This book offers a wholesale reinterpretation of both the introduction
of excise taxation in Great Britain in the 1640s and the genesis of the
Financial Revolution of the 1690s. By analysing hitherto unpublished
manuscript and print sources, D'Maris Coffman resolves divergent
accounts of these constitutionally problematic but fiscally significant
new taxes. Parliament's success at imposing on a deeply divided kingdom
an extra-legal species of indirect taxation, which hitherto had been a
constitutional anathema and a political impossibility, remains one of
the most striking features of the period. A fresh reading of William
Petty's Treatise on Taxes illustrates the development of an indigenous
discourse in defence of the tax state. By highlighting the importance of
fiscal innovation during the Civil Wars and Interregnum for the
development of the fiscal state in Britain, this study challenges
'stylised facts' about the economic significance of 1688/89. The final
chapter delivers new insight into why the eighteenth-century British
public accepted both unprecedented levels of government borrowing and
one of the heaviest tax burdens in Western Europe. Coffman reveals how a
'new financial history, ' rooted in closely contextualised studies, can
contribute to current debates about sustainable levels of taxation and
to fundamental questions of economic theory