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Why did France influence the geopolitical system of eighteenth-century Europe more effectively than did Britain? Explanations pointing to states’ military and economic power are unable to explain this outcome. I argue that durable geopolitical influence depends on states’ symbolic capacities to secure recognition from competitor states, in addition to their coercive and economic capacities. And I show that states are liable to secure recognition to the extent that their agents embody social dispositions congruent with those of competitor agents. France converted military and economic power into durable influence in eighteenth-century Europe because French agents and most of their European counterparts shared courtly standards of competence, and they were invested in the common stakes of patrimonial sovereignty. By contrast, Britain failed to convert its greater material power into similar influence because British agents tended to lack courtly manners and they were uninterested in patrimonial stakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the legitimacy and the effectiveness of privateering in the mid-eighteenth-century Mediterranean were determined by high politics beyond the indispensable war status. After the presentation of four distinctive privateering stories involving individuals of different backgrounds, there follows an analysis of the Ottoman, French, and British factors that determined national and private interests in wartime Archipelago (the Aegean Islands). As the Ottoman Empire was the major commercial partner and a potentially desirable ally for both the French and the British, especially for the Levant Company, privateers were trapped between conflicting interests, beyond their own comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]