If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.

Centring on key state functions of protection and the promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens, the welfare state describes a range of functions related to state intervention aimed at reducing the risk of market failure, ensuring a decent living standard and a certain degree of equality and intergenerational distribution. The welfare state thus often plays a central role in relation to essential issues of people’s daily lives such as housing, employment, income security, health and education. Nevertheless, despite some initial explorations of the relevance of perspectives grounded in sustainability transitions for understanding processes of change and innovation in welfare states, the question of welfare remains a neglected area in transition studies and, until recently, in environmental studies more broadly. Yet the welfare state can both be used to enable and hardwire social protection into transitions to protect ‘stranded workers’ and also have a key role to play, and be heavily impacted by, the social costs and adjustments brought about by the disruptions and dislocations that transitions inevitably bring in their wake. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what ‘sustainable welfare’ might look like as part of a transformation of the welfare state.

This chapter outlines the history of previous institutions that created forms of capital in Europe, including land, dowries, banks, bills of exchange, and government debt. It examines the reasons why the system of informal oral credit, as it had developed over the previous 100-odd years, began to be criticised during the Commonwealth period. Many authors started to claim that it was both inefficient and an obstacle to economic growth. Many pamphlets were published containing proposals of different sorts of banks, which would issue paper currency to speed up circulation. Some of these were based on previous European examples. The nature of these proposals is examined, together with a summary of how they related to the creation of the Bank of England. Its establishment is normally seen as the successful outcome of this debate, but in fact it was not primarily created as an institution to expand the supply of credit, but to help fund the government debt. The increasing cost of the War of Spanish Succession did, however, result in the issue of things like Exchequer or Treasury bills, as well as South Sea and Bank stock to fund the war. The last part of the chapter focuses on the significant effect these multiple forms of paper currency had on liquidity within London.

This chapter examines how the local issue of notes, wage payments, and the brokerage of bills of exchange over longer distances came together in the form of county banks after 1760. Certain tradesmen and industrialists moved from financing their own businesses to providing finance on a more exclusive basis to their communities in the form of institutions they then decided to call banks. This chapter will show how trust in individual local brokers was gradually transformed into institutions that their owners termed banks, and how they became a part of local society. They emerged out of local practice, and did not generally copy London institutions such as Child’s or Hoare’s banks. It will also examine just how important the payment of industrial wage labour was in the formation of county banking. The chapter will end by placing Adam Smith’s advocacy of banking and his discussion of capital in the context of the developments described in this book. It was Smith’s contention that the value of labour converted into abstract capital was the wealth of a nation. His was a ‘capitalism’ based on the ethics needed to create the conditions to make capital keep its value.

The chapter is focused on the Palmyrene Tariff (CIS II.3913), a lengthy bilingual text in Aramaic and Greek promulgated in the city in AD 137 to regularize local taxation, i.e. taxes on goods entering and leaving the city which originate within its immediate vicinity, and on trades being plied within the city, not taxes on long-distance trade. Attention is given to the book on the Tariff by Ilia Sholeimovich Shifman, published in Russian in 1980 and republished in English in 2014, and to the publications of Michał Gawlikowski (2012, 2014) on the original location of the Tariff stone opposite a shrine devoted to Rab-Asīrē and close to the Agora. The respective roles of Greek and Aramaic are explored, including the question of which had priority in the drawing up of the Tariff. The sources and composition of the text are analysed with reference to the role played by earlier Roman authorities. A final section considers the position of tax collectors in Palmyrene society and the light which the Tariff can throw on life in Roman Syria.

In the wake of the boycott, the British govenment strengthened the warrant chief system, gathered intelligence on these communities to reorganize them into discrete, governable units. Reorganization was carried out in the context of interwar colonial development policy, which sought to increase the efficiency and productivity of the colonies. The British government coerced Africans across their colonies to engage in waged labor, in order to pay taxes and contribute to local development initiatives. In the Niger Delta, ethnic competition was used as a mechanism by which colonial development was distributed. Paramount chieftaincy increased a community’s ability to access colonial resources, contributing to a proliferation of new chieftaincy titles in competition for these resources. The case of the Olu title among the Itsekiri people is exemplary of these developments.

