The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815. Edited by Richard Bonney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 527. $110.00.

Extract

Since 1995 three volumes of essays, in each of which Richard Bonney has served as contributor or editor, have been published around the history of European fiscal systems. What new contribution or approach does this volume, the third, offer? Like its predecessors, this one fits into the “new fiscal history,” structured around the notion that fiscal systems should be studied in their broader constitutional, political, social, and economic contexts. As Bonney states in the introduction to the present volume, the point is to move beyond “teleology” (p. 12) or the tendency to compare “any fiscal system over time … with another in a sort of balance sheet” (p. 2). While not wanting to take any one country's experience as the measure for others, Bonney does identify certain broad stages through which fiscal systems have passed. His approach borrows from Joseph Schumpeter's thesis—subsequently adopted primarily by historians of Scandinavia and Germany—that early modern “countries” underwent a transition from “domain state” to “tax state,” whereby sovereigns expanded their fiscal reach beyond the medieval ideal of living from the revenues of the royal domain. In a previous volume Bonney and his collaborators revised this model of the rise of the tax state (see the introduction to Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, edited by W. M. Ormrod, Margaret Bonney, and Richard Bonney. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1999). Tax states, they argued, could falter and break down through loss of confidence or institutional paralysis, and thus did not represent the endpoint of fiscal development. Rather, it is the modern “fiscal state,” where institutions and structures allow for self-sustained growth and development, that represents the culmination of revolutionary changes. Furthermore, they held that crisis might occur within a given fiscal system and affect its shape or scope, but that only revolutionary upheaval could cause transition from one system to another. A revised model requires empirical support, and the present volume seeks to deliver it in the form of “national” case studies that are juxtaposed (in rough geographical order, from Western Europe eastward), but not compared.