In 1975, the Ugandan state established an Economic Crimes Tribunal to investigate and penalize smuggling, hoarding, overcharging, and other commercial malfeasance. In the coming years, innumerable Ugandans were arrested and charged with contravening the state's economic regulations. Prior observers have seen this as another instance of a capricious state, but in this article, I demonstrate the popular investment in economic regulation. Ugandans demanded better stewardship of money and things because they were aghast at the ungovernable world of commodities. For one thing, the inaccessibility of so-called “essential commodities” — sugar and salt, preeminently — impeded ethical expectations surrounding social reproduction, hospitality, and masculine respectability. More troubling, essential commodities were not completely unavailable; rather, they were available on exclusionary and confusing terms. Relative deprivation was more upsetting than absolute scarcity because it offended a sense of consumptive entitlement. As a result, it was not only the state that accused citizens of economic crimes. There were widespread accusations in which allegation and denunciation circulated among neighbors, families, and bureaucrats in an urgent effort to discipline commodities and people.

This article deals with a fiscal reform implemented in Chile during the late 1870s, when the country was suffering a severe economic and fiscal crisis, on the eve of the War of the Pacific. In 1879, the Chilean government introduced a new set of direct levies, taxing inheritance, income and wealth, despite the historic resistance of most of the economic elites to direct taxation in a highly unequal society. The process also shows that not all the economic elite avoided direct taxation. Despite other challenges faced by any developing country in extracting taxes from its population (e.g. lack of both proper information and human capital), during c.1879-1884 collection of these new direct taxes was successful, mainly on account of the improved extractive capacity built up during the preceding decades. Yet, by the mid-1890s all direct taxes (new and old) had been either derogated or transferred to local government (in some cases after being modified). Once again, Chilean central government depended entirely on indirect taxes, with export duties on nitrate being the most important. Nitrate provides a good example of an export boom shaping taxation for the worse; rather than increasing and diversifying the sources of revenue, a dominant sector of the Chilean economic elite decided to stop paying direct taxes and to make the state entirely dependent on the cycles of the international economy. However, some members of the economic elite, although defeated in their purpose, were aware of the wide range of benefits of keeping direct taxation: social justice, financial health and less vulnerability to trade cycles. Unfortunately, the balance of power favoured elite groups with enough power to hinder direct taxation.

Currently, scholars hold that the government’s principal contribution to the California wine industry’s recovery from Prohibition in the 1930s was to get out of the way, freeing entrepreneurs to conduct business properly; according to this interpretation, the United States only taxed the product and impeded progress. But this article argues that in the areas of regulation, promotion, and protection of the wine industry, the federal government provided a framework for California winemakers to succeed and that, moreover, it often did so at their request and in cooperation with them. Though New Deal laws and regulations did not benefit all stakeholders equally, they did work to bring economic recovery to an industry that suffered from both Prohibition and the Depression.

The violent and competitive context in which trade relations between the states of Senegambia and Europeans evolved required moments of calm and stability, which were decisive and important factors in the cohabitation of trade actors. Diplomacy was a fundamental political lever for European trade in Senegambia. It had become a major stake in the daily lives of the actors. Diplomacy was generally reserved for field actors from different political cultures and with different political and economic ambitions. Diplomacy took the form of negotiations, and took the form of simple agreements of principle, notably in the context of palavers, or the conclusion of trade and peace treaties. The aim of diplomacy, for example, was to establish strong, peaceful commercial relations between trade players and to regularize the tax system, which was the fundamental basis of trade and the expression of the sovereignty of local chiefs towards the Europeans.

Richard Nixon was the first president who examined the possibility of introducing a value-added tax (VAT) at the federal level in the late twentieth century. By 1970, his administration had considered recommending it alongside other domestic programs to overcome the criticism against the VAT’s regressivity, potential conflict in the federal–state tax authority, and the fragmented decision-making authority between the executive and legislative branches of the government. However, in 1971, the Nixon administration shifted their policy priority toward gaining the middle-class political support by linking local property tax relief to a federal VAT. Although they combined the two measures with a rebate to obtain consent to and confidence in them from the “opponents” among the “internalists” of policymaking and societal actors, their attempt failed to accomplish it. As a result, Nixon abandoned the federal VAT. This abandonment was a missed opportunity to introduce a federal VAT, leading the United States to become a fiscal outlier among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries: it has not yet implemented a national/federal VAT. Furthermore, this outcome marked the origin of certain historical characteristics of the American fiscal state: the use of tax expenditures, “fend-for-yourself federalism,” weak extractive capacity, and fiscal inflexibility.

