Determinants of the Growth of the State: War and Taxation in Early Modern France and England

Although the causal impact ofwar on state-making in the earlymodern era is now widely accepted, there is less consensus about the way in which war affects levels of taxation, and thefactors thatmightstrengthen or weaken therelationship. Two questions can be posed: Do individual wars produce immediate effects on taxes, or is the cumulative effect of longperiods ofwarfare more important? How do variations in administrative capacity and thestrength of representative institutions affect theextent to which war pushes the growth of the state? This article attempts to answer these questions with a quantitative analysis of theeffects ofwaron taxation in early modern England and France. Wefind that the cumulativeeffect ofwar is strongin bothcases, suggesting thatwarmadestates viaa "ratchet effect, " and that this effect ismuchstronger when the administrative capacity of states is improved by centralization and bureaucratization. Strongrepresentative assemblies decrease the effect of war on state growth in France but increase it in England, due to theverydifferent characteristics of these institutions in the twocountries. Many scholars have argued that war was a significant determinant of the growth of the state in early modern Europe. Following Lane's (1958) pioneering work, and further developing classic arguments by Weber ([1922] 1968) and Hintze (1975) on the geopolitical determinants ofstate formation and development, Tilly (1985) views war-making and state-making as a "protection racket " similar in many respects to organized crime. He describes rulers as "coercive and self-seeking