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The only two certainties in life; taxes and death
Well might we laugh at First Century AD Roman emperor Vaspasian placing a tax on urine, or to be more precise, taxing the buyers of said urine. The tax was lucrative because the ammonia in urine made it an indispensable cleaning agent in laundries for keeping the iconic Roman toga whiter than white. Benjamin Franklin was right in his assessment then that “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” The pain of unfair taxation was felt as keenly in ancient Rome as it was in pre-revolutionary France; in colonial America as in Thatcher’s Britain or post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. But isn’t it interesting that it was so often the essentials of life that were taxed – salt, candles, fireplaces, windows; or the few simple pleasures of the poor – tea and sugar?
Of course, measures like protectionism, flexible interpretations of true earnings, and taxing imports to the hilt to protect big business are old tricks. They have been employed so often over the past two-hundred years from the Corn Laws to protecting Greek shipping magnates[1]; from low corporation tax in Ireland to the current trade war between the United States and China. While the sting of death may be sharp, even sharper perhaps, is the sting of taxation without representation; sharper than a serpent’s tooth; sharper than a samurai sword; deadly enough to start a revolution.
For anyone comfortably settled in middle age, the term poll tax will bring back images on the television news of angry rioters on the streets of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1990. Almost six-hundred years previously, John of Gaunt, advisor to the boy king, Richard ll, introduced the first poll tax[2] to fund the vanity exercise that was the Hundred Years War[3] (1337 to 1453). The tax was set at four pence per head for everyone over the age of fourteen who was not a professional beggar. One can only assume then that there was a sudden surge of interest in pursuing a career in begging after 1377. By 1381 the poll tax had risen to twelve pence per head resulting in widespread tax evasion from the squeezed lower echelons. It was this hike that was one of the main causes of the Peasants Revolt.
While in the short term the revolt was ruthlessly put down and the leaders executed, the Peasants Revolt marked the beginning of the end of the feudal system in England. A much earlier tax in England, called scutage, was introduced by King Henry I to allow knights to opt out of their military duties. When the greedy King John raised it by three hundred per cent, suits of armour rattled with displeasure. Some historians believe that this excessive hike was one of the things that led to the drawing up of the Magna Carta, the first document containing clauses to restrain kingly power.
But to return to the poll tax, for Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister during the nineteen-eighties, it was also the beginning of the end. Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax demanded a flat rate to be paid by every adult whether you lived in a mobile home or a stately mansion. Another unsettling thing about this poll tax was that councils could set their own charges. Like a replay of the Peasants Revolt in 1381, riots occurred at an anti-poll tax march in London in 1990. While there were no executions or murders, the situation did turn violent: 340 demonstrators were arrested, and 45 policemen were injured. Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative party was challenged, and she eventually resigned; her successor, John Major, removed the poll tax. Those of a certain age in Ireland will also remember the budget proposal to put a tax on children’s shoes which brought down the Fine Gael / Labour coalition government in 1982; not a good day for the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald.
A consistent pattern throughout history is that innocent and powerless people are put upon to fund vanity projects, or pay for the mistakes of, in many cases, reckless and irresponsible leaders. The innovative ways in which these taxes have been extracted over time are both colourful and disturbing, especially when employed as a punishment.
Take, for example, the Hearth Tax introduced by Charles ll in 1662. A tax of one shilling had to be paid twice yearly on every fire hearth and stove in households who paid worth more than twenty shillings in rates. Homeowners tried to get around this tax by blocking up their chimneys, but if caught, they were charged double the original tax. This stupid and dangerous tax was rescinded by King William in 1689; too late though for the four people who died in a fire caused by a baker trying to evade the tax by concealing his oven. Furthermore, the Hearth Tax was retained in Ireland as a punishment for those who had defied King William at the Battle of the Boyne.
