The emphasis on the alleged economic advantages of maritime war, especially that against Spanish America, in the pro-maritime war argument has been pointed out by historians who have examined relations between politics and war in the period of the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. For example, Terence J. Denman has summed up the character of the argument supporting war at sea (which he calls the ‘Country strategic argument’), which had its origin in the Elizabethan war at sea and had developed by the late seventeenth century, as follows: ‘maritime attacks on an enemy's colonies and trading routes were the best method of bringing a power, such as Spain low, and that such attacks would make a war a profitable or self-financing enterprise’. Likewise, J.A. Johnston describes the convictions regarding naval power, which were often expressed in Parliament in the period between 1688 and 1714, as follows: ‘England was by tradition, if not by right, a great sea power’, and ‘Englishmen instinctively understood the management of a sea war, and that properly managed, a sea war should largely pay for itself out of the spoils of the enemy.’