Coffman, DD; (2008) The fiscal revolution of the Interregnum: Excise taxation in the British Isles, 1643--1663. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract

By offering the first full-length treatment of excise taxation during the Interregnum, my dissertation argues that the British fiscal state pre-dated the Financial Revolution by two decades. The standard narrative of early modern European state formation elaborates upon Joseph Schumpeter's notion of transition from a feudal demesne-state to the beginnings of the modern tax state. In the British Isles, this transition is understood to have occurred in the seventeenth century, culminating in the Financial Revolution of the 1690s. Widespread acceptance in the scholarly literature of John Brewer's claim that "post-revolutionary finance was built on a pre-revolutionary model" has failed to spark a corresponding interest in the financial history of the Protectorate and Restoration regimes. In keeping with a commitment to a closely historicized "fiscal sociology," my dissertation takes Interregnum public finance on its own terms. ^ Revisionist historiography places the origins of the civil wars in a mid-century "functional crisis" of the monarchy that turns on taxation. Of the financial innovations of the Interregnum era, the domestic excise tax was the most controversial. Twenty years later, the excise, had become a notoriously "easy and productive" tax, a threat to the common law notions of an "ancient constitution." Standard historical accounts present the introduction of tax farming in the 1650s as the pivotal development. In this view, recourse to private entrepreneurs allowed the regime to deflect onto private parties the public's hostility towards an unpopular tax. My research shows this is not an adequate framework for understanding the settlement of excise taxation in Britain. Successive regimes retained the excise because commodity taxation had proven the most flexible mechanism for ensuring access to money markets via financial intermediaries. The Restoration regime preserved the lessons of Interregnum public finance. By 1663 Britain had a tax state. This indigenous development was catalyzed by the political crisis of the 1640s and should not be reduced to English tutelage to "Dutch finance" in the wake of the arrival of William and Mary at the Revolution.

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