Nine Years' War

We were generally able to defeat countries with bigger populations and greater resources than ours because we had a technological edge and because we were better at mobilizing capital.

I would argue that if you take the 300 years up until the end of the Cold War, so from 1689 when we entered the Nine Years' War, right the way through all the wars we fought against France in the 19th century, the imperial expansion, and then the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War.

We were able to defeat countries that on paper had every advantage, France in the 18th century, China in the 19th century, Germany in the 20th century, because we were technologically superior and that gave us the edge in whatever, pick your moment, air superiority in the Second World War or whatever.

And we had better money markets, deeper money markets, cheaper money markets.

It had been extensively rebuilt, and it was a kind of new and shiny version of itself.

And after the Glorious Revolution, the new king, William III, as you say, immediately involved England in a series of wars, the so-called Nine Years' War, which took place in Ireland and also in Europe.

And he had a problem because wars were very expensive.

The money men, the goldsmiths in the city, were wary of lending to the king because he, in the past, and this was a very new king, had just been replaced, had just replaced another one.

And in the past, Charles II had defaulted on his loans.

So they were a bit suspicious of just lending to the crown.

Well, throughout the whole of this series, we've seen the city looking at the monarch and thinking, hmm, and sometimes the loans go well.

quite often they don't go so well.

I think I can feel Robin calling out to me.

The nerd card is The Nine Years' War.

The Nine Years' War.

The trope card is Yo-Kai.

Yo-Kai.

They drove out most of the Christians and put down the Christian rebellions in the 1610s and 30s.

Then they put down the last of the individual Daimyo rebellions and basically penned up the emperor.

So by the beginning of the Nine Years' War, the Tokugawa had been ruling Japan with, one hesitates to say an iron fist, but let us say a mailed fist.

As tensions increased in Europe and Spain's position diminished throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain gradually lost control of the island.

In a unique arrangement outlined in the sixteen ninety-seven Treaty of Ryswick at the end of the Nine Years' War, Spain ceded control of roughly one-third of the western side of the island to France.

Under this new arrangement, the western third was dubbed Saint-Domingue, while the eastern two-thirds remained the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.

It was at this point the two sides of the island began to evolve very different personalities.

But we have had, even in the UK, suggestions of war, not war bonds, but defence bonds or whatever, in order to fund that increase in defence.

Then, of course, we've got the other famous year we all remember equally well, 1694, which was the year a syndicate of 1,268 investors bought English government debt to fund the Nine Years' War leading to the creation of the Bank of England.

So war seems to be a pretty kind of constant theme in this historical analysis as well, because it's expensive.

And we're seeing the impacts of that war now on US government treasuries, and we're all going to feel the impact.

In Europe itself, Britain had led alliances alongside powers like the Dutch Republic and Austria, which had withstood French efforts to dominate Western Europe for decades.

This rivalry was so intense that historians now talk about a second Hundred Years' War, one which ran from 1688, when the Nine Years' War broke down, to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and which was actually much more intense than the first Hundred Years' War, fought between England and France between 1337 and 1453.

Britain had won the latest round in this clash at the time that William was born.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, two years before William's birth and at the end of the Seven Years' War, had seen the French cede Canada to Britain and accept British ascendancy in northeastern India.

It's, it's a big problem, especially in periods of epidemics.

I mean, the famous example is that there were major typhus epidemics on the ships during the, um, during the Nine Years War, um, 1689 to-

Yeah

... 1698.