The colonial tax state

The development of the tax state and the nation state are closely interlinked. Most of the literature focuses on the histories of sovereign European states and argues that three main domestic factors - modernization, war, and democratization - drove the introduction of modern taxes and with them the development of the capable states we see today. Yet, many of today’s tax systems have their origins not in sovereign decision making, but in colonial coercion. Based on a new dataset of modern tax introductions, I illustrate how modern taxes spread via empires and explore if the drivers we know from the literature also account for the development of the colonial tax state.