.113 It is striking that the critical voices in the British public debate got articulated not during, but only after the war, at a time when the rapid increase in public debt encouraged having a look back into the
4 Conclusion
Although, in and of themselves, many of the careers presented seem to have something unique about them – “the richest man from”, “the biggest war profiteer in” or “the greatest fall” – from a comparative perspective, the profiteers exhibit some common patterns: patterns that reveal structural mechanisms and cultural models of interpretation, evaluation and action lying behind the individual biographical trajectories. All of them invested in spectacular real estate holdings and acquired lavish urban residences, country estates and businesses. This was, on the one hand, a symbolic expression of their ascent into the ranks of nobles and gentlemen; at the same time, it was also an economic investment, that was, for instance, supposed to be of long-term benefit for their family.116 Not many entrepreneurs will have intended to shift the centre of their existence to the countryside; they continued to rely on their urban contacts and networks.117 Their rise in status was also legally consolidated: Brenkenhoff was already part of the nobility, Schimmelmann rose to the status of a baron and later a count, Uckermann rose into the ranks of the imperial baronry (Reichsfreiherrnstand), Dundas became a baronet and in the case of Splitgerber, his son was made David von Splitgerber (1741–1826) and a member of the hereditary Prussian nobility in 1789.118
Another commonality, although not of all the entrepreneurs mentioned, was that they again and again slipped into the role of expert.119 This was perhaps most pronounced in the case of Splitgerber, who was frequently asked
If this was lacking, margins for manoeuvre appeared that were exploited in a variety of ways, were viewed critically in the contemporary public debate, and were severely sanctioned by the authorities in the event of military failure.
War became an engine of social mobility for a group of war profiteers. It is notable that in the contemporary assessment, crass parvenus like Schimmelmann, Taylor, and Uckermann were more often depicted as deviant than more established actors like Splitgerber or Oswald; indeed Oswald himself warned directly about Uckermann’s behaviour. There can, however, be different reasons for this. On the one hand, the parvenus may have encountered prejudice and greater scepticism because they were rapidly altering social power relations. On the other hand, it may also be the case that they really had not yet internalised the rules of the entrepreneurial game that well, such that they made mistakes. When addressing the question of punishment of deviant, personal
Looking at the Seven Years’ War placed the focus on a specific time span, which often represented merely a segment of the careers in war profiteering of the entrepreneurs discussed, many of whom had already been active in the War of Austrian Succession or in the first two Silesian Wars and whose entrepreneurial activity – with some exceptions from the Affaire du Canada case – continued well beyond the end of the Seven Years’ War. The Seven Years’ War was, nonetheless, a crucial event that served to consolidate certain logistical requirements and resulting margins of manoeuvre for private entrepreneurs, and it can serve as a measure of the fragile condition of political economy in the early modern princely state.
Voltaire‘s Correspondence, 34, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva, 1958), p. 146: “il y a à parier cent contre un qu›aucune des puissances beligérantes gagnera de ces troubles et qu’il n’y aura peutêtre que quelques malhonêtes particuliers, par exemple, quelques entrepreneurs des subsistances ou négociant d’argent qui en profitrons”.
Marian Füssel, Der Preis des Ruhms: Eine Weltgeschichte des Siebenjährigen Krieges, 2nd ed. (Munich, 2020).
Isabel Schnabel, Hyun Song Shin, “Liquidity and Contagion: The Crisis of 1763,” Journal of the European Economic Association 2:6 (2004), 929–968; Stephan Skalweit, Die Berliner Wirtschaftskrise von 1763 und ihre Hintergründe (Stuttgart, 1937); Hugo Rachel, Paul Wallich, Berliner Grosskaufleute und Kapitalisten, 2 (Berlin, 1938; repr. Berlin, 1967); more generally, also Rolf Straubel, Zwischen monarchischer Autokratie und bürgerlichem Emanzipationsstreben: Beamte und Kaufleute als Träger handels- und gewerbepolitischer Veränderungen im friderizianischen Preußen (1740–1806) (Berlin, 2012).
“Entrepreneur,” in Universal-Lexicon …, 8, ed. Johann H. Zedler (Leipzig/Halle, 1734), col. 1295.
Louis Dupré d’Aulnay, Traité général des subsistances militaires, 1–2 (Paris, 1744), pp. V, 187.
