Michael Duffy, University Fellow, formerly Director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, University of Exeter

Following the original French language publication of this book in 1999, it was hailed as a ‘pioneering work’ and it was admitted that ‘no one had previously attempted a detailed analysis of the V[ictualling] B[oard]'s work or the tendering system by which it ensured that the navy was fed’. Whereas historians had previously only considered naval victualling at best as a chapter in wider works, Christian Buchet has afforded it an in-depth study covering its development over time and in particular its impact on Britain's most decisive imperial war of the eighteenth century – the Seven Years War. He has also explored its relations with the agricultural economy and with the contractors who made the agricultural market in the eighteenth century. He shows how it was possible to achieve reform in what has traditionally been regarded as the corrupt administrative system of the first half of the eighteenth century, and produce improvements that were both efficient and economic. Perhaps it took a French scholar who understood the workings of the French naval administration to see so clearly how these reforms provided a crucial difference which released forces to operate in large numbers over large distances and for long periods, whereas in the Seven Years War the French were unable to consider maintaining a large army in Canada because it was impossible to feed it there, while French naval expeditions to the Caribbean had barely time to arrive before lack of adequate provisions forced them to return home.