War, Revenue, and State Building: Financing the Development of the American State

by Sheldon Pollack

In a relatively short time, the American state developed from a weak, highly decentralized confederation composed of thirteen former English colonies into the foremost global superpower. This remarkable institutional transformation would not have been possible without the revenue raised by a particularly efficient system of public finance, first crafted during the Civil War and then resurrected and perfected in the early twentieth century. That revenue financed America's participation in two global wars as well as the building of a modern system of social welfare programs. Sheldon D. Pollack shows how war, revenue, and institutional development are inextricably linked, no less in the United States than in Europe and in the developing states of the Third World. He delineates the mechanisms of political development and reveals to us the ways in which the United States, too, once was and still may be a "developing nation."

Without revenue, states cannot maintain political institutions, undergo development, or exert sovereignty over their territory. Rulers and their functionaries wield the coercive powers of the state to extract that revenue from the population under their control. From this perspective, the state is seen as a highly efficient machine for extracting societal revenue that is used by the state to sustain itself. War, Revenue, and State Building traces the sources of public revenue available to the American state at specific junctures of its history (in particular, during times of war), the revenue strategies pursued by its political leaders in response to these factors, and the consequential impact of those strategies on the development of the American state.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[The American Conservative]

'The factor that explains the largest share of the centralism and growth of the American state is war. In War, Revenue, and State Building: Financing the Development of the American State, Sheldon D. Pollack, professor and director of the Legal Studies Program at the University of Delaware, sets out to trace war’s role in facilitating that expansion.
The book is a synthetic account that includes a review of the scholarly literature on state building in Europe, a sweep through (mostly secondary) sources describing the founding of the American state, and a third section detailing the growth of the fiscal-military state from the Civil War onward.
Given the extensive existing literature and the broader and deeper treatments of these subjects by scholars such as Otto Hintze, Frederic Lane, Charles Tilly, Bruce Porter, Robert Higgs, and many others, however, one searches mostly in vain for value added beyond the book’s use as a roadmap of existing literature.'

Read the full review, "An Empire, if You Can Keep It," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...