Economic history has recently returned to research programmes and investigations into the cultures, institutions, legal systems and political frameworks within which economic activities are embedded. That is why the constitutions, capacities and behaviour of states have also come back onto the subject's agenda.

Historians know that States create, modify and destroy institutions. Central governments are responsible for the maintenance of internal law and order and for the preservation of national economies against external aggression and takeover. States enforce the contracts, protect the commerce and extend the systems of communication upon which internal and external trade and Smithian growth ultimately depends.

Successful states can be represented as states that survived and presided over the long run evolution of economies that were transformed, over time, into industrialized and urbanized market economies. Such states were ruled and managed by monarchies, aristocracies, patrician oligarchies and bureaucracies who (with difficulty) raised the fiscal and financial resources required to protect their regimes, territories and populations and the assets and commerce of their businessmen within, and beyond, the borders of their empires, realms, republics, regions and cities.

Within Western Europe the capacities of states to raise the taxes and borrow the money required varied from country to country and over the centuries. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the British or Hanoverian state appears to have been 'outstandingly successful' in raising taxes, floating loans and managing public credit in order to provide the fiscal and financial resources required to create conditions of stability and good order within the realm and the mix of aggression and defence required, beyond its borders to protect and promote the interests of British merchants, industrialists and investors against foreign rivals and predators.

As they accumulated capital and extended their networks of trade and commerce abroad, Britain's businessmen were provided with unrivalled degrees of stability, order and protection from a state that somehow, between 1688 and 1815, managed to increase its tax take in real terms by a multiplier of fifteen, the share of the national income appropriated as taxes by a factor of five and the size of the Government's debt from a small fraction to something like three times the national income for 1819. Perhaps nothing approximating to the British fiscal and financial 'achievement' appears in the records of rival European states (France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Naples, Venice) over the same, or earlier, periods? Since nearly all European states engaged in geopolitical and mercantilist competition for trade colonization and empires a meta question for comparative economic history emerges: what were the historical antecedents, economic preconditions, political constraints, administrative barriers, fiscal opportunities, financial possibilities, levels of compliance with and resistance to demands for taxes etc., that allowed some Governments and restrained others from building strong and efficient states in Europe?

To deal with this grand question in ways that could make for illuminating contracts across Europe and between European/Asian participants in this session we will need to address the following headings and subheadings and issues for each and every state brought into a general framework for purposes of discussion and comparison.

State formation was path dependant and its fiscal potential was constrained by a history and heritage of past attempts and 'base period' possibilities, for increasing taxation and loans.

Opportunities for taxation continued to be circumscribed by the levels, diversity and concentration of economic activities carried on within each empire, realm or republic.

This base is more or less limited to the populations and economies, juridically under the control of sovereign states. Some states also obtained access to embryo and evolving international markets for capital and credit. Others did not.

At one extreme, a fiscally sovereign state could both, politically and administratively, extend any preselected tax to include all subjects, territories, economic activities within its jurisdiction. At the other extreme, a State's juridical powers to tax look severely and rigidly limited. In short, the central government was not in position to exercise the power of universal taxation.

Taxonomies and distinctions for representing and analyzing the choices made by States in their selections of taxes are familiar and are as follows.

Different structures of taxation can be compared and ratios of various types of taxes evolving through time can be measured.

This theme is about the processes of assessment and collection of taxes. Assessment depended upon prior definitions in law of precise liabilities for taxes on persons, property, goods and services. Collection problems preoccupied governmental and private administrations charged to collect and dispatch revenues to central governments. A key ratio here is the percentage of taxes appropriated, absorbed as costs of assessment, collection and despatch. That ratio varied across Europe and Asia and variations can be correlated to:

States borrowed long and short term. Their borrowing and debt servicing were intimately and often politically and administratively connected to taxation. Debt accumulation and taxes are inseparable.

What made for fiscal success and failure over time and across European States - what can we learn from comparative European fiscal history about the Formation and Economic Efficiency of States?

Global historians (following Max Weber) have formulated hypotheses about the peculiarities and benign effects for long-run development that flowed from Europe's 'Competitive State system'. That system and the intensity of warfare and competition it engendered depended ultimately on the taxes and loans that Europe's rulers and élites managed to appropriate.