Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [105]
William had long had a strong, mutually advantageous relationship with Holland's Sephardic Jews. Among the Dutch Jews who followed William to England were members of the financially powerful Machado and Pereira families. Antonio (Moseh) Machado and Jacob Pereira were the chief provisioners for the Dutch Republic's military, supplying bread, grain, horses, and wagons to Dutch troops. In England, the newly arrived Dutch Jews continued to serve as William's military provisioners. The army contractor Solomon de Medina, one of Machado and Pereira's agents, proved so indispensable to William that the king dined at his home on Richmond Hill in 1699. The next year, Medina became the first openly practicing Jew to be knighted in England.2
But Britain's new Jews did not only supply armies. Far more important, they played a critical role in financing Great Britain's wars against its most formidable rival in the eighteenth century— France.
Between 1689 and 1763, and arguably for much longer, the rivalry between England and France was obsessive and constant. It extended, moreover, to seemingly every dimension of potential power: land wars, control of the seas, overseas colonies, the slave trade in Africa and the Americas. In many respects, France was in a better position than England to succeed the Dutch Republic as Europe's foremost power. In 1689, France's population was four times greater than that of England, and it had a much larger army, a comparable navy, and a chain of excellent ports and naval bases in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Moreover, in 1689, France's industrial production seemed, if anything, stronger than England's. How, then, did England prevail?3
In a nutshell, Britain triumphed over France because it had greater access to money. Throughout the seventeenth century, European monarchs were constantly scrambling for the resources needed to finance the skyrocketing costs of war. During this period, most of Europe's treasuries were empty. Armies marched into battle insufficiently provisioned, their soldiers hungry and unpaid. England's coffers were practically empty as late as 1603. (According to the Earl of Clarendon, it was “the popular axiom of Queen Elizabeth,” who ruled from 1558 to 1603, “that as her greatest treasure was in the hearts of her people, so she had rather her money should be in their purses than in her Exchequer.”) In this context, the “capacity to summon up large sums swiftly and transfer them secretly was crucial to the execution of sudden, bold initiatives of state.” Jews were particularly well placed to do this: They were able to raise massive amounts of capital, relying on international family networks and drawing on funds from all over the world.
Jews played precisely this role for William III. Not only did Jewish loans finance the stadtholder-king himself, but it was Jewish loans to a nearly bankrupt Spain—provided, ironically, by Sephardic families who had fled the Inquisition just a few decades earlier—that allowed the anti-French alliance among England, the Netherlands, and Spain to turn the tide against Louis XIV.4
However, loans from a few wealthy individuals to desperate monarchs would soon become a thing of the past. (The individual loans, not the desperate monarchs.) In 1694, Parliament established the Bank of England, built on the modern system of privately financed public debt pioneered by the Dutch. Here too Britain's new Jewish community played an important, although less direct, role.
After they arrived