Markus Meumann, “Heereslieferant,” in Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, 5 (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2007), col. 275–277, here, in particular, col. 275; as standard work, still see Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and His Work Force: A Study in European Economic and Social History, 1–2 (Wiesbaden, 1964–65); more recent studies are collected in War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean: 1300–1800, ed. Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden, 2014).
Johann G. Krünitz, “Entrepreneur,” in Oeconomische Encyclopädie, 11 (Berlin, 1777), pp. 75–76.
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 230.
Tim Neu, “Glocal Credit: Die britische Finanzlogistik als fraktales Phänomen am Beispiel des Siebenjährigen Krieges,” in Der Siebenjährige Krieg 1756–1763: Mikro- und Makro- perspektiven, ed. Marian Füssel (Berlin/Boston, 2021), 75–93.
Werner Sombart, Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Kapitalismus, 2 (Munich/Leipzig, 1913), pp. 32–33.
Rafael Torres Sánchez, Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2016); The Contractor States and its Implications (1659–1815), eds. Richard Harding, Sergio Solbes Ferri (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2012); Peter H. Wilson, “The European Fiscal-Military System and the Habsburg Monarchy,” in The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State c. 1648–1815, eds. William Godsey, Petr Mat’a, and Thomas Winkelbauer (Oxford, 2022), 85–103.
“Die Generalprinzipien des Krieges,” in Die Werke Friedrichs des Großen, ed. Gustav B. Volz, 6 (Berlin, 1913), 1–86, p. 15.
Martin Krieger, “Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann,” in Kein Platz an der Sonne: Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer (Frankfurt a.M., 2013), 311–322.
Horst Carl, Okkupation und Regionalismus: Die preussischen Westprovinzen im Siebenjährigen Krieg (Mainz, 1993), p. 220.
Schimmelmann – PP: Hamburg entfernt ein Kolonialdenkmal: Lesungen, Vorträge, Kurzfilme: Beiträge zur Veranstaltungsreihe vom 28. bis 30. November 2008 im FRISE-Künstlerhaus /Abbildungszentrum Hamburg im Rahmen des Projekts Wandsbektransformance – Die Gegenwart des Kolonialen, ed. Hanni Jokinen (Hamburg, 2009).
Christian Degn, Die Schimmelmanns im atlantischen Dreieckshandel: Gewinn und Gewissen (Neumünster, 1974).
On the context, see Christian Hochmuth, Globale Güter – lokale Aneignung: Kaffee, Tee, Schokolade und Tabak im frühneuzeitlichen Dresden (Konstanz, 2008).
Füssel, Preis des Ruhms, pp. 112–115.
For a recent study on Prussian logistics, see Marcus Warnke, Logistik und friderizianische Kriegführung: Eine Studie zur Verteilung, Mobilisierung und Wirkungsmächtigkeit militärisch relevanter Ressourcen im Siebenjährigen Krieg am Beispiel des Jahres 1757 (Berlin, 2018).
Wilhelm Treue, Wirtschafts- und Technikgeschichte Preußens (Berlin, 1984), p. 97.
Alessandro Monti, Der Preis des ‘weißen Goldes’: Preispolitik und -strategie im Merkantilsystem am Beispiel der Porzellanmanufaktur Meißen 1710–1830 (Munich, 2011), p. 176.
Gisela Zick, Berliner Porzellan der Manufaktur von Wilhelm Caspar Wegely 1751–1757 (Berlin, 1978); Friedrich Wilckens, Krepon, Kredit und Porzellan: Vom steilen Aufstieg und tiefen Fall der Unternehmerfamilie Wegeli aus Diessenhofen im Berlin des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frauenfeld, 2008).
Isabelle Pantel, Die hamburgische Neutralität im Siebenjährigen Krieg (Münster, 2011).
Richard Haehl, Samuel Hahnemann: Sein Leben und Schaffen (Leipzig, 1922), p. 8.
Advertisements from the Hamburgischer Correspondent in Degn, Schimmelmanns, p. 8.
Reinhold Koser, “Die preußischen Finanzen im Siebenjährigen Krieg,” Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte 13 (1900), 153–217, 329–375; Jörg K. Hoensch, “Friedrichs II. Währungsmanipulationen im Siebenjährigen Krieg und ihre Auswirkungen auf die polnische Münzreform von 1765/66,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 22 (1973), 110–175; Peter Blastenbrei, “Der König und das Geld: Studien zur Finanzpolitik Friedrichs II. von Preußen,” Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte, n.s., 6 (1996), 55–82.
