Tax Transfers: Britain and its Empire, 1848‑1914

In a footnote to their influential two-volume account British Imperialism, Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins comment that ‘taxation in Africa remains a neglected subject’, despite the fact that colonial officials had to wrestle with the problem of extracting revenue in the absence of an existing tax base.1 In India, there was a pre-existing tax base, but it was not necessarily one that British rulers saw as appropriate or sustainable. They pondered how it should be reformed in order to ensure that the Raj secured as much revenue as possible, while also contributing to political stability and encouraging economic growth. Similarly, decisions on the shape of taxation in the new white settler colonies had major implications for the nature of society, the distribution of income and wealth, the allocation of land, and the provision of welfare. In each case, taxation was linked with normative assumptions about the most desirable social and economic structure ‑ the nature of landownership, the distribution of income and wealth, and the limits of the market ‑ and with calculations of political stability and order.