Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

Dal Bo, Ernesto, Hutkova, Karolina, Leucht, Lukas and Yuchtman, Noam Meir (2023) Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP1931). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.

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Abstract

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series disaggregating excise revenues from traded and domestic goods. We find substantial growth in taxes on traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges the conventional wisdom attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors: international factors mattered, too.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion...
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Management
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
JEL classification:	N - Economic History > N4 - Government, War, Law, and Regulation > N43 - Europe: Pre-1913 N - Economic History > N7 - Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, Technology, and Other Services > N73 - Europe: Pre-1913 H - Public Economics > H2 - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue > H20 - General P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P16 - Political Economy
Date Deposited:	24 Jan 2024 17:42
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2024 17:48
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121310

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