At about 8 a.m. on Saturday, 16 July 1054, mass was being prepared in the church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The congregation was gathering; priests, deacons, and acolytes were assembled in the choir. Then, quite unexpectedly, three strangers—three Papal legates—entered the church. Passing through the nave, they made their way to the high altar, where they stopped to address the congregation in a few words of Latin or ill-spoken Greek. Turning, they placed upon the altar a strange document that one of them was carrying; then, in silence, they went back to the doors. Pausing in the narthex, they cried aloud the words: ‘Videat Deus et judicet!’—and with that they passed from the church. For a moment, there was confusion within. One of the subdeacons picked up the document and flung it to the ground; but then, as anger gave way to curiosity, it was recovered and carried to the patriarchal palace. Here, upon examination, it proved to be a bull of deposition and anathema directed against the Patriarch himself.

That the making of a law and the enforcement of it are two different things is a commonplace which is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the history of economic legislation. As a recent essay on ‘The Smugglers' Trade’ has shown, the point applied with special force to the sixteenth century when the government attempted on an unprecedented scale to control the economic life of the country, and especially the export and import of goods. The problem was twofold. In the first place the administration of the customs limped badly behind the rest of the financial administration. It was not until 1536 that nationally uniform rates were imposed, and at no time could the central government be sure of exercising effective control over the local customers and searchers and their deputies. While the royal lands were put under a modernized administration in the hands of such courts as those of General Surveyors and Augmentations, nothing was done either by Henry VII or by Thomas Cromwell to go to the root of the customs question. Cromwell, indeed, produced a comprehensive code with a preamble which showed that at least he knew what the trouble was; but somewhat in contrast to his usual practice, he did not approach the administrative problem at all. The customs were left in the exchequer from whose palsied hands the royal lands had been removed; consequently, when in an age of rising prices the value of the customs revenue began to outpace that of fixed land rents, the government of Elizabeth could do no better than farm a revenue which their own machinery was incapable of handling efficiently. Until the reign of Charles II, the English customs administration was never thoroughly reformed, and governments fell back either on the inefficient exchequer or on the dubious expedient of farming.

In a book published twenty years ago, the present writer expressed the following opinion on the European wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: ‘It was not that the wars of that period meant less in expense and suffering than those of later times. Armies and navies were smaller, and even smaller in proportion to the number of the peoples; but they were as large as the poorer and simpler societies of those days could afford. In every great war there was some state that fought until it came within sight of revolution at home.’ The purpose of the present article is to consider, for the special case of the Nine Years War, whether this opinion may still be maintained or ought to be modified in the light of the many relevant publications of the intervening twenty years. The words quoted above relate to the social and economic aspects of the wars, but these, of course, cannot be entirely detached from the military aspects, and it will be well to begin by stating an assumption as to these military aspects. This assumption is that those who directed the fighting, whether on land or on sea, apart from such exceptions as the weaknesses of human nature must always occasion, fought to win and fought as hard as they could. For the present purpose this will be assumed, but it is not accepted as true by all historians. Some of them have applied to this period a famous sentence of Gibbon: ‘in War the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests’.

The military triumphs and the political eclipse of Marlborough epitomize much of the history of the Treaty of Utrecht. He was, as even Bolingbroke acknowledged, the great successor to William, keeping the Grand Alliance together and imparting to it a rapid and vigorous motion in sharp contrast to the delays of William's ‘languishing out disastrous campaigns’. As ‘the greatest general, and as the greatest minister, that our country or perhaps any other has produced’ (to quote Bolingbroke again), he was deeply involved in the prolonged negotiations leading to the peace. But Marlborough and the Whigs were discredited and ousted from office in the course of the negotiations, and the peace was the work of a Tory ministry which claimed that the terms showed a reaction from the impracticable proposals of the Whigs to the more sound, statesmanlike and feasible, concepts of William III.

The strides made by the Russians into Central Asia between 1864 and 1869 were greater than any they took thereafter in that area. In 1865 they captured Tashkend. In 1866 they occupied Khojend and broke the power of the Khanate of Khokand. In 1867 they invaded the Khanate of Bokhara, and established fortified posts far to the south of the Jaxartes River; they also established the new Province of Turkestan, erecting it into a separate Viceroyalty with its capital at Tashkend. In 1868 they captured the city of Samarkand, capital of Bokhara, and made it clear that the Amir of Bokhara lived henceforth as a subservient client.