Another ridiculous levy imposed in late seventeenth century Britain was the Window Tax in 1696. It was extended to Ireland, again as a punishment tax, following the 1798 Rebellion. It would not be repealed in either country until 1851. This tax was based on the number of windows in a house, an easy enough one then to assess. The more windows you had, the more per window you paid. The hollows evident on the House of Lords in Dublin’s College Green were a temporary measure until the Window Tax was abolished. They were not replaced after 1851, and if they were, I am not so sure they would improve that magisterial building. These false windows can be seen on many period houses and public buildings around Dublin.
Just like the Hearth Tax, people avoided the Window Tax by blocking up their windows, and a new trend started of building houses with fewer windows. This was not a progressive development at a time when urban populations were increasing exponentially in industrial centres. The medical profession especially argued that a lack of ventilation was contributing to the spread of diseases. Add to this another regrettable tax that coincided for a time with that on windows. In pre-electricity days the tax on candles, introduced in 1789, was harsh. With very little natural light during the day because of the Window Tax, and dark nights restricting your indoor activities because of the Candle Tax, it must have been a dull and miserable existence, especially for people of meagre means who spent their days in hard labour in factories, coal mines or farms. You had to buy a licence to make your own candles and then to add insult to injury, you had to pay tax on the candles you made. The tax was repealed in 1831, allowing people to engage in a wider range of tasks in the dark evenings, reading being a major one. Incidentally, the half-door found in rural cottages in Ireland and England was a response to the Window Tax. It was a clever workaround, letting in light and fresh air without being a window.
Keeping with the home front then, the Brick Tax was imposed in 1784 to help fund Britain's losing battle with the American revolutionaries. It was abolished in 1850 because it was rightly considered to be stifling enterprise. Just stand on any Georgian street in Dublin and survey the number of small bricks in any wall, and weep for those property developers. Brick manufacturers had to pay four shillings on every thousand bricks. As always, clever workarounds were devised. In this case, the manufacturers started making fewer larger bricks. The government responded by putting a cap on brick size. Prospective homeowners responded by wishing a plague on all brick houses and eschewing bricks in favour of timber. But internal walls still needed to be covered, and even this was stymied by the Patterned Wallpaper Tax, introduced in 1712 and lasting for 120 years. The creative workaround to this tax was for householders to buy untaxed blank wallpaper and stencil it themselves. So, fireplaces, brick walls, windows, and wallpaper were seen as fair game by the ever-unpopular tax collectors.
England’s hat tax of 1784 resulted in yet another creative workaround that rivalled the wallpaper one. To avoid the tax, hat-makers stopped calling their head coverings "hats", but this led to a tax being placed on anything you wore on your head (except your hair). This was a serious tax; the death penalty was the punishment for those who forged a hat tax license. It was repealed in 1811. Keeping with heads then, when Peter the Great returned to a medieval Russia from the modernising influences of Europe he was keen to drag Russian fashions into the early 18th century by discouraging the signature Russian beard. He forcefully imposed the clean-shaven face by putting a tax on beards. Hair would find itself under scrutiny again in 1795, when the British Parliament did the world a favour by putting a tax on wig powder, leading to a dramatic decline in the wearing of those fashion monstrosities.
As soon as one war ended, another would quickly follow, and the coffers were always hungry. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the British establishment was under attack from its own citizens. This was the era of the Spitalfields riot (1816) and the Peterloo Massacre (1819). The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was a sign that the government felt threatened. The Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act (1819) taxed newspapers and periodicals with the direct hope of preventing the spread of radical ideas; the Window Tax and the Candle Tax were doubtless making it already difficult for the working poor to read anything, radical or otherwise. Any act that restricts the freedom of the press is usually counterproductive, and the censorship resulting from this act was not lifted until the 1850s. As in so many countries in different historical eras, publications critical of the government went 'underground', and an underground press is a very effective weapon for educating, informing and rallying to a cause. People across all spectrums of society understood the stupidity of curtailing free trade in print and consequently, the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of Taxes on Knowledge started a campaign that would eventually succeed in abolishing this tax in 1855.
