ABSTRACT
It is surprising, given the scale of the transfer payments involved, and the excellence of the documentation (in comparison with so much of the potentially quantifiable record in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), that so little attention has been paid by historians to the economic effects of taxation and its alter ego, government spending.[ 1 ] As Charles Wilson remarked in another context it is, indeed, an ‘unfashionable theme’.[ 2 ]
