A Measure of Wealth: English Land Tax in Historical Analysis - Hardcover

The land tax is the most important systematic documentation, both in its geographical and chronological coverage, which we have on British landed society between the Domesday of the Conqueror and the New Domesday of the late Victorian era. Its use has been central to many of the most important questions in modern British historiography. The decline of the small landowner, the impact of enclosure, the measurement of wealth inequalities, urban morphology, industrial development, and the economic classification of the unreformed electorate. This is the first comprehensive study of the reliability of the tax for pursuing such questions. Through an examination of more than 5,000 parishes and townships in fifteen historical counties (approximately one-third of England), the central chapters of the book show that inequalities in the burden of national taxation were far greater than anyone has anticipated. The book thus provides a highly innovative analysis of the mechanisms and operation of local and national administration in the countryside and of the limits of political authority on the eve of the nineteenth-century 'Revolution in Government'.