Konrad Schneider, “Zum Geldhandel in Hamburg zur Zeit des Siebenjährigen Krieges,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 69 (1983), 62–82. Besides the money trade, the neutral Netherlands also played a role in the grain trade and logistics of various warring parties, see Alice Clare Carter, The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years’ War (London, 1972), pp. 129–152.
Degn, Schimmelmanns, pp. 8–9.
Degn, Schimmelmanns, p. 12.
Füssel, Preis des Ruhms, p. 442–443.
Degn, Schimmelmanns, pp. 14–15.
Degn, Schimmelmanns, p. 67.
Denmark first abolished the slave trade in 1792, see Erik Gøbel, The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition (Leiden/Boston, 2017).
Benno von Knobelsdorff-Brenkenhoff, Eine Provinz im Frieden erobert: Brenckenhoff als Leiter des friderizianischen Retablissements in Pommern 1762–1780 (Cologne, 1984), pp. 11–13.
August Gottlieb Meißner, Leben Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff, Königl. Preuß. geheim. Ober-Finanz-Kriegs- und Domainenrath (Leipzig, 1782), p. 16.
Meißner, Leben, pp. 16–17. The Wispel was a grain measure differing from territory to territory. A Prussian Wispel equalled 24 Scheffel (bushel) which is about 1,319.1 litres.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., pp. 32–37.
Ibid., p. 38; Knobelsdorff-Brenkenhoff, Provinz, pp. 13–29.
Knobelsdorff-Brenkenhoff, Provinz.
Richard Berg, “Der Brenkenhoffsche Defekt: Nach den Akten des Pommerschen und des Geheimen Staatsarchivs,” Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte 11 (1898), 493–525.
Wilhelm Treue, “David Splitgerber (1683–1764): Ein Unternehmer im preußischen Merkantilstaat,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 41 (1954), 235–267.
Treue, “Splitgerber,” p. 261.
Treue, “Splitgerber”.
Friedrich Lenz, Otto Unholtz, Die Geschichte des Bankhauses Gebrüder Schickler: Festschrift zum 200-jährigen Bestehen (Berlin, 1912).
Lenz, Unholtz, Gebrüder Schickler, p. 264.
Füssel, Preis des Ruhms, pp. 215–216, 443–445.
Treue, “Splitgerber,” p. 266.
Treue, “Splitgerber”.
Carl, Okkupation, p. 359.
Tobias Smollet, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 1 (Dublin, 1771), p. 56.
By ‘cultural sociology’, I mean classical analyses of parvenus, consumption behaviour and prestige, see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York/London, 1899); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 1986).
See for example, Marian Füssel, “Händler und Krieger? Robert Clive, die East India Company und die Kapitalisierung des Siebenjährigen Krieges in Indien,” Die Kapitalisierung des Krieges: Kriegsunternehmer in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, eds. Markus Meumann, Matthias Meinhardt (Berlin, 2021), 133–156.
Nikolaus Böttcher, As Ship Laden with Dollars: Britische Handelsinteressen in Kuba (1762–1825) (Frankfurt a.M., 2007); Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Williamsburg, Virginia, 2018), p. 206.
Hancock, Citizens, pp. 225–226; Gordon E. Bannerman, Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain: British Army Contracts and Domestic Supply, 1739–1763 (London, 2008); Stephen Conway, “Provisioning the Combined Army in Germany, 1758–1762: Who Benefited?,” in The Contractor State and its Implications, 1659–1815, eds. Richard Harding, Sergio Solbes Ferri (Las Palmas de Canaria, 2012), 81–102, p. 83; Walter Mediger, Herzog Ferdinand von Braunschweig-Lüneburg und die alliierte Armee im Siebenjährigen Krieg (1757–1762). Für die Publikation aufbereitet und vollendet von Thomas Klingebiel (Hannover, 2011), pp. 911–971.
Starting in 1758, Hanoverian and British troops were jointly provisioned by an English commissariat, Medinger, Ferdinand, p. 929; see too Hamish D. Little, The Treasury, the Commissariat and the Supply of the Combined Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (1756–1763) (unpublished PhD diss., University of London, 1981); on the commissaries, Little, The Treasury, pp. 98–141, 348–361.
Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (New York, 2006), pp. 121–126; On Dundas, see Bannerman, Merchants.
Renaud Morieux, The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French War and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2019), pp. 313–321.
Bannerman, Merchants, pp. 31–33; Hancock, Citizens, pp. 222–225.
Bannerman, Merchants, p. 139. On the differences between the Prussian and the British-Hanoverian commissariat system, see Geschichte der Feldzüge Herzog Ferdinands von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 1, ed. Ferdinand von Westphalen (Berlin, 1859), pp. 119–121.
James A. Oughton, By Dint of Labour and Perseverance: A Journal Recording Two Months in Northern Germany Kept by Lieutenant Colonel James Adolphus Oughton, Commanding 1st Battalion, 37th Regiment of Foot, 1758, ed. Stephen Wood (London, 1997), pp. 52–53 (note 131); Conway, War, pp. 123–124.
John A. Cannon, “Taylor, Peter,” in The House of Commons 1754–1790, 3, eds. Lewis Namier, John Brooke (London, 1985), 517–518, p. 517.
Cannon, “Taylor”.
The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland, 2 (London, 1889), p. 214; on the investigations of the governments, see too Little, Treasury, pp. 57–58.
Cannon, “Taylor,” p. 517.
Cannon, “Taylor”.
On the following, see Hancock, Citizens, pp. 221–239; Bannerman, Merchants, pp. 62–63; 85–87; Little, Treasury, p. 103.
Hancock, Citizens, pp. 226–227.
Hancock, Citizens, p. 227; this was already a long-established procedure see Bannerman, Merchants, p. 46.
On transport, see Little, Treasury, pp. 259–298.
Hancock, Citizens, p. 229; Little, Treasury, pp. 240–241.
See the map ibid., p. 232.
Ibid., p. 237.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., pp. 321–347.
Ibid., pp. 353–354 (collections), 376–381 (garden), and 380 (quote).
Ibid., p. 238.
Hendrik Bärnighausen, “Das ‘Museum’ des Freiherrn Johann Jacob von Uckermann und seine Übernahme durch die Universität Leipzig,” Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Schlösser, Burgen und Gärten Sachsen 13 (2005), 128–152, p. 129.
Ottfried Dascher, “Die Hessische Handelskompagnie zu Karlshafen (1771–1789),” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 22 (1972), 229–253, pp. 230–231.
Dascher, “Handelskompagnie,” p. 231.
Mediger, Ferdinand, p. 946.
On the contracts and sums, see Little, Treasury, pp. 363–366.
Mediger, Ferdinand, p. 947: “Wenn ich von dem Dessein des Uckermanns recht urteile, so will derselbe ein Monopolium von Viktualien zu Kassel etablieren. Denn im Fall ich ihm die Akzise-Freiheit verschaffen könnte, so würde ihm kein anderer Kaufmann anfangs Preis halten, hernach aber, wenn er sich des Handels bemeistert hätte, kein Soldat seine Viktualien bezahlen können. Ich kann mich nicht wohl auf dieses Projekt einlassen.”
Mediger, Ferdinand, p. 948.
Little, Treasury, pp. 255–256.
8 December 1760, as cited in Mediger, Ferdinand, p. 965: “Das Unglück rühret von dem unbeschreiblich bösen englischen Kommissariat her, welches teils aus Ungeschicklichkeit, noch mehr aber aus interessierten Absichten und durch betriegerische Entrepreneurs die gehörige Vorsicht nicht nimmt und alsdann, wann Not vorhanden ist, auf das arme Land fällt … Das Herze blutet, wenn man erwäget, daß um dergleichen Leute, als Massau und Uckermann sind, zu bereichern, so viel Tausend getreue Untertanen des Königs an den Bettelstab in proprio sensu gebracht werden.” On criticism of Uckermann, see Little, Treasury, pp. 136–139, 177–179.
Joseph Ruhl, “Der fürstlich hessische General-Post-Intendant Johann Jacob Freiherr von Uckermann,” Archiv für Post und Telegraphie 12 (1884), pp. 338–343.
Dascher, “Handelskompagnie,” p. 233.
Dascher, “Handelskompagnie”.
Horst Carl, “‘Pavillon de Hanovre’: Korruption im Militär im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Integration – Legitimation – Korruption: Politische Patronage in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, eds. Ronald Asch, Birgit Emich, and Jens Ivo Engels (Frankfurt a.M., 2011), 233–246.
