This picture of the art of war and the social foundations of the armed forces in the eighteenth century has been drawn from a study of the conditions in England, France, and Prussia: conditions in the Austrian, Russian and other armies, though different in detail, were not different in essence.

A note of leisure characterised eighteenth-century warfare, both on land and at sea, until the Revolutionary wars, first of America, then of France, introduced a sense of energy such as the preceding years had never known, and began that ideological warfare characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas in modern times the function of generals is to win campaigns by decisive battles, in the eighteenth century few would have questioned a saying of the great duke of Alva, quoted with approval by Lord Hardwicke to the duke of Newcastle in September 1760: ‘It is the business of a general always to get the better of his enemy, but not always to fight, and if he can do his business without fighting, so much the better.’

At sea, Clarendon's views in his verdict on Blake, written in the preceding century, also still held good. Blake, according to Clarendon, was ‘the first man that declin'd the old track…and despised those rules which had been long in practice, to keep his ship and his men out of danger; which had been held in former times a point of great ability and circumspection; as if the principal art requisite in the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come home again’. Armies and navies were expensive necessities for the limited resources of eighteenth-century governments; military forces and ships represented a heavy investment in time and money, and if lost in action could not be easily replaced.