Customs and Excise Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640-1845

This book traces the growth of customs and excise, and their integral rolein shaping the framework of industrial England; including state power, technicaladvance, and the evolution of a consumer society. Central to this structure wasthe development of two economies - one legal and one illicit. If there was aunique English pathway of industrialization, it was less a distinctentrepreneurial and techno-centric culture, than one predominantly definedwithin an institutional framework spearheaded by the excise and a wall oftariffs. This process reached its peak by the end of the 1770s. The structurethen quickly started to crumble under the weight of the fiscal-military state,and Pitt's calculated policy of concentrating industrial policy around cotton,potteries, and iron - at the expense of other taxed industries. Thebreakthrough of the new political economy was the erosion of the illiciteconomy; the smugglers' free trade now became the state's most powerful weaponin the war against non-legal trade. If at the beginning of the period coveredby this book state administration was predominantly deregulated and industryregulated, by the close the reverse was the case.

William J. Ashworth is a Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool.