^this

Hal Moore seemed to have a good deal of respect for him. FWIW.

He led the forces that drove three of the world's 15 largest empires ever out of his homeland. That is noteworthy.

Are people really questioning generals? By your logic, Octavious, George Washington wasn't a great general by the end of the American Revolution because he wasn't tested outside of his comfort zone. Never mind that he drove away the reigning world power.

Weird, sounds a lot like Vo Nguyen Giap.

No, Tiber, I am not saying he definitely wasn't a great. I am saying without the wider test it is impossible to say he was.

I would also check your history. The British of the 1770s weren't a reigning world power by any stretch of the imagination, and no Washington wasn't a great general.

Well, they were reigning over the colonies, and they were indubitably a world power. Was Washington a great general? Well, he was adequate to the task, wasn't he?

RIP. Ask the Algerians if beating the French is as easy as "putting on a hat". Or the British who fought the Vichy French in Syria. Or the Americans who fought the French during Torch.

You're better than cheap stereotypes, Octavious.

Reigning over a baker's dozen of undeveloped blocks of land in the middle of nowhere does not a world power make. I doubt we were in the top ten world powers at the time. And the British army was hardly considered a world beater. We regularly got our arse kicked whenever we ventured into Europe, and that was with the core of our army. The sort of troops available for policing colonies was a step down in quality.

The truth of it is Washington, with European assistance, beat the third rate troops of a second rate power. That both countries achieved greatness in later years doesn't change the reality of the time.

@ Putin

Normally, yes, but with the French I have always made an exception ;)

Washington was not responsible for winning the war. The rise to power of pro-American (Rockingham) Whigs in Britain was responsible for losing it. The British held a large number of very important cities when they decided to quit America.

Other than (arguably) France, what polity was more of a global power than Britain? The Moguls? The Sublime Porte?

@Putin

I don't see how Britain wins the Revolution, even with the most bellicose of administrations. They weren't willing to massacre Cousin Jonathan on a wholesale level, and without that will, it's almost impossible to win a guerrilla war without reforms the sort of which would have been impalatable to the people back in the Isles who mattered, politically.

"Other than (arguably) France, what polity was more of a global power than Britain? The Moguls? The Sublime Porte?"

The Prussians, the Hapsburgs, the Russians, the Chinese.

"I don't see how Britain wins the Revolution, even with the most bellicose of administrations"

The Americans and French were on the brink of financial ruin. All the British had to do is wait them out while they held Savannah, Montreal, Quebec, Charleston, etc. As we know the French financial situation was so dire that they themselves had a revolution soon thereafter.

The Prussians were more of a global power than the British in 1775. Mmmkay.

"The Prussians, the Hapsburgs, the Russians, the Chinese"

The Russians and the Chinese were a joke. Russia was only a "global" power because it controlled so much land that nobody else wanted. China was still the whipping boy of the Western powers. You're telling me that the fucking Chinese were more of a power than the British?

I read this as RIP Khan Noonien Singh.

In a sense Putin is right and its important to note that the Americans won the war in drafting the peace treaty more than on the battlefield. The Americans successfully were able to play the British against the French and Spanish and the British were all too happy to oblige in order to work with the least of 4 evils.

That being said, washington a defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga by gates and Arnold and the surrender of the British army at Yorktown were definitely traumatic events for the British and led to the end of campaigning in North America, which, in turn, negated important leverage in the peace negotiations.

Washington's brilliance was the ability to keep his army in the field, and for the most part united, and ready to pounce on a British mistake, which he did at Yorktown. His Fabian tactics also allowed the Americans time to convince 3 of the largest superpowers in Europe to recognize the rebellion and provide it with military and material support.

The Chinese were nothing like a whipping boy in 1775 Europeans didn't make inroads until the 19th century,.

The Prussians were not a global power at all. They didn't even become so when they started uniting the German states in the mid 19th-century - it took longer, what with their colonial gap vis-a-vis France and England. So 1770ish Prussia was well over a century from becoming even arguably a global power.

