ABSTRACT
The time of Robert Walpole marks the transition between seventeenth and eighteenth century views of taxation. The eighteenth century inherited a system of taxation which for a long time was fairly satisfactory from the merely financial point of view. The eighteenth century therefore divides itself naturally into two parts — first, a period ending in 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, during which comparatively few changes were made in a stereotyped tax system but during which tax doctrine was gradually welded into something approaching a new orthodox canon; and second, a period beginning in 1776 with the finance of the American War of Independence, during which a large increase in taxation took place, culminating in the imposition of the Income Tax in 1799, and in which attempts were made to stand by the rules of orthodox canon.
