1700: Financing the Imperial State

Abstract

The seventeenth century had seen the creation of the first British Empire, but the beginning of the end for the Ottoman and Mughal Empires and the complete collapse of the Ming Empire. These events coincided with differences in the capacity of these states to realize fundamental transformations in their finances: (i) military spending (from small cavalry armies paid in kind to much larger forces armed with gunpowder weapons and paid in cash); (ii) fiscal structure (from direct taxation of production to indirect taxation of transactions) ; (iii) organizational control (from decentralized nobles’ households to centralized bureaucracies). In England, these fiscal transformations were facilitated by the increasing standardization of the written and spoken vernaculars. However, in Asia the ruling dynasties were handicapped by the high cost of decoding information written in classical literary languages . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.