ABSTRACT
The fiscal-military state has frequently been discussed in terms of its efficiency, its institutional and bureaucratic innovations and its successes in raising everincreasing revenues without significantly disturbing the social order. This image holds true, reasonably well at least, for England, and to some degree for Scotland, but how well does it apply to Ireland? This chapter seeks to answer this question, and in doing so open up some new questions about the challenges faced by the agents of the fiscal-military state across Britain and Ireland. In particular it explores the particular challenges posed by what the Irish revenue commissioners described, as late as 1755, as an ‘uncivilised and unreduced people’.2 Special attention is paid to the mutually dependent relationship that existed between the fiscal and the military arms of the fiscal-military state in Ireland, exploring both how it shaped the impact of the increasingly extractive and bureaucratic fiscal-military state in Irish society, and how it defined Ireland’s distinctive contribution to the imperial composite state.