Jöel Félix, “Victualling Louis XV’s Armies: The Munitionnaire des Vivres de Flandres et d’Allemagne and the Military Supply System,” The Contractor State and its Implications, 1659–1815, eds. Richard Harding, Sergio Solbes Ferri (Las Palmas de Canaria, 2012), 99–125, p. 103.
Félix, “Victualling,” p. 122.
John F. Bosher, “A Québec Merchant’s Trading Circles in France and Canada: Jean-André Lamaletie before 1763,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 10:1 (1977), 24–44; ibid., “The French Government’s Motives in the Affaire du Canada, 1761–1763,” English Historical Review 96:1 (1981), 59–78; André Côté, “L’affaire du Canada (1761–1763),” Cap-aux-Diamants 83:4 (2005), 10–14; Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Ithaca/London, 2014), pp. 128–136.
Guy Frégault, Le Grand marquis: Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil et la Louisiane (Montréal/Paris, 1952).
Guy Dinel, “Péan, Michel-Jean-Hugues,” 2003, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography [DCB]. Available at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/pean_michel_jean_hugues_4E.html. Accessed 26 April 2021.
Pierre-Georges Roy, Bigot et sa bande et l’Affaire du Canada (Lévis, 1950).
Jugement rendu souverainement et en dernier ressort, dans l’affaire du Canada … (Paris, 1763).
Gustave Lanctot, “L’Affaire du Canada: Bibliographie du procès de Bigot,” Bulletin des Recherches Historiques 38 (1932), 8–17; Guy Frégault, François Bigot: Administrateur français, 1–2 (Montréal, 1948); Denis Vaugeois, “François Bigot: Son exil et sa mort,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 21:4 (1968), 731–748; John F. Bosher, Jean-Claude Dubé, “Bigot, François (d. 1778),” 2003, in DCB. Available at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bigot_francois_1778_4E.html. Accessed 26 April 2021.
Frégault, Bigot, 1, pp. 53–68.
Frégault, Bigot, 1, pp. 69–75.
Frégault, Bigot, 1, pp. 293–289.
Bosher, Dubé, “Bigot”.
Frégault, Bigot, 2, pp. 219–273.
Bosher, Dubé, “Bigot”.
Bosher, Dubé, “Bigot”.
Frégault, Bigot, 2, pp. 341–388.
Alfred Barbier, “Un munitionnaire du roi à la Nouvelle France: Joseph Cadet, 1756–1781,” Bulletins de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest 8 (1901), 399–412; John F. Bosher, “Cadet, Joseph-Michel,” 2003, in DCB. Available at http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cadet_joseph_michel_4E.html. Accessed 26 April 2021; André Côté, Joseph-Michel Cadet (1719–1781): Négociant et munitionnaire du roi en Nouvelle-France (Sillery/Paris, 1998).
Bosher, “Cadet”.
He evidently was homesick for Canada and had typical Canadian objects, like, for instance, canoes, sent to him, see Louis-François-Georges Baby, “Une lettre de Cadet, le munitionnaire de la Nouvelle-France,” Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, 3rd s., 1:4 (1898), 173–187.
Little, Treasury, pp. 57–58; Conway, “Provisioning,” pp. 84–85; Mediger, Ferdinand, pp. 965–967.
Samuel Foote, The Commissary: A Comedy in Three Acts (London, 1765).
Bannerman, Merchants, p. 139.
Bannerman, Merchants, pp. 129, 142. On the Nabobs, see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010).
Bannerman, Merchants, pp. 131–133.
Bannerman, Merchants, pp. 131–132.
Johannes Barnick, Ein schweigsamer Ahn: Leben und Geheimnis des Jägermeisters David von Splitgerber (Munich/Berlin, 2001).
On the relationship between early modern experts and economics, see Wissen und Wirtschaft: Expertenkulturen und Märkte vom 13. bis 18. Jahrhundert, eds. Marian Füssel, Philip Knäble, Nina Elsemann (Göttingen, 2017).
“Politisches Testament Friedrichs des Großen (1768),” in Politische Testamente der Hohenzollern, ed. Richard Dietrich (Munich, 1981), 256–397, p. 285.
Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert, Ecrits militaires 1772–1790 (Paris, 1977), pp. 231–238.
Bosher, Dubé, “Bigot”.