T heoretical work on taxation and state-building borrows heavily from early modern European experience. While a number of European states increased centralized tax revenues during this period, for others revenues stagnated or even declined and these variations have motivated alternative arguments for the determinants of fiscal and state capacity. This study reviews the arguments concerning the three determinants that have received most attention, namely warfare, economic structure, and political regime, and tests them by making use of a new and comprehensive tax revenue dataset. Our main finding is that these three determinants worked in interaction with each other. Specifically, when under pressure of war, it was representative regimes in more urbanized-commercial economies and authoritarian regimes in more rural-agrarian economies that tended to better aggregate domestic interests towards state-building.

The early modern era witnessed the formation across Europe of centralized states that captured increasing shares of resources as taxes. These states not only enjoyed greater capacity to deal with domestic and external challenges, they were also able to shield their economies better against wars. This article examines the Ottoman experience with fiscal centralization using recently compiled evidence from budgets. It shows that due to high shares of intermediaries, Ottoman revenues lagged behind those of other states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ottomans responded to military defeats, however, and achieved significant increases in central revenues during the nineteenth century.

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Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economies.