Batavian Allies: The Dutch Contribution to Financing the Napoleonic Wars: a Response to Pierre Branda’s “Did War Pay for War?”

Just over one decade ago, Pierre Branda published a study of Napoleonic public finance. The study marks a turning point in the historiography of Napoleonic war financing because, through relying on well-researched quantitative data, Branda lays to rest the long-held myth that Napoleon ‘made war pay for war’. However, the conceptualisation of Napoleonic resource extraction, the methodology for quantifying resource flows and the temporal delineation have resulted in a prism that omits certain resource flows. This has a bearing on the assessment of Napoleonic war financing. Through exploring French resource extraction in the Netherlands this article builds on Branda’s work to shed a new light on the success of Napoleonic resource extraction and war financing.