Organised by GRHIFI: www.unav.es/GRHIFI and the Contractor State Group: www.unav.es/centro/contractorstate School of Economics and Business Administration Research Seminar Pamplona, 8 October 2010 Great Britain, France and Spain: the Threeway Struggle for America (1774-1783). A Comparative History Seminario de Investigación Universidad de Navarra Pamplona, 17 de junio de 2010 CONTINUIDADES Y PERMANENCIAS EN LA REAL HACIENDA ESPAÑOLA DURANTE LA EDAD MODERNA CONTINUIDADES Y Other publications of the GRHIFI of Universidad de Navarra
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Organised by GRHIFI: www.unav.es/GRHIFIand the Contractor State Group: www.unav.es/centro/contractorstate
School of Economics and Business Administration
Research Seminar
Pamplona,8 October 2010
Great Britain, France and Spain: the Threeway Struggle for America (1774-1783).A Comparative History
Seminario de
Investigación
Universidad de Navarra
Pamplona, 17 de junio de 2010
CONTINUIDADES Y
PERMANENCIAS EN
LA REAL HACIENDA
ESPAÑOLA
DURANTE LA EDAD
MODERNA
CONTINUIDADES Y
Other publications of the GRHIFI of Universidad de Navarra
09:30 THE CHALLENGES OF
COMPARATIVE HISTORY
Agustín González EncisoUniversidad de Navarra
10:00 THE ALL-ROUND STRUGGLE.
GREAT BRITAIN IN THE
AMERICAN WAR OF
INDEPENDENCE.
Stephen ConwayUniversity College London.
10:30 DEBATE
12:00 RÉVANCHE. FRANCE IN
THE AMERICAN WAR OF
INDEPENDENCE.
Joël FelixUniversity of Reading.
12:30 THE DEFENCE OF THE EMPIRE.
SPAIN IN THE AMERICAN WAR
OF INDEPENDENCE.
Rafael TorresUniversidad de Navarra
13:00 DEBATE
16:00 PROPOSALS AND DEBATE.
18:00 CONCLUSIONS.
The main goal of this international seminar is to con-duct a comparative historical study of eighteenth-century warfare arrangements. To do so a specifi c study will be made of how Great Britain, France and Spain acted during the American War of Independen-ce (1774-1783).
Recent studies of globalisation and transnational his-tory have shown the main problem of comparative history to be the persistent search for models, whe-ther of a state or a society. The preconceived aim of fi nding ideal types leads to a grave risk of oversimpli-fi cation, since the information we are using is uneven and often incomparable, culled as it is from different sources and involving different historical circumstan-ces and study methods. There is no doubt that boiling things down to the quintessential and permanent traits is useful, but it does not fi t in well with the no-tion of ongoing historical change and context.
Our proposal for making headway in Comparative History is simple: delimit the object under study, de-fi ne the questions with precision and draw up a com-mon, single text agreed by specialists who are familiar with the problem, sources and respective historical study methods.
The aim of the seminar is to compare and assess the arrangements made by Great Britain, France and Spain in raising and employing their political, social, military, economic and cultural resources for waging a particular war. The methods and solutions availa-ble were similar because Europeans shared a similar technical and administrative pool of knowledge. In-ter-state rivalry and the legal and illegal exchange of ideas helped to keep this knowledge up to date. But the application and results of those methods could differ depending on the corresponding difference in the social and economic circumstances under which these methods were applied and even the underlying traditions. We believe that the real difference in war-waging arrangements lay precisely in how those so-lutions were put into practice. In our view the impor-tant comparison is not how those states tackled their warfare needs but how effi cient they were in so doing. The makeup of a soldier’s diet, the length of time a ship lasted, the price of a cannonball, the support of the social elites or the existence of fi scal upsets are some of many variables that give us an idea of how effi cient states and their societies were in raising and using their warfare resources.
