The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c.1200-1815

Cover
Richard Bonney
Clarendon Press, 02.09.1999 - 540 Seiten
In this volume an international team of scholars builds up a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal history of Europe over six centuries. It forms a fundamental starting-point for an understanding of the distinctiveness of the emerging European states, and highlights the issue of fiscal power as an essential prerequisite for the development of the modern state. The study underlines the importance of technical developments by the state, its capacity to innovate, and, however imperfect the techniques, the greater detail and sophistication of accounting practice towards the end of the period. New taxes had been developed, new wealth had been tapped, new mechanisms of enforcement had been established. In general, these developments were made in western Europe; the lack of progress in some fiscal systems, especially those in eastern Europe, is an issue of historical importance in its own right and lends particular significance to the chapters on Poland and Russia. By the eighteenth century `mountains of debt' and high debt-revenue ratios had become the norm in western Europe, yet in the east only Russia was able to adapt to the western model by 1815. The capacity of governments to borrow, and the interaction of the constraints on borrowing and the power to tax had become the real test of the fiscal powers of the `modern state' by 1800-15.
 

Inhalt

England in the Middle Ages
19
England 14851815
53
France in the Middle Ages
103
France 14941815
125
Castile in the Middle Ages
177
Castile 15041808
203
The Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages
243
The Low Countries in the Middle Ages
281
The Swiss Confederation
327
The Papacy and the Papal States
359
Venice
381
The Italian States in the Early Modern Period
417
PolandLithuania before Partition
443
Russia 12001815
481
List of Contributors
507
Urheberrecht

The United Provinces 15791806
309

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Beliebte Passagen

Seite 4 - ... to say, in short, that not even by convention can any limitation be made to the power of that body in a state which in other respects is supreme, would be saying, I take it, rather too much: it would be saying that there is no such thing as government in the German Empire; nor in the Dutch Provinces; nor in the Swiss Cantons; nor was of old in the Achaean league.
Seite 9 - War drove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of states within it...
Seite 3 - These writers do distinguish, of course, between the apparatus of government and the authority of those who may happen to have control of it at any one time.

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