Anyone who thinks the Prussians were a global (sic!) power in 1775 is insanely ignorant of history. Like, the Earth is 6000 years old level ignorance.

Washington was a good, but not great, general. The Americans definitely won the Revolutionary War; no army this side of Napoleon's Grand Armee could have controlled a region as vast as the American colonies. It's kind of like Vietnam, actually, to get back to the example at hand: however superior on a "neutral" field the British/Americans might have been to the Americans/Vietnamese, and however many battles they won or better economy they had, the fact was that the smaller power decided when the war began, and it would go on as long as there was resistance.

Britain was definitely a world power in 1776 -- arguably the world's greatest after their victory in perhaps the first world war (7 Years'/French and Indian War), although still in the middle of a decades-long struggle with the French for superpower status. You could make the argument about the Hapsburgs or the Chinese as greater powers in 1500 or 1600 or arguably even 1700, but not by the time of the Revolutionary War.

"The Prussians were more of a global power than the British in 1775. Mmmkay."

You can mmmkay if you'd like. The battles of Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf, and Burkersdorf speak for themselves. Prussia fought all the land powers of Europe basically single-handedly in the seven years war. If France is a 'great power' I don't know why the people who soundly beat them and their allies at Rossbach are not.

"The Prussians were not a global power at all. They didn't even become so when they started uniting the German states in the mid 19th-century - it took longer, what with their colonial gap vis-a-vis France and England. So 1770ish Prussia was well over a century from becoming even arguably a global power."

By that logic, Spain and Portugal were greater powers than Prussia and Austria in the mid-1700s. It's clear that some people here suffer from an extreme maritime bias where you have to have overseas colonies in order to be a great power. Nonsense.

Global =/= central Europe.

"Russia was only a "global" power because it controlled so much land that nobody else wanted"

I think the Poles, Turks, and Swedes would disagree.

"China was still the whipping boy of the Western powers. You're telling me that the fucking Chinese were more of a power than the British?"

If China was not a great power in the late 1700s under Qianlong, widely considered one of the greatest if not the greatest Chinese emperor ever, then it was never a great power, which is absurd on its face. China was at the height of its territorial achievement under Qianlong. Under Qianlong China conquered Xinjiang and Tibet, while forcing the Nepalese, Mongolians and Burmese to submit to Chinese suzerainty. The West was irrelevant in China at this time.

If somebody needs a refresher on history, it isn't me.

"Global =/= central Europe."

Central Europe had the most powerful states and armies of the world. If you can single handedly defeat the combined armies of Austria and France, you can beat Shaka Zulu and the Sultanates of Indonesia.

Are we talking about "great powers" or "global powers"? If the former then in the mid-1700s it's easily Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia, maybe China (inclined to agree but I'm not sharp enough on Chinese history). Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands are relevant and global, but not quite "great" powers.

If it's global though, it's going to be somewhat arbitrary; China, for example, would be a stretch to be considered a global power, given that it has no maritime colonies or exclaves, and that its empire was restricted to one area (albeit a big one), but calling it a "regional" power would be a disservice considering the "region" it controls is not that much smaller than all of Europe (9.7 Gm vs 10.18 Gm). On the flip side, Russia was enormous (don't have precise numbers, but its current size is 17.1 Gm and its greatest extent in the 1800s was 22.8 Gm, so I'll take the middle and say ~20 Gm), but most of its land was virtually uninhabited, certainly not fortified and thus not very useful for projecting force outward. It's global by definition, stretching into two continents and owning the most land in the world at the time, but its concentration of force was very regional, limited mostly to Eastern Europe.

Off the top of my head it'd be hard to consider any but Britain and France truly "global" powers; Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had global territories but lacked strength, Russia and China (and especially Austria and Prussia) were strong enough to count but weren't global.

