The rise of state navies in the early seventeenth century: A historiographical study

Abstract

This article addresses a relative vacuum of the historiography of early-seventeenth-century navies. The central question is how European states established and sustained their navies. The article presents the main historiographical issues, especially the concepts of the ‘military revolution afloat’ and the ‘fiscal-naval state’, and demonstrates the technological, administrative and social concerns of early modern navies. It also exposes the main contemporaneous threats and alternatives to early modern state navies. It presents the changes that states made to navies and vice versa just before the so-called military revolution afloat in the mid-seventeenth century. This contested concept is put into context and exposed as a historical construct. The author, along with some other scholars, argues that it was far from a revolution, but more of a gradual evolution. The process of state-building in relation to state navies therefore needs to be reassessed: the navy was one of the tools of state-building, not just a tool of the already built and consolidated state.