ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the way in which certain of the essential problems in taxation were dealt with and thought about in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. On the historical side, the tax policy of the period from the Civil War to the end of the eighteenth century is an important aspect, which awaits interpretation, of the social and economic policy of the then governing landed class. Taxation has had the misfortune to be identified in England with two great controversies in which very few of its own essential problems were involved. The first and greater of these dealt with the question of the authority by which taxes should be levied. This was merely part of the wider constitutional question of the body which should make law and control the administration of government. The second controversy was the tariff struggle, of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, over the use of Customs duties for protective and preferential purposes.