When are we talking about here? Spain had the largest empire in the world at the time (especially if we are talking about before the seven years war). Sure it might have been a "rotting colossus" as it was nicknamed, but the Spanish still ha presence in South America, North America, Asia, and I believe Africa. They also had a strong alliance with France throughout the period. Their navy didn't compare to the British but when combined with the French it did.

Basically you can make the argument the Dutch were a world power by the grace of England and the Portuguese by the grace of, well, England. But Spain was still a power, although a declining one.

And I should also add that after the seven years war the French were largely not a world power at all. If I am not mistaken the only international possessions that they held were in the Caribbean, during the seven years war they lost all their holdings in India, Philippines, and North America. They still had African presence but at the time those did not resemble colonies except maybe senegal. France was a continental power after the seven years war, the Sparta to Britains Athens

The man was a brilliant general. There can be no doubt. If only he had been on our side...

Who cares if a country has a bunch of enclaves around the world? Does that mean they're harder to beat in combat? Did Spain's entry into the 7 years war change anything whatsoever?

Putin33 and President Eden:

Spain was certainly a 'great power' in the 18th Century. Certainly it wasn't the hegemonic global superpower of the two centuries prior, but its recovery from the War of Spanish Succession is too often overlooked. In the War of the Quadruple Alliance, which started just a couple years after war-ravaged Spain came out of that disaster, Spain held at bay the of the combined arms of France, Great Britain, the Habsburg Empire, the Netherlands and Savoy for four years. At the end of it, Spain was still allowed to have a toe-hold in northern Italy (the Quadruple Alliance ad been formed to prevent this). A couple decades later, after the War of Polish Succession, half of Italy in the form of Naples and Sicily is Spanish again in exchange for that northern toehold. In the Battle of Cartagena de Indias, possibly the largest amphibious invasion until D-Day, the British are crushed by the Spanish garrison (under the command of the military genius Blas de Lezo) despite being outnumbered worse than 10:1 in all respects. After the War of the Austrian Succession, a decade later, part of that northern toehold becomes Spanish again, though Spain has to make the great sacrifice of handing over the slave trade to the ever-noble Brits. After the Seven Years' War, which was mentioned here, Spain loses Florida, but gains the adjacent gigantic territory of Louisiana. And after the U. S. Revolutionary War, two decades later, Spain is returned Florida and Menorca. Six years prior Spain had exacted Spanish Guinea and regained regions of what is today Uruguay and Brazil from Portugal.

By the time Carlos IV takes the throne, everything lost in the War of Spanish Succession but the hopeless case of the Spanish Netherlands, Milan and eyesore of Gibraltar is back in Spanish hands. Meanwhile, the Spanish territories overseas, especially in America, have grown to their maximum extent of unimaginable vastness.

At the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, Spain almost regained Roussillon in northern Catalonia. It took a series of idiots during and after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (mostly in the Spanish court, but also Napoleon and Joseph Bonaparte) to cause the Spanish Empire to pre-maturely collapse into a chaotic, multi-lateral, Atlantic-wide civil war.

the Quadruple Alliance ad been formed --> the Quadruple Alliance had been formed

The Spanish navy was also still vast and powerful until the Battle of Trafalgar in the Napoleanic era.

Spanish Netherlands, Milan and eyesore of Gibraltar -->Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Sardinia and eyesore of Gibraltar

Thanks for the post, JECE. That was informative.

I use as a reference here Paul Kennedy's work "Rise & Fall of the Great Powers", which is a tremendous work.

On p. 99 he has a chart of the military power of the great powers of the time over the 1700s.

In 1710, Spain's army was 30,000 strong. This puts Spain far beyond the other great powers.

France - 350,000
Russia - 220,000
United Provinces - 130,000
Sweden - 110,000
Hapsburg Empire - 100,000
Britain - 75,000
Prussia - 39,000

In 1789, Spain had 50,000 troops. France, Austria, Prussia, & Russia all had many times that amount. Only Britain had fewer - 40,000.

