ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on what governments did and how it was financed. It focuses on the how in terms of organization and functioning. The chapter devotes to who was employed in government. It presents such middle-range theories as can be found in literature on the development of tasks and finance on the development of the civil service. The chapter discusses the bureaucratization in the functioning of public functionaries. There is an abundance of literature on the development of public services, but there are few general introductions. Ernest Barker's 1944 study on the development of public services in Western Europe (1660–1930) concentrates on territorial organization, public finance, and central-local relations. There is also a wealth of literature in the social sciences focused on the growth of public expenditure in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The literature on England appears to be most complete.