From pharaohs' tours to the Rosetta Stone, taxes are as old as states
The stone that unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs was, at heart, a decree about tax relief. That fits: the first known tax system appeared in Egypt around 3000 BC, when a pharaoh toured the kingdom every two years gathering dues. Ever since, rulers have invented ingenious ways to take a share, and subjects have resented most of them.
The oldest and most common levies were labour and produce. Peasants too poor to pay otherwise owed the state corvée, forced work, and in ancient Egyptian the word for labour doubled as the word for taxes. The tithe, a tenth of earnings or crops, was another staple. The Rosetta Stone itself records concessions granted by Ptolemy V.
Rome found collection so troublesome that it auctioned the job each year. Private tax farmers paid the state up front in coin, then gathered whatever they could from citizens, who owed between 1 and 3 percent of their assessed property. The advance worked as an interest-bearing loan to the government, until Augustus switched to direct taxation. Medieval England added its own inventions, from Danegeld, first raised to buy off raiding Danes, to scutage, paid instead of doing military service.
War drove rates upward. Through the conflicts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European governments grew better at extracting revenue, and England most of all. Britain's effective rates before the French Revolution were actually higher than France's, but they fell mainly on trade, whereas French taxes landed on landowners, individuals and internal commerce and bred far more anger. England's excise duties, begun in 1643 under a scheme devised by John Pym, first targeted beer, ale, cider, cherry wine and tobacco before spreading to soap, candles and sweets.
The poll tax shows the trade-offs neatly. Charging every adult the same amount is cheap to run and hard to dodge, and economists once prized it for causing no distortion, since people seemed fixed in supply. But it takes a bigger bite from poorer incomes, and people are not truly fixed: couples tend to have fewer children when one is imposed.
Source: Tax