In terms of Navies; Spain had 34 ships in 1739 to Britain's 124, France's 50, Russia's 30, and United Provinces's 49. In 1779, Spain had 48 ships to Britain's 90, France's 63, Russia's 40, and United Province's 20.

Population-wise, Spain had 9 million in 1750 to Britain's 10.5 million, France's 21.5, Austria's 18, Prussia's 6, and Russia's 20.

Also, I should point out that in the Anglo-Spanish war of 1739, Spain was backed to the hilt by France, the major military power in Europe.

And you should probably mention that the only reason Spain got Louisiana after the seven years war was because France, their ally, gave it to them as compensation for their loss of the Philippines and Florida as a result of their entering the war. Those were big losses considering how briefly Spain was involved. The Philippines, while they got it back, they had to pay a ransom.

By the "Anglo-Spanish war of 1739" you are referring to the War of Jenkins' Ear, during which the Battle of Cartagena de Indias took place. While France was involved in the war to the extent that it fought on the same side as Spain in the War of Austrian Succession (which raged at the same time), the French played a very minor role in America. The Spanish were on their own.

Regarding the Seven Years' War, Spain did not lose the Philippines, just like it did not lose Cuba. The fact that these claims are still commonly reported in English language histories is an example of the biased, prejudiced and disinterested reporting of Spanish history. Manila and Havana fell, nothing more. And as far as I know there was no 'ransom' paid for Manila. And France gave Louisiana to Spain in a secret treaty a year before the War ended, presumably so that Great Britain wouldn't dare demand it.

As for the statistics you cite in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, I cannot say much. Does Kennedy make any attempt to cite the enormous amount of archival research that would be necessary to reach any of his figures? Just realize that the Black Legend still shrouds much historical research on Spain.

And if the statistics are right, then the consistent projection of Spanish power in the 18th Century and the progressive Spanish diplomatic gains in the century are all the more impressive.

I assure you Paul Kennedy is a serious scholar. His sources for that information come from a variety of sources, acknowledging that it is difficult to get consistent information.

Sources for that information: Cipolla - Fontana, Economic History of Europe (1976); B.R. Mitchell - European Economic Statistics (1975); W. Woodruff - Impact of Western Man (1967); New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 8; Cipolla - Before the Industrial Revolution (1976). Corvisier - Armies & Societies in Europe; Childs - Armies & Warfare in Europe. Anderson - Europe in the 18th Century; L.W. Cowie - 18th Century Europe.

As for the Battle of Cartagena de las Indias, the British forces were ravaged by disease before they ever launched the attack. The French did not play a minor role in America (they controlled the Louisiana for one). They fought a war with the British in Canada and New England at the same time as Jenkins ear (King George's War). Furthermore, it would have been hard for Spain to prevail against the Royal Navy if they didn't have the bulk of it protecting the home territory for fear of a French attack.

Losing Manila and Havana is a big deal. The point being that the reason Spain kept or didn't lose territories has more to do with Britain giving them back in exchange for something else than Spain successfully winning them back by force.

The point on the Louisiana territory is you cannot use this as an example of Spain's military prowess or great power status. They were handed this gift by an ally, whether as compensation or because they didn't want Britain to get it.

"then the consistent projection of Spanish power in the 18th Century and the progressive Spanish diplomatic gains in the century are all the more impressive."

Not really. Europe was consumed by major wars on the continent throughout this century. Nobody could spare the manpower necessary to maintain Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. But Spain was self-evidently a declining power. In the 1600s it had the largest military force in Europe. A century later its military force were a 1/10th of what they once were.

They were handed Louisiana territory by the British so that the French wouldn't have it

Wow I'm actually wrong on that, I always misunderstood that transaction I guess

Putin33: I'll reply when I am able. I'm pretty sure that you're still missing my point.

bump

bump . . .

grrr. I will get around to this eventually.