 The Political Economy of TaxationChapter 8 in Excise Taxation and the Origins of Public Debt, 2013, pp 183-199 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract When Parliament resorted to excise taxation during the Civil Wars, they had intended it as a temporary expedient for financing what they understood as the extraordinary expenses of funding the war against the king. Permanent settlement of the excise was unthinkable. Yet amidst common law objections to excise taxation, both Hobbesian arguments about state sovereignty and rehabilitations of the civil law of merchants were available to pro-excise pamphleteers as independent justifications for Parliament’s imposition of the tax. These discourses evolved into the theory of compensatory taxation advocated by William Petty in 1662. Taken together, these print polemics point to a native discourse on the tax state that significantly pre-dates the late eighteenth-century contributions made by Adam Smith. The Interregnum’s experiment with excise taxation provides both the impulse and the context for a significant shift in attitudes towards the public revenue as a whole. Keywords: Political Economy; Public Debt; Indirect Taxation; Ancient Constitution; Public Revenue (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-1-137-37155-3_8 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan |
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