The author regards the chronology as sitting awkwardly with the conventional explanation because

the fall in borrowing costs came decades after the constitutional change and coincided with other developments.

British borrowing costs had already begun to fall well before 1688.

the Dutch achieved rates that Britain never matched at any point.

Parliament did not in fact control taxation until long after 1688.

The passage suggests that states which have imported the formal architecture of the British system

will attain fiscal strength, though more slowly than Britain did.

have been more successful than the author is prepared to acknowledge.

would do better to abandon constitutional constraints on executive discretion.

are likely to find those constraints inconsequential without the administrative depth and debt market that gave them force.

The passage implies that the lesson conventionally drawn from the British case is

correct in substance but supported by unusually weak evidence.

a misreading that inverts the relation between state capacity and fiscal strength.

applicable only to the states of early modern Europe.

less significant than the comparison with France.

According to the passage, the work beginning with Brewer established which of the following about the eighteenth-century British state?

It borrowed at rates lower than those available to the Dutch republic.

Its excise service was modeled on an existing French precedent.

It relied primarily on customs duties rather than on excise.

It took a larger share of national income than the French state did.

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The Fiscal-Military State and the Price of Credit

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

For most of the twentieth century, explanations of Britain's eighteenth-century ascendancy leaned on a familiar contrast: a liberal, commercially minded island power outmaneuvering the absolutist, tax-burdened monarchies of the Continent. The account was congenial and largely wrong. Beginning with John Brewer's work in the 1980s, historians established that the British state extracted a larger share of national income than its French rival, sustained a heavier per-capita tax burden, and administered that burden through a professional excise bureaucracy of a size and competence that had no French equivalent. Britain did not win by governing less. It won by governing, in a narrow but decisive domain, considerably more. The mechanism that converted taxation into power was credit. A state that can borrow cheaply may spend, in wartime, far beyond its current revenue, and Britain borrowed at rates its rivals could not approach. The conventional explanation attributes this advantage to the constitutional settlement of 1688: a Parliament controlling taxation could credibly bind the Crown against default, and lenders priced that credibility accordingly. Yet the chronology sits awkwardly with the argument. British borrowing costs did not converge on Dutch levels for some four decades after the Revolution, and the sharpest improvements coincide less with constitutional change than with the consolidation of the debt and the emergence of a secondary market deep enough to render government securities genuinely liquid. The revision matters beyond the accounting. If credibility was manufactured by institutional plumbing—the routinization of the excise, the fungibility of the funded debt, the willingness of a propertied class to hold paper it could sell on demand—rather than conferred at a constitutional stroke, then the lesson conventionally drawn from the British case does not travel. States seeking to replicate the achievement have often imported its formal architecture, the written constraints on executive discretion, while lacking the administrative density and the domestic market for public debt that made those constraints consequential. The eighteenth-century British state is invoked as evidence that limiting government produces fiscal strength. It is better read as evidence that fiscal strength is expensive, slow to build, and largely administrative.

The primary purpose of the passage is to