Across more than seven centuries (c. 1350–600 BC), the Assyrian Empire established political dominance and cultural influence over many settlements in the Ancient Near East. Assyrian policies of resource extraction, including taxation and tribute, have been extensively analysed in textual and art historical sources. This article assesses the impact of these policies on patterns of wealth within mortuary material—one of the most conservative forms of culture, deeply rooted in group identity. The author argues that a trend of decreasing quality and quantity of grave goods over time supports models emphasising the heavy economic burden of Assyrian administration on its subjects.

How governments raise tax revenue is at the core of domestic political conflict. Public opinion towards taxation is measured generally and qualitatively by many surveys, but previous research has not closely linked public preferences to the budget problem faced by governments regarding how best to raise or cut a marginal quantity of revenue. We present results from a novel tax preference experiment in which UK respondents are given choices over different tax ‘levers’ that are expected to raise or cut equal revenue. We find that while different tax levers vary substantially in their popularity, there is a ‘hidden consensus’ regarding different tax levers across income levels and partisanship of the respondents.

This article examines the fiscal transformation of Spain's trade with Spanish America during the 17th century. It analyses the taxation of trade combined with the evolution of the Hispanic Monarchy's long-term domestic debt. To this end, the author looks at the almojarifazgo de Indias (main customs duty), its juro (annuity) obligations and the evolution of the transatlantic trade. He argues that the fall in customs revenue and the increasing non-payment of the juros issued against the almojarifazgo were neither a consequence of the alleged crisis of the Carrera de Indias nor of the higher incidence of fraud. The Crown was not interested in exerting greater fiscal pressure on the trade or fighting fraud at the customs houses of Seville and Cadiz as the increased tax revenue would have gone entirely to service the unpaid juros. Instead, the fiscal burden shifted towards extraordinary contributions that were free of juro obligations.

This article analyses taxation practices in colonial, post-colonial rebel-led, and independent South Sudan and argues that the ethos of taxation in the region has been and remains primarily oriented around predatory and coercive strategies of rule. This overarching pattern endures because the fundamental structure and rationale of revenue-raising practices, which collectively constitute South Sudan’s revenue complex, have not changed since at least Anglo-Egyptian occupation of the region in 1899. The paper explains how tax collecting as predation began when the first colonial administration deployed taxes to acquire loyalty from customary authorities such as chiefs and sheikhs, who personally benefitted from their taxation powers. From the early 1960s to 2005, armed groups in the region periodically fought against Khartoum-led rule, and rebels extorted taxes from the population to help fuel their war efforts. Taxes in today’s South Sudan, which acquired independence in 2011, are not collected to raise revenue except to pay off the individuals collecting them, and they continue to generate predation. The rise of international aid and windfalls from oil revenues have further diminished taxation’s financial significance for the national government and have altered local authorities’ coercive demands for payment. The portrait that emerges from the practices of South Sudan’s successive war-makers and state-makers is one of taxation wielded as a technology of rule, one of coercion and often extortion, to fulfil the self-interests of tax collectors. The article is based on archival research in Sudanese and South Sudanese national archives, British colonial archives, and 205 interviews conducted in South Sudan.

When reading contemporary theories of distributive justice, one could easily get the impression that questions of fiscal design are normatively speaking merely instrumental for realizing the distributive ideal. Once the overall conception of justice is settled upon, questions of how the state should arrange its institutions and policies are settled if they effectively and efficiently promote the preferred distribution. I argue that such pure instrumentalism is mistaken in the context of fiscal policy. As a result, there is nothing problematic or morally arbitrary about accepting domain-specific principles of fiscal justice.