Until the early 1900s governments of Southeast Asia farmed out the right to run opium, gambling and other monopolies. Yet by about 1920 all of the major farms had been abolished and the collection of revenue brought under direct bureaucratic control. This book explains the rise and sudden fall of revenue farming, traces the changing fortunes of the Chinese businessmen who held the major farms, and uses the study of revenue farming to examine the emergence of the modern state in Southeast Asia.

This study examines for the first time the finance procedures and documents of the post-classical Ottoman Empire. It provides an overview of institutional and monetary history and a detailed description of assessment and collection processes for Cizye, Avariz and Iltizam-collected taxes, the documents produced by these processes, and the information they contain. The finance department's detailed record-keeping, procedural continuity, and provision of economic justice made it a bulwark of stability in a period of turmoil. For specialists, this book introduces a multitude of sources on the economic and social history of the post-classical age, while for comparativists it places the empire in its seventeenth-century context. It links Ottoman administrative change with early modern state formation and reformulates the seventeenth century as a period of consolidation, not decline.

In January 1682, William Culliford, a loyal and experienced officer in the King's customs service, began an extraordinary journey under Treasury orders to investigate the integrity and efficiency of the customs establishments of southwest England and south Wales as part of a drive to maximize the Crown's income from customs duties (on which it relied for much of its revenue). Starting at Bristol, Culliford eventually completed this daunting task in Cornwall over two years later in the spring of 1684. His report on each of the ports he inspected (the primary source for this book) revealed widespread smuggling and fraud in the context of a customs service both lacking in efficiency and riddled with corruption. The book documents the varied frauds and wide-ranging abuses uncovered and their facilitation by customs officers only too ready to collude with smugglers, dishonest merchants and seamen and to accept bribes to ignore tax evasion. It describes, too, Culliford's assessment of the administrative practices of each port inspected and his judgment on the levels of probity and efficiency of individual officers, detailing his recommendations for procedural improvements and the treatment of the corrupt and incompetent and, incidentally, of those suspected of political and religious dissent. Additionally, the book presents a body of statistical data on the customs revenue actually collected at individual ports in the 1670s and 1680s and surveys the extent and nature of the maritime trade of the ports Culliford examined. It thus not only throws light on the history of the customs service, but provides a rare insight into the interactions of economic, social and political issues in the later seventeenth century, and makes a valuable contribution to the particular histories of the ports and maritime districts visited by this energetic and tenacious investigator.

When Roger Lockyer's political history of the reigns of James I and Charles I, up to the outbreak of civil war in 1642, first appeared in 1989 it met with a general welcome for its calm, sensible, informed analysis of these eventful years; for its ease and clarity of style; and for its return to the writings and speeches of the time to understand, and animate, the issues that were of central importance to early Stuart Britain. Now, almost a decade on, Roger Lockyer has substantially reworked the entire book, tightening the structure, and updating and significantly expanding the text. There are new chapters on Scotland and Ireland, greatly strengthening the "British" dimension of the analysis; on the personal rule of Charles I; and a welcome new final chapter examining recent historiographical controversies, and reassessing our current understanding of the causes of the Civil War.

This celebrated collection of essays was first published in 1961 to mark the 80th birthday of the great historian and social reformer R. H. Tawney. The list of contributors contains several of the most English distinguished historians of the post-war period, including Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill, Joan Thirsk, Gerald Aylmer and Donald Coleman, and many of the essays in this volume have since assumed classic status. The collection opens with F. J. Fisher's celebrated overview of 'Tawney's Century', defined as that period which separates the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the 1530s from the Great Rebellion of the 1640s.