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  • Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845
  • James Jaffe (bio)
Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845. By William J. Ashworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+396. £55.

The importance of taxation for the state and civil society has always been both evident and multivalent. At one level, taxation is a simple shillings-and-pence issue that readily evokes deep-seated expressions of anger and resentment. Protest movements, demonstrations, and, of course, revolutions have been sparked at least in part by high and inequitable taxes. On another level, however, taxation expresses a wide variety of political objectives and social meanings. The relative distribution of wealth, the progress and poverty of commerce and manufacturing, the power and might of nations, what is eaten and what is worn, the nature of law, justice, and liberty—all of these issues are reflected in the history of customs and excise taxes. Indeed, as William J. Ashworth notes, some have suggested that taxation and revenue not only contributed to the formation of the modern state, they essentially created it. [End Page 247]

Before publication of the works of John Brewer, Patrick O'Brien, and several others, the importance of state finance and taxation had lain dormant for several decades. Since Brewer's identification of the character of Britain's "fiscal-military state," however, much closer attention has been paid not only to the military significance of state financing but also to its political and even its linguistic significance. Building in large part upon the works of these authors, Ashworth seeks to argue very broadly that the system of customs and excise that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also played a prominent role in the origins of Britain's industrial revolution, the rise of a scientific, meritocratic, and bureaucratic society, and, ultimately, the birth of Anglo-American radicalism.

These are bold claims indeed, and in some senses the author delivers more than the reader has any right to expect. Ashworth's accounts of the role of the excise in standardizing products, mathematizing measurements, and regulating manufacturing processes are fascinating contributions to the discussion of how science and scientific thinking penetrated government and society. Whereas the role of scientific societies and informal communications in this endeavor have been examined previously, the more pragmatic means by which scientific knowledge was disseminated is perhaps less well appreciated. In this regard, a key element of Ashworth's book is his discussion of the role played by the law in defining and thereby regulating the production process in taxable industries. As the needs of the state increased and expanded, more and more workshops and manufacturing processes became subject to the bureaucratic policing, supervision, and regulation of the excise officer. One of the less well-recognized effects of these new measures was to standardize and rationalize production, but equally important was the impetus such efforts gave to the many attempts to lower or avoid the state's assessments altogether. Thus a dialogue of sorts developed in which the standardization of production practices simultaneously spurred on both manufacturers and smugglers to either negotiate with or subvert the state's efforts to police production and distribution.

Yet such broad claims as Ashworth sometimes makes in this book naturally run the risk of exaggeration and overdetermination. The political economy of Anglo-American radicalism, for example, was certainly fueled by the issues of taxation, but does the conflict over taxation fully or even primarily explain its origins? Contrary to Ashworth's implications, neither radical groups like the London Corresponding Society nor far less radical opponents of excessive taxation were necessarily inspired to action solely or even principally by the existence of high taxes. Instead, they were motivated by a deeper sense of injustice borne of inequality, oppression, and exploitation, all of which were irritated but not solely generated by high taxes. "Tyranny," Edmund Burke explained in his speech on American taxation, "is a poor provider." Similarly, Ashworth's assertion that Pitt's taxation policies were ultimately more important to the trajectory of British industrialization [End Page 248] than either entrepreneurship or new technologies is here argued largely through assertion rather than...

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