A lucid, incisive account of 18th-century Britain's development
from a minor player on the periphery of the European theater to an
imperial power through the evolution of the modern
"fiscal-military" state. Brewer (Director, Clark Library and the
Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies/ UCLA)
examines the transformation through a focus on the bureaucracy that
evolved to assess, collect, and channel tax monies. Three major
factors are considered formative: the lack of an entrenched venal
officier class, as in France; the absence of a large standing army
independent of civil authority and the consequent emphasis on the
navy; and the Common's check on the Crown's behavior through the
power of the purse. Looking at methods of taxation used to finance
the growth of war and Empire, Brewer points to the changeover from
direct - i.e., land - tax to indirect excise taxes; a system of
well-trained and efficient clerks and tax collectors, as opposed to
tax fanning and factional sinecures; and the tendency of the
population to accept taxation due to Parliament's participation in
the process. The apparatus of the fiscal-military state created an
environment that nurtured the growth of a private financial
community and thus the tools of a modern economy and the
development of deficit financing. A final chapter dealing with "the
politics of information" considers the public's view of itself as
part of the larger national economy due to the vogue for "political
arithmetic" and the dissemination of "useful knowledge": statistics
gathered and processed by the Bartlebys of the 18th century. Though
aimed at the nonspecialist (much information will be familiar to
students of the period's economic and military history),
considerable background is required. Still, this is fluid,
readable, and informative, and will reward anyone with an interest
in the evolution of the modern state. (Kirkus Reviews)
Under the later Stuarts, England became a major European military
power, English armies and navies grew to an unprecedented size,
civilian administration burgeoned and taxation, public borrowing
and spending on war reached new heights. This work examines the
causes of the emergence in England of this fiscal-military state
and the features which distinguished it from European powers. It
also charts the effect of these developments on society at large:
their impact on the economy, on social structure and politics and
their role in developing special interest groups and lobbies. Thus
it provided an interpretative framework which links adminstration
with politics, public finance with the economy and foreign policy
with domestic affairs.
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