2. Legislation for a New Tax on Land

This book goes further than previous authors in arguing that English land taxes were invented in the 1640s even if statutes used the term ‘assessment’. Contemporaries knew them as land taxes and they continued to be levied in England until 1963. Indeed the main innovative features of land taxes were created in the decade after 1643 by legislators aided by feedback loops from local administrators in the English regions. The result was effective taxation that could effectively target income from a developing English economy principally from land and included innovations around: clear deadlines, fixed tax quotas, enforcement, logistics, and process. The importance of the exploitation of monetary flows from production and around financial cycles was vital to the success of the early land taxes, in a period when physical cash was scarce.