Presentation: The Subtle Nerves of War: Strategy, Empire, and Information (18th Century)
Abstract
This article highlights the central role of information in eighteenth-century warfare and in shaping the power of the Spanish monarchy. Beyond battles or material resources, imperial strategy depended on military observations, reports, maps, espionage, and news networks. The study examines three levels: the metropolitan, involving observation missions and Cádiz’s strategic function; the institutional, focused on port captaincies and the San Blas naval department; and the peripheral, where regions such as Darién and the Caribbean required critical intelligence. The article demonstrates that war was also fought through knowledge, information flows, and naval intelligence essential to sustaining imperial authority.
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García Hernán, E., & Maffi, D. (Coords.). (2017). Estudios sobre guerra y sociedad en la Monarquía hispánica: Guerra marítima, estrategia, organización y cultura militar, 1500-1700. Albatros.
MacCormack, S. (2007). On the wings of time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400832675
Parker, G. (1996). The military revolution: Military innovation and rise of the west, 1500-1800 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Parrott, D. (2012). The business of war: Military enterprise and military revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023337
Bayly, C. A. (1996). Empire and information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511583285
Black, J. (1994). European warfare, 1660-1815. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203499429
Black, J. (2004). Rethinking military history. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203337462
Blair, A. (2011). Too much to know: Managing scholarly information before the modern age. Yale University Press.
Brendecke, A. (2012). Imperio e información: Funciones del saber en el dominio colonial español. Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Brewer, J. (1989). The sinews of power: War, money and the English state, 1688-1783. Alfred A. Knopf.
Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2001). How to write the history of the New World: Histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503619241
García Hernán, E., & Maffi, D. (Coords.). (2017). Estudios sobre guerra y sociedad en la Monarquía hispánica: Guerra marítima, estrategia, organización y cultura militar, 1500-1700. Albatros.
MacCormack, S. (2007). On the wings of time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400832675
Parker, G. (1996). The military revolution: Military innovation and rise of the west, 1500-1800 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Parrott, D. (2012). The business of war: Military enterprise and military revolution in early modern Europe. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023337
Presentation: The Subtle Nerves of War: Strategy, Empire, and Information (18th Century). (2026). Studia Historica: Historia Moderna, 47(2), 7-12. https://doi.org/10.14201/shhmo2025472712
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