Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, England changed its system of raising revenues from tax farming, combined with the granting of monopolies, to direct collection within the government administration. Rents were then transferred from tax farmers and monopolists to the central government...

Acknowledgements -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Changing strategies and global power in the long eighteenth century -- Eighteenth-century realities and historiographical approaches -- Administering the fiscal-military state : ordinary revenues : trusting in a consumers world -- Increasing...