The demobilization of the armies of the Thirty Years War during 1649 and 1650 allowed rulers to take stock of what had been an evolutionary process in the management and operations of their armed forces. Large-scale warfare waged for an unprecedented, continuous duration had presented an organizational and financial challenge which swept away the notion that armed forces could be raised and funded exclusively through the state and its administrators. The various initiatives to bring private investment into the organization and financing of war certainly had not proved uniformly successful, but nor was it the case that the co-option of private resources had been a disastrous failure. Indeed, it would have been impossible to wage war on this scale and over this time-scale on the basis of the resources – manpower, provisions and finance – that could be mobilized or extracted by early seventeenth-century governments and their direct agents. The better credit of the private sector, its greater technical and organizational know-how, and the access to international networks for raising resources, capital and manpower, far outweighed anything that a state administration could have hoped to achieve. The ability of the belligerents to protract the Thirty Years War over decades of successive campaigns was a human and material disaster. But it is important to recognize that the duration of the war was not simply a consequence of military stagnation, a dismal and universal failure of organization and strategic potential. To a large extent it was the effectiveness and adaptability of their outsourced military organizations which allowed the belligerents to continue waging war, to overcome individual military disasters, and to stave off the prospect of surrender on entirely unacceptable terms.

There were thus good reasons to think that for many European rulers the organization and deployment of military force after 1650 would rest upon the further development and refinement of various forms of public–private partnership: they and their governments would continue to control and finance some aspects of a military system, but would also seek to involve the credit and the organizational resources of their subjects or of outside military contractors. The main argument of this chapter is that this is precisely what does happen during the later seventeenth century, and that there is a far greater degree of continuity in military organization than is traditionally allowed.