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

英法战争，有时被称为“第二次百年战争”，始于1689年的光荣革命，直到1815年的滑铁卢战役才结束。人们广泛研究了使英国能够承担如此长期战争的国家资助政策。历史学家和经济学家仔细研究了“金融革命”，表现在1694年英格兰银行的创建，以及从直接到间接的累积财政转变（Brewer, 1988； O' brien, 1988）。反过来，不断上升的税收收益使战国能够支付不断增加的国家贷款负担。人们普遍认为，英国之所以能够崛起为18世纪的世界强国，主要是因为这些财政政策的成功，这些政策使英国成为一个“财政军事国家”。但学者们对这场“税收革命”的确切性质一直很困惑。虽然从1715年到1815年，税收实际增长了250%（哈里斯，2008），正如经济和社会历史学家和经济学家经常引用的那样，实现这些增长的确切手段仍然是假设而不是证明。我们也不知道政策变化是如何以及为什么发生的，以及税收负担的转移实际上在哪里。因此，改变税收政策的社会结果也逃过了学者们的关注，而大量的当代社会和经济写作，从报纸文章到政治经济学家的论文，都没有得到应有的关注，有时还被误解了（Davies, 1786; Forster, 1767）。

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).