A key Tory policy, which had a particular resonance in Irish history, especially in relation to the Great Irish Famine, was the introduction of the Corn Laws. Although these protectionist laws came and went throughout British history, they assumed a particular importance during the Napoleonic Wars when grain was badly needed to feed a growing population and a hungry army. The Corn Laws protected the profits of landowners in Britain by the imposition of a duty on imported corn. Put simply, the Corn Laws provided a protective buffer for big farmers and land- owners. Despite incurring the wrath of his party and losing the next general election as a result, British Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 to allow massive imports of maize into Ireland; enough to feed one million people for one month, although not many people were yet starving at this stage.
This contentious decision split the Conservative party in a very similar way to the current split over Brexit[4]. In 1846 Peel had to work with the Whigs; in more recent times, Theresa May had to work with the Labour Party. Both Peel and May lost their premierships, leaving behind polarised opinions, infighting, and divided and shifting loyalties. Incredibly, when real starvation became a reality, grain continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the Famine, mainly for fear of violent reactions from the farmer classes. While many have interpreted the Repeal of the Corn Laws as an altruistic move by Peel, Christine Kinealy, in This Great Calamity, questions his motives:
Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws, therefore, was not prompted by a ‘famine’. Was it rather the response of an opportunist and pragmatic politician who, for a number of years, had been moving closer to a policy of free trade in corn and not, as had frequently been implied, an act of political suicide largely motivated by a desire to alleviate the situation in Ireland?
While laissez faire and neo-liberal thinking then were at the root of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, a complete and unapologetic sense of self-entitlement by the one per cent was at play in pre-revolutionary France, and this one per cent was kept in the style to which it was accustomed by the rotten and corrupt affair that was the collection of taxes. Pre-revolutionary France was absolutist, Catholic and feudal. The people of France were divided into three estates – First Estate – the clergy, Second Estate – the nobility, and Third Estate - everybody else – from the wealthiest merchant to the lowliest rat catcher. It was the rising prosperity yet political disenfranchisement of a large rump of the Third Estate – the prosperous (albeit tax-paying) middleclass - who were desperately looking for acceptance, that underpinned the revolution.
On the eve of the French Revolution, the nobility - the one per cent - owned over a fifth of the land and held most of the power across all spectrums of society. Next most powerful was the church, who owned approximately[5] ten per cent of the land. The nobility and clergy paid no tax, but they were very good at collecting it from the Third Estate. These privileged buffoons were free to extract tax in whatever manner they deemed fit, but they were also good at creaming off some of the takings. Suffice it to say that a substantial proportion of the king’s revenue went into building or refurbishing the grandiose mansions of his nobility and clergy.
Not only did Louis XVI inherit the French throne in 1774, he also inherited a French debt of four billion livres and defeat by Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). But a temporary stopgap emerged in the form of colonial trade, which thrived and facilitated an enthusiastic growth in consumerism. This nascent experimentation with capitalism was championed by the new, commercial bourgeoisie. From a materialistic perspective at any rate, class distinctions were blurring with this ‘new money’, one of the first warning shots of the old order being diluted.
The chief government tax, the taille, was arbitrary and inequitable (two words you could also associate with the poll tax). In fairness though, the more far-sighted finance ministers of Louis XVI did try to modernise the taxation system, but they were always obstructed by the privileged orders. The last finance minister before the revolution, Necker, described the taxation system as ‘a real monstrosity in the eyes of reason’. The most hated tax of all was the tax on the consumption of salt, known as the gabelle. Unsurprisingly, the nobility, the clergy, and certain other privileged persons were exempted. The high rate and unequal distribution of the gabelle simply encouraged a flourishing trade in contraband salt by smugglers. It was the unpopularity of the gabelle in particular that was added to the list of grievances drawn up for the Estates-General of 1789 on the eve of the revolution. It was abolished in 1790.
Preoccupied with the French and Indian War, from about 1650 to1763, Britain left its American colonies to run themselves in what became known as the age of salutary neglect. Being left home alone suited the colonial Americans very well. They set up their own governing systems in the form of representative legislatures and democratic town meetings to address their very different New World needs.
