From the Netherlands to the Ottoman Empire, to Japan and India, this groundbreaking volume confronts the complex and diverse problem of the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia between 1500 and 1914. This series of country case studies from leading economic historians reveals that distinctive features of the fiscal state appeared across the region at different moments in time as a result of multiple independent but often interacting stimuli such as internal competition over resources, European expansion, international trade, globalisation and war. The essays offer a comparative framework for re-examining the causes of economic development across this period and show, for instance, the central role that the more effective fiscal systems of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played in the divergence of east and west as well as the very different paths to modernisation taken across the world.

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla is Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain and Head of the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Patrick K. O'Brien is Professor of Global Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Convenor of a European Research Council Programme on 'Regimes for the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in the East and the West' (URKEW).