The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History 1500–1914 ed. by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla et al. (review)

The transition from the domain state (or demesne state), which drew income primarily from crown-owned property, such as estates and mines, to the fiscal or tax state, which rested upon tax revenue, has been widely considered a vital political and economic change in early modern Europe. But is the rise of the fiscal state a phenomenon unique to Europe? Did the institutions of fiscal states contribute not only to the ascendance of Western Europe, but also to the great divergence in economic development between Western Europe and the rest of the world in the nineteenth century?

The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, edited by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla and Patrick K. O’Brien with Francisco Comín Comín, represents an important effort to grapple with these questions by bringing together studies on the history of taxation in both European and non-European parts of the world primarily from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Part 1 of this book consists of chapters on fiscal development in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Britain. Part 2 focuses on the German state system, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire. Part 3 includes studies on Spain; Portugal; the republics, city-states, and Papal States in Italy; and the Ottoman Empire. Part IV is made up of chapters on China, Japan, and Mughal and British India. These empirically informative studies on particular fiscal developments in different parts of the world not only illustrate some common patterns, but also suggest certain research directions for future studies in comparative fiscal history.

The connection between war and the development of fiscal states remains close across Eurasia even though the transition to fiscal states may occur at different times. The two chapters on China, for example, point out that war-fighting was vital to the emergence of a fiscal state in China in the Song dynasty (960 c.e.–1279 c.e.), much earlier than the establishment of fiscal states in Western Europe. Contributors to this book also demonstrate that fiscal and financial innovations on the part of the state are closely related to the commercialization of the economy. As illustrated by the case-studies of the Netherlands (by Mantje Fritschy, Marjolein’t Hart, and Edwin Horlings), France (by Richard Bonney), and Britain (by Martin Daunton), the development of a market economy is a crucially important context against which we should investigate issues such as the change from taxation in kind to taxation in cash; the increasing percentage of indirect taxation extracted from mass consumption; and the financial methods that the state employed to obtain long-term loans from the financial markets. The causal relationship between economic growth and the rise of fiscal states is therefore not unidirectional, and more attention could be paid to the complex interactions between the economy and a given fiscal state.

Contributors to this book at times use the term “fiscal state” to describe quite different methods or institutions by means of which the state collected taxes and borrowed money, such as direct collection by officials, tax-farming, and short-term versus long-term credits. As these financial techniques were employed in different political systems, one wonders how the history of fiscal states might be different from a fiscal history of non-state political units, such as empire. If we consider that the legitimation of coercive force is a vital component in state formation but not necessarily in territorial empires, the political aspects of fiscal states may be as important as the technical methods of collecting taxes. In fact, the chapters on the fiscal history of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Britain all address the political conflicts that arose in collecting income or property taxes, and how states attempted to legitimate the heavy burden of taxation to the people. The chapter by R. Bin Wong...