With the end of the French and Indian War came the end of the age of salutary neglect, but it was too late; the New World had established its own new order while the Old World was preoccupied with yet another pointless war. Now Britain very unwisely, tried to replenish its war drained treasury by imposing intolerable taxes on its American colonies, and there is no doubt that this propelled the American colonies into rebellion. This ‘taxation without representation’ would lose Britain its thirteen American colonies. The intolerable taxes came hot on the heels of each other. The Sugar Act was the first fully enforced tax levied in America solely for the purpose of raising revenue. The American response was to boycott certain imported British goods. The Currency Act was imposed to remove paper currencies from circulation, the Stamp Act taxed printed materials and the Quartering Act required Americans to house and feed British troops.
Colonial leaders held the Stamp Act Congress in New York to petition Parliament and King George III to repeal the tax. Bowing to public pressure, it was repealed in 1766, but bizarrely, the Declaratory Act was passed, which gave the British Parliament the right to tax the colonies anytime it chose. Refusing to pay these taxes landed you in front of a bewigged British judge without a jury. So, now the American colonists were feeling violated on two fronts, and this feeling would never go away, but simply foment into rebellion over the next decade. Now there was no going back. In December 1773, the Boston Tea Party occurred as a reaction to the hated Tea Act of that year. The revolutionary war would start just two years later.
The water charges of recent notoriety are not a new thing in Irish history, or Dublin’s history at any rate. In 1244, King Henry lll’s chief governor of Ireland, Maurice Fitzgerald instructed[6] in a letter dated April 29th of that year, the city sheriff to gather a jury of twelve men to figure out “where water can be best and most conveniently taken from its course and conducted to the king’s city of Dublin.” The project would be financed through a water tax imposed on the city dwellers, and anyone who resisted paying the water tax would be arrested.
Water tax once again became a reality in Ireland in January 2015. In something akin to the poll tax protests in the United Kingdom, people took to the streets, mainly in fear of the water utility being privatised, and the tax was suspended in July 2016. In the last payment cycle of this water tax just over seventy-two per cent of people did not pay. This mass boycott was an effective response to what was considered an unjust tax, like so many taxes throughout history, from John of Gaunt’s first poll tax to the payment of tithes in Ireland. The payment of tithes in Ireland was a case of taxation without representation brought to its most ridiculous extremes, because it was a tax paid by Catholics and Dissenters to pay for the upkeep of a religion, they were not members of – the minority Protestant Established Church of Ireland. To say that this was a cause of simmering discontent and resentment would be an understatement, especially since most Irish people were Catholic. The Tithe War[7] in Ireland 1830-38 was a passive campaign of non-payment, which on several occasions overflowed into violence and death. The campaign was not centrally organised, but it was a chance for an emerging Irish middle-class to cut its teeth on a cause, a practice run, as it were, for future battles, and the eventual disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871.
The arrogance of the coloniser has often defied belief when it comes to imposing taxes on the colonised. Trampling on the already downtrodden was done with impunity if it facilitated the funding of (usually unjust) wars or paying off national debts. Tariffs were also imposed by colonisers to protect their own manufacturers and farmers, a practice which resulted in the ruination of Irish agriculture and industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Navigation Act of 1660 (amended 1663 and 1666) for example, prohibited all exports from Ireland to the colonies and the import of Irish cattle into England, thus destroying the Irish cattle and shipping businesses. Again, to protect the English cloth industry, Ireland’s one hope of industrial prosperity, the wool trade, was ruined by an act of the Irish parliament in 1699, which placed extortionist export duties on Irish woollen products. Simultaneously, the English parliament passed an act greatly limiting the number of ports from which Ireland could export from, and the number of English ports she could export into.
The linen trade was left alone because it did not impact the English cloth industry. Just like the fallout of the gabelle (salt tax) in pre-revolutionary France, contraband trade and smuggling in all manner of goods increased. Ireland would have to wait for over two centuries before industry could re-emerge; in the meantime, land was king, and preoccupation with its ownership would dominate from hereon in. The most iconic slogan, “Fair rent, free sale, fixity of tenure” became the battle cry of the land wars of the eighteen seventies onwards. The slogan called for an end to exorbitantly high rents, the right to purchase the land you tilled, and removal of the constant threat of eviction. But for these purely protectionist Navigation Acts and import duties on wool, Ireland could have developed an industrial base; reliance on land and the vagaries of landlords would not have been so marked for most of the population, and our story might have been different.
