Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050718000049
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 40-80
• 关键词: economic-history; taxation; british; POLITICS; origins

摘要

Although recent studies on African colonial tax systems have deepened our understanding of early fiscal capacity building efforts in the region, they have largely ignored the contributions from a widely used but invisible source of state revenue: that of labor contributions. Exploiting data on corvee systems in French Africa, this is the first article to make these in-kind taxes visible by estimating a lower bound of how much they augmented governments' revenue base. Revealing that labor taxes constituted in most places the largest component of early colonial budgets, I argue that studies on historical taxation need to make a greater effort to integrate this significant source of government revenue into their analysis.