Preface: This article was completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

The War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s profoundly reshaped Europe’s power structure. Its immediate trigger was the death of the Habsburg emperor Charles VI in 1740 and the succession of his daughter, Maria Theresa. Under the Pragmatic Sanction, formulated through years of prior diplomatic negotiations, Europe’s major powers had formally recognized the right of female succession.

Reality, however, quickly revealed that Europe’s great powers did not treat this document as an untouchable constitutional baseline. Instead, they regarded “legitimacy disputes” as opportunities to redistribute interests. On paper, Maria Theresa’s succession was valid. The Pragmatic Sanction stood, Habsburg dynastic law stood, and previous international recognition stood. Yet France, Bavaria, Spain, Prussia, and others abruptly began emphasizing various “doubts”: did female succession violate tradition? Did the imperial electors possess alternative rights? Should certain territories be divided? These questions were not new. They had existed all along but had previously been suppressed. Now states mobilized jurists, court advisers, and imperial legal traditions to reinterpret old treaties, family compacts, and the constitutional texts of the Holy Roman Empire.

Bavaria was a political entity that had existed for centuries in Central Europe but was often underestimated. Located between the upper Danube and the northern foothills of the Alps, it connected the German heartland, northern Italy, and Central European transit corridors. From the outset, it was not a peripheral region but a strategic passage. From the Middle Ages onward, Bavaria was part of the Holy Roman Empire and, from the twelfth century, was ruled for the long term by the Wittelsbach dynasty. Through inheritance, partition, and institutional consolidation, this family enabled Bavaria to maintain a relatively stable political continuity within an empire otherwise prone to fragmentation. In 1623, Bavaria obtained electoral status, formally entering the empire’s highest power structure and gaining the right to participate in the election of the emperor.

At the time, Bavaria emphasized the marital and dynastic inheritance ties between its ruling house—the Wittelsbachs—and the Habsburgs, of which Maria Theresa herself was the direct dynastic heir. Bavaria claimed that it possessed “earlier or more direct” rights to certain territories and, on this basis, advanced an imperial claim for its elector. At the same time, Bavaria aligned with France to promote the electoral logic of the Holy Roman Empire, stressing that the imperial crown was not automatically inherited but required election. This maneuver downgraded Maria Theresa’s position from “legitimate successor” to a party “not yet fully confirmed by imperial politics.”

In diplomatic notes, memoranda, and negotiations, the powers deliberately avoided definitive titles such as “the lawful ruler of Austria,” instead adopting vague expressions like “claimant to the inheritance” or “concerned party.” These shifts in language directly affected alliance behavior, credit conditions, and the object of military oaths. Legitimacy was not denied outright; it was suspended. Prussia’s ruler, Frederick II, did not wait for these legal debates to conclude. He selected one long-discussed but never fully resolved gray zone—Silesia—asserted Prussian rights based on old treaties, and immediately enforced this claim through military action.

Prussia was not a naturally evolved great power, but a militarized state assembled from a series of discontinuous territories. It lacked advantages in population size, natural resources, and traditional legitimacy. Under Frederick William I, however, it had been forged into a highly disciplined, permanently mobilized standing army. In traditional dynastic politics, the army was usually a tool of royal authority; under Frederick II, this relationship was further inverted. The state apparatus was organized ever more thoroughly around the needs of the army, fiscal extraction, and sustained war-making capacity.

The 1740 invasion of Silesia was a highly opportunistic, almost modern strategic decision. Frederick did not abandon legal language entirely, but treated it as a tool for post hoc justification. What truly drove action was an assessment of the territory’s material value. Silesia possessed a dense population, mineral resources, developed handicraft industries, and a stable tax base—assets capable of feeding back into military expansion and fiscal integration. This move was emblematic: war aims began shifting from “legitimate inheritance” toward a closed loop of resources, finance, and armament.

More destabilizing still was the fact that this “rule-breaker” was never corrected by the European system. The war lasted nearly eight years, with alliances and theaters repeatedly shifting. In the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Austria was ultimately forced to recognize the loss of Silesia. This outcome released a dangerous signal: if military and fiscal capacity were strong enough, dynastic legality could be overturned after the fact and still accepted by the international order. The rules were not restored; they were tacitly tolerated.

From this point on, Europe’s power structure underwent three transformations. Prussia shifted from a regional variable into a systemic force that could no longer be ignored in major conflicts. Austria came to recognize that traditional prestige alone was insufficient to sustain great-power status and began pushing deep reforms in finance, military organization, and bureaucracy. France and Britain, meanwhile, began to see that continental equilibrium was becoming unstable and that future competition would increasingly hinge on resource mobilization rather than dynastic alliance craft.

After the Seven Years’ War, Britain emerged on the surface as the greatest winner: France was defeated, Canada was acquired, dominance was secured in India, and naval supremacy further consolidated. Yet the cost of this victory was equally clear. It was a triumph financed heavily through debt. During the war, Britain’s national debt rose sharply, and its fiscal capacity was significantly strained by prolonged conflict.

Before this point, Britain’s response to fiscal pressure had been relatively restrained. On one hand, it sought to maintain the continental balance of power to avoid becoming a primary land combatant; on the other, it relied on trade expansion and economic growth to absorb debt gradually. Naval warfare was expensive, but its marginal efficiency was high. Subsidizing allies was often cheaper than direct engagement. This gave war spending elasticity: rapid escalation during crises, contraction once tensions eased, without sustained high-intensity domestic mobilization.

Founded in 1694, the Bank of England, together with parliamentary tax guarantees and financial markets, formed a public credit system. The government could finance war through long-term bonds and roll over debt as long as markets believed repayment was predictable. The key was not absolute debt size, but whether interest rates were manageable and credibility maintained. In the first half of the eighteenth century, this system functioned well. Trade and empire generated steady cash flow. Tariffs, shipping, insurance, and colonial monopolies provided relatively low-friction revenues, embedded in prices and trade flows rather than direct taxation, and thus less likely to provoke social resistance. As long as global trade expanded, the state could sustain debt and war expenditure without fundamentally restructuring domestic politics.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, global trade volumes increased, North American populations grew rapidly, and commercial potential in the Caribbean and India continued to expand. In this context, “borrow first, grow later” was not mere gambling but a judgment grounded in experience and expectation. The Seven Years’ War, however, disrupted this balance. It was the first conflict to display truly global scope and sustained high consumption, heavily mortgaging future growth. Britain could no longer avoid a question it had previously sidestepped: if trade and credit were insufficient to cover security costs, who should bear the burden of imperial defense? The answer quickly pointed to the North American colonies.

At the same time, the French threat in North America disappeared. With Canada absorbed by Britain, colonial dependence on metropolitan military protection declined sharply. From London’s perspective, this created a new risk: a colonial system that no longer depended on imperial force yet refused fiscal responsibility was itself unstable. Britain increasingly realized that future imperial competition would be decided not by diplomatic maneuver alone, but by stable, predictable, and mobilizable fiscal capacity. North America, with its relatively low internal tax burden and limited fiscal integration, became the critical zone yet to be fully incorporated into this system.

Policy direction therefore shifted fundamentally. The Stamp Act, Sugar Act, and Tea Act were not significant because of the sums involved, but because of the institutional signals they sent. The colonies were expected to move from “highly autonomous commercial partners” to “components of the imperial fiscal system.” Yet colonial political culture had already diverged in practice from that of Britain. To London, these measures were rational institutional adjustments; to the colonies, they represented an intrusion on sovereignty without consent. Conflict was therefore inevitable.