Was there a 'taxation revolution' in late Eighteenth-Century Britain?

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Britain's wars against France, sometimes termed 'the second Hundred Years War', started after theGlorious Revolution of 1689 not ending until the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815. The policies of statefunding enabling the British state to undertake such prolonged warfare have been extensivelystudied. Historians and economists have closely investigated the 'financial revolution', manifested inthe creation of the Bank of England in 1694, and the cumulative fiscal shift from direct to indirecttaxation (Brewer, 1988; O'Brien, 1988). In turn, the rising tax yields enabled the warring state toservice an ever-increasing burden of state loans. It is widely accepted that Britain's ascent as aneighteenth-century world power was enabled primarily by the success of these fiscal policies, whichmade Britain into a 'fiscal military state'.But the exact nature of this 'taxation revolution' has eluded scholars. While tax collections grew by250% in real terms from 1715-1815, (Harris, 2008), as frequently cited by economic and socialhistorians and economists, the exact means by which these increases were achieved remainsassumed rather than proven. Nor do we know how and why policy changes took place and wherethe shifting burden of taxation actually lay. As a result, the social outcomes of changing taxationpolicies have also escaped scholars' attention, while a large body of contemporary social andeconomic writing, from newspaper articles to treatises by political economists have not receiveddue attention, and have sometimes been misunderstood, (Davies, 1786; Forster, 1767).