In the late seventeenth century, the British state ended tax farming and established permanent bureaucracies to collect excise and customs taxes. These were staffed by full-time, salaried employees who were recruited by examinations or apprenticeships, promoted on merit through steps in a hierarchy and retired with a pension. With its standard operating procedures and staff training, the British Excise Office in particular rapidly became the model for the administrative revolution taking place across Europe. It was the largest and the most competent part of the government, closer ‘to Max Weber’s idea of bureaucracy than any other government agency in eighteenth-century Europe’. Moreover, the growth of the revenue bureaucracy and its technical approach to assessment and collection created a... (查看原文)
The existence of a professional tax bureaucracy allowed Britain and other countries to develop a sophisticated system of bond finance. Knowing that their governments had access to reliable sources of revenue, investors and financiers could accept lower rates of interest for these bonds, allowing the government to invest not only in weapons and manpower for wars, but, many decades later, in the construction of systems of sanitation and water that would boost living standards for the increasingly urban populations. (查看原文)