Throughout history, taxes and tariffs have funded unnecessary wars, paid for the sins of greed committed by the worst kind of leaders and private interest groups, or just simply maintained the extravagant lifestyle of some useless monarch or thuggish dictator. It will be interesting to read an analysis of the impact of the Universal Social Charge to fund the Bank Bailout in Ireland, in one hundred years’ time or, from a more global perspective, the fallout from the current trade war between the United Staets and China.
T is for taxes, whose tactless timing will invariably lead to civil unrest, revolution, trade wars, the fall of governments, the collapse of monarchies, unnecessary suffering for the neediest in society, and predictably, opportunities for crooks and downright robbers.
[1] See chapter entitled Is your country doomed in History Repeating: Why Populists Rise and Governments Fall by Sam Wilkin
[2] “There is a record of the parliamentary discussion in 1377 when, after rejecting an income tax, a purchase tax, and other novelties, it was decided to levy the flat rate of 4d. a head ('poll') from everyone over the age of 14 who was not a professional beggar. This was a regressive tax, taking in proportion more of a poor man's income than a rich man's, and when Richard II's Parliament granted a second poll tax in 1379 there was an attempt to make the tax more acceptable by grading the payments according to rank.” https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol4/pp304-313
[3] The Hundred Years' War was waged sporadically from 1337 to 1453, by the Plantagenet kings of England against the French House of Valois, over the right to rule the Kingdom of France.
[4] See https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/when-history-rhymes-brexit-theresa-may-and-the-19th-century-corn-law-fiasco/
[5] Somewhere between six to 10 percent.
[6] Footnote for above - http://chancery.tcd.ie/document/other/henry-iii/1
Samples of the letters - https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/trinity-historians-reconstruct-thousands-of-medieval-documents-bombed-in-the-four-courts-in-the-civil-war/
[7] The lists of tithe defaulters show that the vast majority were ordinary folk: 1,356 widows; six cottiers; 771 labourers; four woodrangers; 90 carpenters; ten pensioners; one soldier; two sailors; 62 shopkeepers; 113 publicans; one constable; five innkeepers; and 54 millers. But they also show that these ordinary folk were in good company, for among those also named are the earl of Clonmel; Earl Glengal; Lord Ashbrooke of London; Lord Clifsten of Ringwood, Co. Kilkenny; Lord Ferrard of Collon, Co. Louth; … https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/the-tithe-war-reports-by-church-of-ireland-clergymen-to-dublin-castle/
The only two certainties in life; taxes and death
Well might we laugh at First Century AD Roman emperor Vaspasian placing a tax on urine, or to be more precise, taxing the buyers of said urine. The tax was lucrative because the ammonia in urine made it an indispensable cleaning agent in laundries for keeping the iconic Roman toga whiter than white. Benjamin Franklin was right in his assessment then that “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” The pain of unfair taxation was felt as keenly in ancient Rome as it was in pre-revolutionary France; in colonial America as in Thatcher’s Britain or post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. But isn’t it interesting that it was so often the essentials of life that were taxed – salt, candles, fireplaces, windows; or the few simple pleasures of the poor – tea and sugar?
Of course, measures like protectionism, flexible interpretations of true earnings, and taxing imports to the hilt to protect big business are old tricks. They have been employed so often over the past two-hundred years from the Corn Laws to protecting Greek shipping magnates[1]; from low corporation tax in Ireland to the current trade war between the United States and China. While the sting of death may be sharp, even sharper perhaps, is the sting of taxation without representation; sharper than a serpent’s tooth; sharper than a samurai sword; deadly enough to start a revolution.
