100 books like The Rise of Fiscal States

This book traces the paths of fiscal development in England, Japan, and China, focusing on a critical era of institutional reform after, respectively, the English Civil Wars, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion.

He brilliantly shows how these events led to urgent calls for state revenue, but how responses differed. England and Japan developed tools of modern public finance and equipped themselves to become world powers. China failed and only caught up much later.

This book is a wonderful example of historical comparative research in fiscal state formation, offering deep insights into the rise of the modern world system. 

This book sheds light on a very important yet greatly understudied theme: how modern tax systems spread across the globe.

Modern taxes refer to the broad-based tax instruments such as income taxes and general consumption taxes that underpin the rise of big government taxes.

The volume introduces a new historical dataset that maps the adoption of these modern taxes, covering both sovereign and colonial states from the 18th to the 21st century.

It shows how the logic of modern tax introductions in non-sovereign states differed from those in sovereign ones. In doing so, this volume goes beyond the methodological nationalism prevalent in fiscal sociology and comparative political economy. 

This volume provides the first global survey of taxation in the premodern world.

The book demonstrates how dispersed societies across the globe adopted a great diversity of fiscal institutions and instruments, such depending on local geographic conditions, political ambitions, and distinct historical settings.

With a coverage including Europe, the Near East, East Asia, and the Americas, this is arguably the most global survey of fiscal states formation that currently exists on the market.

This book also makes an admirable effort in interdisciplinarity approaches to fiscal history, with authors contributing from a wide range of fields including history, anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology.

This book focuses on the financial structure of the British Empire in Africa.

It traces how fiscal systems evolved in line with the two central aims of colonial rule: maintaining law and order on the cheap and promoting export production.

The book shows how efforts by colonial states to balance their budgets influenced their relationships with local elites as well as the imperial government.

Gardner uses quantitative data on public revenue and expenditure as well as qualitative archival records to follow the development of fiscal policies in British Africa from the beginning of colonial rule through the first years of independence, including the upheavals of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the ultimate handover of power.

For an in-depth study of the politics of colonial taxation, this is certainly one of the best books on the market.  

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, did as much as Alexander Hamilton to create the unique blend of capitalism and democracy that is the United States of America – a story that more Americans ought to know.

This is a landmark book in political economy and economic history. 

Douglass North won the Noble Prize in Economics in part for the study of institutions in economic history. 

This was his final work (coauthored with Wallis and Weingast). And while the lessons of North's earlier work on institutions have been incorporated into the wider body of scholarship in economic history and development economics, I think the lessons of this book haven't been fully absorbed.  

The fundamental idea is that all societies face "the problem of violence". They have to deter individuals from resorting to violence in order to take what they want. But the means through which society limits violence vary and are often detrimental to long-run economic growth. There is thus a "natural" form of government that is common throughout history, capable of producing social order but not widespread prosperity.

Achieving sustained economic growth in the long-run requires… show more.

This book is both a soaring and substantive comparative analysis of early modern social classes and state formation in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. 

For me and many others, it has been indispensable for understanding world power politics and history from the early modern era to the present. Methodologically, it is a genuine tour de force. Anderson’s scholarly output generally is in a class by itself.

Olson focuses on the impact of interest groups on public policy. He emphasizes the way that economic interests lobby governments to produce policies favorable to them, but at the expense of the general public. Interests lobby for subsidies, tax breaks, trade barriers to protect them from foreign competition, regulatory barriers to inhibit domestic competitors, and more. Over time, the connection between interest groups and policymakers strengthens, so that increasingly, profits are the result of political connections rather than producing value for consumers. The growth of interest group influence over time leads to the decline of nations.

I have been fascinated with selfhood, the cultivation of ‘subjects of development’ as either targets, or ‘trustees’ of aid, since my PhD.

Anand Pandian’s Crooked Stalks offers a nuanced, careful, and ultimately beautiful account of how moral selves are cultivated among the Kallar caste near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, India.

Development looms large among the Kallar, what Pandian describes as a ‘moral horizon’ that is an impetus to transform people’s lives and the material environment.

In presenting an impressive breadth of historical material alongside ethnographic description he shows the remnants of colonial rule in contemporary virtues, contributing to understanding the ‘postcolonial self’. 

This is the major book of my teacher, Anthony D. Smith, which seeks to explain why nationalism has become the dominant ideology of much of humanity.

In it, he argues that nationalism seeks to answer profound questions of identity arising from the crises generated by the global secular, political, and economic revolutions of modernity. Although nationalism is a predominantly modern phenomenon, its power rests on its ability to evoke and renovate the myths, symbols, and memories of older ethnic communities to legitimise political demands for autonomy.

Smith takes the symbolic world of nationalists seriously, particularly their preoccupation with national golden ages that are evoked to inspire a drive for a glorious future.