Free Delivery Over $100
|
|
|||
|
||||
OverviewUnder the later Stuarts, England became a major European military power, English armies and navies grew to an unprecedented size, civilian administration burgeoned and taxation, public borrowing and spending on war reached new heights. This work examines the causes of the emergence in England of this fiscal-military state and the features which distinguished it from European powers. It also charts the effect of these developments on society at large: their impact on the economy, on social structure and politics and their role in developing special interest groups and lobbies. Thus it provided an interpretative framework which links adminstration with politics, public finance with the economy and foreign policy with domestic affairs. Full Product DetailsAuthor: John BrewerPublisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd Imprint: Routledge Dimensions: Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 23.40cm Weight: 0.730kg ISBN: 9780044452928ISBN 10: 0044452926 Pages: 312 Publication Date: 27 April 1989 Audience: College/higher education , General/trade , Tertiary & Higher Education , General Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviews`The book is a distinguished work - of importance not just to eighteenth-century specialists but also to students of governmental development generally. Though authoritative and historically sophisticated, it is written in a fluent and non technical manner that should reach a wide audience. It even has a first-rate index.' - American Historical Review ` ... a radical, but wholly convincing, reinterpretation of the Georgian state ... Brewer's elegant analysis shows how parliament itself, then as today, readily serves as a most effective engine for the centralisation of power.' - New Statesman and Society A lucid, incisive account of 18th-century Britain's development from a minor player on the periphery of the European theater to an imperial power through the evolution of the modern fiscal-military state. Brewer (Director, Clark Library and the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies/ UCLA) examines the transformation through a focus on the bureaucracy that evolved to assess, collect, and channel tax monies. Three major factors are considered formative: the lack of an entrenched venal officier class, as in France; the absence of a large standing army independent of civil authority and the consequent emphasis on the navy; and the Common's check on the Crown's behavior through the power of the purse. Looking at methods of taxation used to finance the growth of war and Empire, Brewer points to the changeover from direct - i.e., land - tax to indirect excise taxes; a system of well-trained and efficient clerks and tax collectors, as opposed to tax fanning and factional sinecures; and the tendency of the population to accept taxation due to Parliament's participation in the process. The apparatus of the fiscal-military state created an environment that nurtured the growth of a private financial community and thus the tools of a modern economy and the development of deficit financing. A final chapter dealing with the politics of information considers the public's view of itself as part of the larger national economy due to the vogue for political arithmetic and the dissemination of useful knowledge : statistics gathered and processed by the Bartlebys of the 18th century. Though aimed at the nonspecialist (much information will be familiar to students of the period's economic and military history), considerable background is required. Still, this is fluid, readable, and informative, and will reward anyone with an interest in the evolution of the modern state. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationJohn Brewer is Director of the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and Director of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California at Los Angeles. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
||||