The communities of the western Niger Delta, in the midst of economic turmoil, confronted the British colonial government’s effort to integrate them into the wider colonial economy with a boycott on palm oil exports in 1927. Taxation was the primary instrument of incorporation for the British government, and Niger Delta community’s primary form of leverage against taxation was a systemic boycott. Beyond taxation, these communities resented the imposition of warrant chiefs, who were tasked with enforcing taxation and carrying out local administration of the courts (another vital source of income for the colonial government). The 1927 boycott succeeded in slowing down the palm oil trade. It was also part of a broader pattern of resistance in the palm-producing region across southern Nigeria. This widespread resistance indicated the lack of knowledge and control the colonial state had regarding these communities, and the need to impose stronger mechanisms of contol, through the warrant chiefs, increased surveilance and policing, and by exploiting ethnic differences.

Chapter 4 explores how fiscal policy and questions of national security play on stage. Fiscal concerns pervade Shakespeare’s history plays. All of his sovereigns wrestle with the need to fund security in the face of ongoing domestic and international threats, and all of them have to confront ongoing fiscal discontent. This chapter shows how security dilemmas are at the heart of controversies that drive English history as Shakespeare understands it. Rulers’ ongoing efforts to cover the expenses associated with implementing security coupled with subjects’ resentment at having to pay for their sovereign’s decisions opens up the terms of security and collective wellbeing for collective scrutiny. By depicting a multiplicity of voices and perspectives on collective existence, Shakespeare foregrounds fiscal controversies and the alternative visions of security and collective life such controversies prompt. These plays immerse theatergoers in an underdetermined world defined by antagonism, conflict, geopolitical struggle, and political inventiveness.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the centrality of fiscal infrastructures to the action of Marlowe’s plays. His Tamburlaine plays, The Jew of Malta, and A Massacre at Paris all hinge on the agencies created by – and the violence associated with –wealth organized into treasuries. The protagonists of these plays – Tamburlaine, Barabas, and the Duke of Guise – draw attention to their own and others’ treasuries, and their stories underscore both the security and the volatility associated with treasuries in action. In each play, treasuries drive the action by creating security for some through extreme violence to others. For Marlowe, treasuries are central to his depiction of geopolitical existence. Fiscal realities, in turn, represent a primary formal mechanism impacting how Marlowe’s characters – and audiences – experience the antagonistic spaces of geopolitical existence. Marlowe’s awareness of the challenges of implementing sovereignty are thus central to his ongoing project of creating theatrical states of emergency.

Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.

For over half a century, discussion of the relationship between military finance, organisation, and state development has been dominated by the contested concept of a ‘military revolution’; the belief that there were one or a few periods of fundamental change that transformed both war and wider European history. More recently, this has been supplemented by the idea of smaller, but more frequent ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMAs) as individual military organisations respond to, or anticipate, changes made by their likely opponents. Technology is generally considered to drive both forms of ‘revolution’, as innovative weaponry and institutional practice transform war, rendering older models ineffective and obsolete. Change flows through a series of chain reactions, as states adapt to new conditions, modifying their structures to sustain and direct altered armed forces, and revising their forms of interaction with society both to extract the necessary resources and to legitimate their use in war-making.

This chapter surveys Qiu’s ideas about financial administration, drawing on Section 4, “Administering State Finances” (Chapters 20–35) of the Supplement. The chapter discusses Qiu’s recommendations for regular and light taxation centred on the land tax and how to control government expenditure, before turning to his view of the state’s relationship with the market and merchants. The state must only involve itself in the market in a limited way, with the exception of moderating the supply of grain, since it is a basic necessity for life and the fundamental source of wealth. A brief overview of policies illustrates Qiu’s support for commerce. Throughout, the chapter also considers how Qiu’s ideas might have reflected or influenced actual practice. While there is some indication that his proposals may have been implemented, by the late Ming and especially from the later Wanli era onwards, the prudent financial administration that Qiu advocated did not exist.