For anyone comfortably settled in middle age, the term poll tax will bring back images on the television news of angry rioters on the streets of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1990. Almost six-hundred years previously, John of Gaunt, advisor to the boy king, Richard ll, introduced the first poll tax[2] to fund the vanity exercise that was the Hundred Years War[3] (1337 to 1453). The tax was set at four pence per head for everyone over the age of fourteen who was not a professional beggar. One can only assume then that there was a sudden surge of interest in pursuing a career in begging after 1377. By 1381 the poll tax had risen to twelve pence per head resulting in widespread tax evasion from the squeezed lower echelons. It was this hike that was one of the main causes of the Peasants Revolt.
While in the short term the revolt was ruthlessly put down and the leaders executed, the Peasants Revolt marked the beginning of the end of the feudal system in England. A much earlier tax in England, called scutage, was introduced by King Henry I to allow knights to opt out of their military duties. When the greedy King John raised it by three hundred per cent, suits of armour rattled with displeasure. Some historians believe that this excessive hike was one of the things that led to the drawing up of the Magna Carta, the first document containing clauses to restrain kingly power.
But to return to the poll tax, for Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister during the nineteen-eighties, it was also the beginning of the end. Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax demanded a flat rate to be paid by every adult whether you lived in a mobile home or a stately mansion. Another unsettling thing about this poll tax was that councils could set their own charges. Like a replay of the Peasants Revolt in 1381, riots occurred at an anti-poll tax march in London in 1990. While there were no executions or murders, the situation did turn violent: 340 demonstrators were arrested, and 45 policemen were injured. Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative party was challenged, and she eventually resigned; her successor, John Major, removed the poll tax. Those of a certain age in Ireland will also remember the budget proposal to put a tax on children’s shoes which brought down the Fine Gael / Labour coalition government in 1982; not a good day for the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald.
A consistent pattern throughout history is that innocent and powerless people are put upon to fund vanity projects, or pay for the mistakes of, in many cases, reckless and irresponsible leaders. The innovative ways in which these taxes have been extracted over time are both colourful and disturbing, especially when employed as a punishment.
Take, for example, the Hearth Tax introduced by Charles ll in 1662. A tax of one shilling had to be paid twice yearly on every fire hearth and stove in households who paid worth more than twenty shillings in rates. Homeowners tried to get around this tax by blocking up their chimneys, but if caught, they were charged double the original tax. This stupid and dangerous tax was rescinded by King William in 1689; too late though for the four people who died in a fire caused by a baker trying to evade the tax by concealing his oven. Furthermore, the Hearth Tax was retained in Ireland as a punishment for those who had defied King William at the Battle of the Boyne.
Another ridiculous levy imposed in late seventeenth century Britain was the Window Tax in 1696. It was extended to Ireland, again as a punishment tax, following the 1798 Rebellion. It would not be repealed in either country until 1851. This tax was based on the number of windows in a house, an easy enough one then to assess. The more windows you had, the more per window you paid. The hollows evident on the House of Lords in Dublin’s College Green were a temporary measure until the Window Tax was abolished. They were not replaced after 1851, and if they were, I am not so sure they would improve that magisterial building. These false windows can be seen on many period houses and public buildings around Dublin.
Just like the Hearth Tax, people avoided the Window Tax by blocking up their windows, and a new trend started of building houses with fewer windows. This was not a progressive development at a time when urban populations were increasing exponentially in industrial centres. The medical profession especially argued that a lack of ventilation was contributing to the spread of diseases. Add to this another regrettable tax that coincided for a time with that on windows. In pre-electricity days the tax on candles, introduced in 1789, was harsh. With very little natural light during the day because of the Window Tax, and dark nights restricting your indoor activities because of the Candle Tax, it must have been a dull and miserable existence, especially for people of meagre means who spent their days in hard labour in factories, coal mines or farms. You had to buy a licence to make your own candles and then to add insult to injury, you had to pay tax on the candles you made. The tax was repealed in 1831, allowing people to engage in a wider range of tasks in the dark evenings, reading being a major one. Incidentally, the half-door found in rural cottages in Ireland and England was a response to the Window Tax. It was a clever workaround, letting in light and fresh air without being a window.
