Social Science Research Council

"'The Devil's Remedy:' Excise Taxation in the British Isles, 1650-1700"

My doctoral dissertation will offer the first full-length monographic study of excise taxation in the seventeenth-century British Isles from its original imposition during the Civil Wars to the fiscal union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1707. This project treats excise taxation both as a case study in state formation and as a neglected contributor to the political crisis of late Stuart rule. It builds upon Patrick O'Brien's research into the consolidation of excise taxation after the Restoration in 1660, William Ashworth's study of the eighteenth-century customs and excise, and Miles Ogborn's path-breaking exploration of 'excise geographies.' The first part of the study will be re-constitutive and descriptive; the second analytical and interpretative. After a wholesale re-examination of the available economic data, the first chapter will reconstruct the history of excise revenue collection over this period. Chapter Two will use cliometric techniques to model the Excise as a regressive consumption tax and to investigate its role as a stimulus or hindrance to macroeconomic growth in the seventeenth-century excisable liquor industries. Chapter Three will investigate the institutional culture of the Excise Commission. Part Two follows the trajectory of the excise from a hated Dutch import to a shibboleth for French style absolutism. Chapter Four will explore the parliamentary debates and pamphlet literature about the respective merits of excise taxation and customs duties in the 1660s and 1670s. Chapter Five will emphasize the key part the excise revenue played in the 1680s in fanning concerns about oversupply of Crown finances. Chapter Six will reinterpret the financial settlement of the Revolution of 1688/89 given contemporaries' concerns about the singular role of excise taxation in promoting non-parliamentary rule. The conclusion will connect fate of excise taxation in the 1690s and early 1700s to the larger narrative of early modern state formation in the British Isles.