The late nineteenth-century notion of moving American public finance toward more direct and graduated forms of taxation was an idea that was embedded in and born out of a larger transatlantic web of intellectual exchange. At the center of this international transfer was a group of American...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of political economists led the conceptual campaign for a fundamental transformation in the American system of public finance. Responding to the social and political conditions of their times, these public finance economists helped...