On the Fiscal-Military State

The fiscal-military state was not simply a state that spent more on war. It was a new institutional form in which taxation, public debt, public banking, naval procurement, bureaucracy, and war-making capacity were joined together. I discuss it in a longer post on substack. I argue that the British case shows how this system became a foundation of capitalist development. Also, ancient Athens shows that public finance and naval power could be constitutive of state formation much earlier, but it lacked the permanent funded debt, central banking, and capitalist financial system that made Britain distinctive.