Wars have to be funded, and the financial arrangements whereby the war effort was sustained had arguably been as important for the many British victories in the previous wars of the eighteenth century as the military efforts of the British state. Moreover, Britain's wars had become progressively more expensive as the eighteenth century wore on, and with the Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s, the cost of war rose to an entirely new level yet again. When studying the contribution the Scots made to the British state and to the war effort in this period, it is therefore necessary to address the issue of the financial contribution the Scots made too. Doing so, however, raises a number of questions with respect to the calculation and assessment of this contribution, and we will look at these technical issues first.

The first point to make is that by contribution, we are not really thinking so much about the absolute financial contribution the Scots made, as about their relative contribution, that is, what they contributed when measured per capita. No one, be that either contemporaries or historians now, would have been in or are in any doubt that the Scottish contribution was small when measured in absolute terms, simply due to the much larger population of England. A related point, however, is what to measure? The most obvious category perhaps– which was also the one contemporaries focussed on– is that of taxation. What did Scotland contribute in terms of tax revenues to the Treasury? While such calculations can be made with a considerable degree of certainty and preciseness in present-day society, due to the well of statistical material we now produce and therefore have available, it is a far more difficult exercise to carry out for the 1790s, primarily because of the paucity of source material on taxation from this decade. This is a point we will be returning to below. The question of financial contribution, however, also touches upon less tangible and quantifiable issues relating to the concept of wealth. How is wealth created in a society, and can all aspects of wealth creation really be measured? And if not, does that mean that any attempt at calculating a relative contribution will always be uncertain and potentially controversial?