In the wake of the Seven Years' War, German states, Catholic and Protestant alike, needed to come to terms with the new fiscal and economic pressures brought about by modern war-fighting and modern bureaucracy. For Catholic states, this process required a wholesale rethinking of political theology. This rethinking occurred within the larger European intellectual context of the mutual redefinition of the church and the state. The development of legal, fiscal, and administrative tools and infrastructures in the eighteenth century represented an intensification of a process that had begun in the sixteenth century. The conceptual elaboration of the state, as Quentin Skinner has argued, marked something new in the history of early modern political thought. This new view of political life held that “our duties are owed exclusively to the state, rather than to a multiplicity of jurisdictional authorities, local as well as national, ecclesiastical as well as civil.” The emergence of this new idea of the state also required a new ideological justification, and conditions in Catholic Germany meant that the process of rethinking would occur somewhat differently than in other parts of Europe.