Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States - The later Roman Empire. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Internetowy Przegląd Prawniczy TBSP UJ, 2016
The Theodosian Code contained a variety of laws aimed at the assurance of a privileged status of the Church and the orthodox clergy. Those laws were part of a general imperial policy aimed at the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire. Fiscal exemptions played an important role here. After the fall of the Western Empire, new Germanic realms respected and preserved the Roman legal heritage and ideas of legislation and relations of ecclesiastical and royal power. Roman fiscal solutions were also generally maintained. On the other hand, new ideas and institutions developed. Fiscal immunities of the Merovingian Age are exemplary here. Frankish kings tried to imitate Roman emperors' ecclesiastical policy and legislative measures. However, the profoundly changed political and economic circumstances led to a transformation of Roman fiscal institutions into new types of feudal bonds.
On Some Fiscal Decisions of Caligula and Vespasian
Studia Ceranea, 2019
The history of the Roman Empire is a history of continuously looking for new sources of state revenues. Numerous public loads, spontaneously created during the early Empire, without any deeper analysis, created a disordered mess of particular and curious taxes rather than a centralized system as an instrument of controlling economic processes. The tax decisions of the emperors mentioned in the title, in spite of having a significant influence on the state treasury, were, in fact, of the same disordered nature.
Reddite quae sunt Caesaris, Caesari. The Late Roman Empire and the Dream of Fair Taxation.
Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate, 2017
Modern states mostly fund themselves through taxation. Although other resources, like royal or temple lands, plunder, tributary extraction from subject communities and hybrid private–public contributions from oligarchies, played a larger role with ancient states, regular direct or indirect taxation represented a significant source of funding.1 The Roman Empire––notably from the time of Diocletian’s reforms at the turn of the fourth century CE––brought tax mechanisms to a degree of sophistication unknown on such a grand scale. Income tax, inheritance tax, sales tax, customs dues, regular wealth assessments, and their corollary (litigation, corruption, deficits, coinage manipulations, and official moral justifications of all sorts)––most of the components displayed by modern tax regimes were alive and well. We shall retrace from ancient sources the path that led a predatory entity––the Roman Republic––into becoming a complex, fully–fledged fiscal regime on an imperial scale. We shall compare imperial discourse with its actual practice. Finally, after a journey across eight centuries of Roman fiscal thinking, we shall settle in sixth–century Roman Egypt in order to assess how taxation was practically implemented–– at least, at that time in that region of the Empire. Key quotes from ancient sources form the backbone of this work until its last section. The main reason behind that choice lies in the fact that we aim at a comparison between the principles and the realities of Roman tax doctrine. As later Roman Egypt is by far the best documented case, none of what preceded it had the prerequisite that could have led to solid numerical estimates of tax–extraction rates. Moreover, extensive qualitative studies of the Roman tax system are available and there was no need to reinvent the wheel.2 We shall follow the emergence and progressive assertion of Roman fiscal doctrine until it reaches its most fully achieved state of development during the later imperial period. These ancient testimonies will make evident the gradual shift that transformed a predatory process into the procedures of a state sharing common values and interests with all its free inhabitants. Our final conclusions will challenge some assumptions often linked with Late Antiquity: an overall weakening of the state, an increasingly parasitic landed aristocracy, and a shrinking class of small landowners.
Fiscal Innovations in Early Modern States
Throughout the Early Modern times, European dynastic states started a long-term process towards the building of a territorial organization, depending on increasing revenues and creating its own self-sustaining logics. Different solutions were found to face expenditures; hence different paths to fiscal efficiency came up. This paper brings up the Portuguese case to add new issues to the debate of the factors for fiscal innovation and political-military efficiency in Early Modern times. Prior to the Spanish Secession war, the Portuguese state had faced the Spanish armies in the 14 th century and again in the 17 th century. Both wars triggered fiscal innovations, shaping the Portuguese fiscal system for centuries afterwards. Taking as benchmarks 1580 and 1680, this paper questions the choice for an income tax precisely at a time when excises were being generalized in North-western Europe. It makes an assessment of state revenues and of the role of this income tax (décima) on a comparative approach. The endurance of décima, as had happened to medieval excises, will be questioned taking into account cost-benefit considerations, regarding the costs (economic and political issues) of any change in collection and assessment. It will be argued that there are good examples of fiscal innovation in the Portuguese case. However, the importance of fiscal innovation for the process of state making and financial modernization may be overestimated just where institutional rigidities had subverted its potentials.
Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second, edited by Clifford Ando and Myles Lavan Century CE, 2021
This paper examines the relationship between Roman citizenship and fiscality in the long second century. It takes as its point of departure the seemingly contradictory relation of citizens to taxation: there were taxes from which all citizens were exempt but there were also taxes that only they paid. At its core lies the contention that we can only understand this situation and its history if we take into account the competing meanings of taxation that existed within the empire. Taxes could signify constitutional, imperial, and social difference, but they could also constitute community and belonging. Tracing these meanings and their history allows us to understand Roman citizens’ relationship to the poll tax, from which they were exempt (Part 2), and to the inheritance tax, which only they paid (Part 4), and it allows us to get to the bottom of Italy’s long-lasting immunity from tributum (Part 3). The paper starts with a case against the existence of a fiscal meaning of citizenship, which scholars sometimes assume (Part 1), and it concludes with an argument about what might have been the most far-reaching consequence of fiscal semantics in the empire: the possibility that what I call “Severan fiscal thought”, the demonstrably unique way in which Septimius Severus and Caracalla approached taxation, also underpinned the constitutio Antoniniana (Part 5).
State revenue and expenditure in the Han and Roman empires
Comparative analysis of the sources of income of the Han and Roman imperial states and of the ways in which these polities allocated state revenue reveals both similarities and differences. While it seems likely that the governments of both empires managed to capture a similar share of GDP, the Han state may have more heavily relied on direct taxation of agrarian output and people. By contrast, the mature Roman empire derived a large share of its income from domains and levies that concentrated on mining and trade. Collection of taxes on production probably fell far short of nominal rates. Han officialdom consistently absorbed more public spending than its Roman counterpart, whereas Roman rulers allocated a larger share of state revenue to agents drawn from the upper ruling class and to the military. This discrepancy was a function of different paths of state formation and may arguably have had long-term consequences beyond the fall of both empires.