State-building is one of the most distinctive and enduring features of early-modern European history. To explain this phenomenon historians, sociologists, economists and political scientists have successively developed and refined analytical models of state formation. They have formulated a number of concepts, such as the confessional state (Oestreich) the tax state (Schumpeter 2012), the fiscal state (Bonney 1999; Yun-Casalilla et al. 2012), the fiscal-military (Brewer 1989) or fiscal-naval state (O’Brien 2005), the bureaucratic state (Weber 2013), the contractor state (Palmer, in Bowen 2013: 241) and so forth. These concepts do not merely serve to reflect specific methodologies, fields of interests or problems of empirical validation when put to the test in the study of specific polities (city-state, territorial state, composite state, empire), regimes (absolute or limited) and organising principles (dynastic, patrimonial, bureaucratic, etc.). To an extent the concepts on offer account for the radical nature of the transformations at work in a period which had to absorb the impact of the Reformation and long-term changes encapsulated in the scientific revolution, the military revolution, the financial revolution and, of course, the development of capitalism in a world economy. They also reveal the extent to which state development, in the era before the fully fledged nation state and modern parliamentary regimes, was a slow process, usually path-dependent and involving incremental change, the scope and intensity of which depended on a multiplicity of variables, most notably location, time and agency (Ertman 1997). If international competition and domestic conflict over access to the sources of power played a vital role in shaping different types of regimes, it seems now clear that their characteristics and resilience hinged upon a complex mix of social, economic, political, legal, religious and cultural components (Braddick 2000; Gorski 2003).
As a response to exogenous and indigenous challenges, state formation in general, and the rise of the fiscal state in particular, was a conflictual process at its heart, with short and long-term transformative effects. Most obviously, international warfare altered the balance of power in Europe, occasionally destroying and creating states, and remodelling social relations. Tilly’s aphorism that ‘states make war and wars make states’ nicely sums up a seesaw model to describe what seems like the inevitable evolution from the end of the Middle Ages onwards. The argument, however, remains a relatively crude explanation and has been further explored to explain successes and failures, in particular to explain state’s successes on the battlefield depended upon access and organisation of economic and capital markets (Tilly 1990). Still, the circularity of the initial aphorism tends to subsume social experience in the state, the end of history being either a situation of total war and potential annihilation of the enemy, or of unstable peace under hegemons and coalitions.
While scholarship remains broadly focused on the roots of state’s successes and failures across time and space, with long-term political stability and economic growth as yardsticks, much of the new research is concerned with the institutional and cultural foundations rather than the material basis of the state’s projection of power through sheer accumulation of military or naval forces (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Although mobilisation and end use of resources are two sides of the same coin, management of warfare was also about solving tensions between demand and supply, and of course legitimacy. In this respect, the extraordinary needs imposed by warfare did not only call for a fiscal-military state, capable of raising money and credit to fund war operations, but also a contractor state to organise procurement. In other words, the sources of power rest on the interplay between coercion, or use of the legitimate monopoly of violence by the ruler, and collaboration, or the relation between public and private interests, to protect society and promote the common good.
Many recent works concerned with state-building in early-modern Europe have highlighted the crucial role played by various private groups in helping rulers access larger pools of resources to display their personal glory and sustain their dynastic interests. However, as Parrott (2012) observed in the case of the business of war in the age of the military revolution, a humanist tradition sees the connection between private and public interests as essentially a fraught one, which prioritised individual profit over the ruler’s authority and the quality of service. Recent research on corruption and anti-corruption in history have reinforced the complex nature of the relation between the two spheres by showing, on the one hand, that their separation was a relatively recent development, which built upon more precise definitions of corruption, but, on the other hand, that the long-term evolution was anything but linear (Kroeze et al. 2017). In medieval and early-modern Europe, for instance, introduction of venality, or the sale of offices by rulers, coincided with specific rules for appointment, transmission and accountability of offices. Various works also argue that criticisms of the patrimonial nature of public functions were not essentially meant to target venality as such but served political strategies aimed at regulating access to offices (Artola and Dedieu 2011). In addition, research on the techniques, objectives and impact of audits of officers who collected and spent tax revenue suggest that the procedures did not seek to prohibit profit in the management of public monies but to distinguish between lawful and unlawful benefits (Legay 2010; Dubet and Legay 2011) especially when set in the context of the bitter rivalries pitting financial interests and political factions (Graham 2015; Andujar Castillo et al. 2016; Kleer 2017).
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and the series of scandals relating to corporate sectors and private actors, it seemed appropriate to explore the role of institutions in maintaining trust and fighting corruption, as well as in promoting political stability, economic growth and equality of opportunities. To this effect, this volume, which proceeds from an international conference organised at the University of Reading on 4–5 December 2015, co-funded by ESRC and IUF, investigates the issues of trust and corruption in the management of tax revenue and expenditure in early-modern Europe. As mentioned, the subject of corruption has attracted renewed attention in a number of recent studies with emphasis on cultural, political and, lately, intellectual dimensions of corruption (Waquet 1992; Storrs 2009; Hoenderboom and Kerkhoff 2008; Kerkhoff et al. 2013; Buchan and Hill 2014). Yet on fiscal corruption specifically there is no specific study to match the important work done in particular on venality and officers in early-modern Europe (Andujar Castillo and Ponce Leiva 2016; Doyle 1996, 2004). This volume proposes to fill this gap by exploring the discourses and practices of the various actors involved in fraudulent activities and their denunciations, as well as the rulers’ and the states’ responses. From the outset, two common pitfalls have to be avoided. Firstly, assessing the action of early-modern agents on the basis of a modern definition of corruption risks promoting an inaccurate teleological model of the phenomenon, and discarding evidence of repression of corruption, for instance through trials and visitations, as historically meaningless or pointless attempts to engage with structural causes. Secondly, it risks fuelling the common fantasy about a conspiracy by early-modern elites accused of hiding their personal greed and moral remorse behind the ethos of noble and free service when consciously committing a crime, an early-modern crime which is none the less set against modern standards. This volume is more interested in examining when and why social actors started considering the ethos of service and the rewards of gifts as the intolerable expression of elite domination and exclusive access to money and honour.
To overcome such pitfalls, this volume pays special attention to early-modern fiscal actors th...
