This book offers a wholesale reinterpretation of both the introduction of excise taxation in Great Britain in the 1640s and the genesis of the Financial Revolution of the 1690s. By analysing hitherto unpublished manuscript and print sources, D'Maris Coffman resolves divergent accounts of these constitutionally problematic but fiscally significant new taxes. Parliament's success at imposing on a deeply divided kingdom an extra-legal species of indirect taxation, which hitherto had been a constitutional anathema and a political impossibility, remains one of the most striking features of the period. A fresh reading of William Petty's Treatise on Taxes illustrates the development of an indigenous discourse in defence of the tax state. By highlighting the importance of fiscal innovation during the Civil Wars and Interregnum for the development of the fiscal state in Britain, this study challenges 'stylised facts' about the economic significance of 1688/89. The final chapter delivers new insight into why the eighteenth-century British public accepted both unprecedented levels of government borrowing and one of the heaviest tax burdens in Western Europe. Coffman reveals how a 'new financial history,' rooted in closely contextualised studies, can contribute to current debates about sustainable levels of taxation and to fundamental questions of economic theory.

This book traces the growth of customs and excise, and their integral role in shaping the framework of industrial England; including state power, technical advance, and the evolution of a consumer society. Central to this structure was the development of two economies - one legal and one illicit. If there was a unique English pathway of industrialization, it was less a distinct entrepreneurial and techno-centric culture, than one predominantly defined within an institutional framework spearheaded by the excise and a wall of tariffs. This process reached its peak by the end of the 1770s. The structure then quickly started to crumble under the weight of the fiscal-military state, and Pitt's calculated policy of concentrating industrial policy around cotton, potteries, and iron - at the expense of other taxed industries. The breakthrough of the new political economy was the erosion of the illicit economy; the smugglers' free trade now became the state's most powerful weapon in the war against non-legal trade. If at the beginning of the period covered by this book state administration was predominantly deregulated and industry regulated, by the close the reverse was the case.

First published in 1982, Augustan England provides ample substance to reinforce the thesis that the years from 1680 to 1730 mark the most decisive stage in the rise of the English professional classes before the 19th century, and that this had profound consequences in maintaining the relative ‘openness’ of 18th century society until the advent of industrialization. This book provides the first ever authoritative study of the professions, as a whole, before the Victorian age. The spectacular growth and prosperity of the professional sector of English society at a time when population growth was minimal is seen by Professor Holmes as a mirror of the transformation of England herself in these same years. The Augustan age was one of high English achievement in many fields, from the flowering of literary genius to the acquisition of a sophisticated financial system and the attainment of Great Power status through two consuming wars. It witnessed a ‘commercial revolution’ and important aesthetic, cultural and scientific advances, many of them centered on the growth of London and on a rejuvenation of provincial urban life. From all these developments the professions derived stimuli; on all of them they left their distinctive stamp. In this study, therefore, they are presented not merely as institutions but as an integral part of the very texture of Augustan England. This is a must read for students and scholars of British history.

How can one make state administrative systems interesting, embody an abstract public ethos and give heroism to homogeneity? The discipline of literature and bureaucracy dismisses Weber's 'neurocrat'. Milton, Trollope and Hare are case studies on implementing the 'what if' visions literature explored during a period of great change in public service

Each generation of lawyers in common law systems faces an important question: what is the nature of equity as developed in English law and inherited by other common law jurisdictions? While some traditional explanations of equity remain useful - including the understanding of equity as a system that qualifies the legal rights people ordinarily have under judge-made law and under legislation - other common explanations are unhelpful or misleading. This volume considers a distinct and little noticed view of equity. By examining the ways in which courts of equity have addressed a range of practical problems regarding the administration of deliberately created schemes for the management of others' affairs, modern equity can be seen to have a strongly facilitative character. The extent and limits on this characterisation of equity are explored in chapters covering equity's attitude to administration in various public and private settings in common law systems.