Imperial Inequalities: The Politics of Economic Governance Across European Empires

Imperial Inequalities explores how Western European empires and their legacies shaped taxation and welfare systems across their global empires. It challenges the notion of states and empires as separate categories and emphasizes the politics of economic governance in imperial spaces. The book provides new insights into the fiscal innovations, redistribution politics, and mechanisms that perpetuated imperial inequalities in the postcolonial world, contributing to Sustainable Development Goal 10.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 29 November 2022
Publisher: Manchester University Press

Imperial Inequalities: Taxation and Welfare in Western European Empires and their Legacies

The concept of "imperial inequalities" takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussing issues of taxation and welfare. By doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe's global empires.

The idea of "imperial inequalities" provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities.

This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world.

These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526166142