Keeping with the home front then, the Brick Tax was imposed in 1784 to help fund Britain's losing battle with the American revolutionaries. It was abolished in 1850 because it was rightly considered to be stifling enterprise. Just stand on any Georgian street in Dublin and survey the number of small bricks in any wall, and weep for those property developers. Brick manufacturers had to pay four shillings on every thousand bricks. As always, clever workarounds were devised. In this case, the manufacturers started making fewer larger bricks. The government responded by putting a cap on brick size. Prospective homeowners responded by wishing a plague on all brick houses and eschewing bricks in favour of timber. But internal walls still needed to be covered, and even this was stymied by the Patterned Wallpaper Tax, introduced in 1712 and lasting for 120 years. The creative workaround to this tax was for householders to buy untaxed blank wallpaper and stencil it themselves. So, fireplaces, brick walls, windows, and wallpaper were seen as fair game by the ever-unpopular tax collectors.
England’s hat tax of 1784 resulted in yet another creative workaround that rivalled the wallpaper one. To avoid the tax, hat-makers stopped calling their head coverings "hats", but this led to a tax being placed on anything you wore on your head (except your hair). This was a serious tax; the death penalty was the punishment for those who forged a hat tax license. It was repealed in 1811. Keeping with heads then, when Peter the Great returned to a medieval Russia from the modernising influences of Europe he was keen to drag Russian fashions into the early 18th century by discouraging the signature Russian beard. He forcefully imposed the clean-shaven face by putting a tax on beards. Hair would find itself under scrutiny again in 1795, when the British Parliament did the world a favour by putting a tax on wig powder, leading to a dramatic decline in the wearing of those fashion monstrosities.
As soon as one war ended, another would quickly follow, and the coffers were always hungry. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the British establishment was under attack from its own citizens. This was the era of the Spitalfields riot (1816) and the Peterloo Massacre (1819). The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was a sign that the government felt threatened. The Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act (1819) taxed newspapers and periodicals with the direct hope of preventing the spread of radical ideas; the Window Tax and the Candle Tax were doubtless making it already difficult for the working poor to read anything, radical or otherwise. Any act that restricts the freedom of the press is usually counterproductive, and the censorship resulting from this act was not lifted until the 1850s. As in so many countries in different historical eras, publications critical of the government went 'underground', and an underground press is a very effective weapon for educating, informing and rallying to a cause. People across all spectrums of society understood the stupidity of curtailing free trade in print and consequently, the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of Taxes on Knowledge started a campaign that would eventually succeed in abolishing this tax in 1855.
A key Tory policy, which had a particular resonance in Irish history, especially in relation to the Great Irish Famine, was the introduction of the Corn Laws. Although these protectionist laws came and went throughout British history, they assumed a particular importance during the Napoleonic Wars when grain was badly needed to feed a growing population and a hungry army. The Corn Laws protected the profits of landowners in Britain by the imposition of a duty on imported corn. Put simply, the Corn Laws provided a protective buffer for big farmers and land- owners. Despite incurring the wrath of his party and losing the next general election as a result, British Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 to allow massive imports of maize into Ireland; enough to feed one million people for one month, although not many people were yet starving at this stage.
This contentious decision split the Conservative party in a very similar way to the current split over Brexit[4]. In 1846 Peel had to work with the Whigs; in more recent times, Theresa May had to work with the Labour Party. Both Peel and May lost their premierships, leaving behind polarised opinions, infighting, and divided and shifting loyalties. Incredibly, when real starvation became a reality, grain continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the Famine, mainly for fear of violent reactions from the farmer classes. While many have interpreted the Repeal of the Corn Laws as an altruistic move by Peel, Christine Kinealy, in This Great Calamity, questions his motives:
Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws, therefore, was not prompted by a ‘famine’. Was it rather the response of an opportunist and pragmatic politician who, for a number of years, had been moving closer to a policy of free trade in corn and not, as had frequently been implied, an act of political suicide largely motivated by a desire to alleviate the situation in Ireland?
While laissez faire and neo-liberal thinking then were at the root of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, a complete and unapologetic sense of self-entitlement by the one per cent was at play in pre-revolutionary France, and this one per cent was kept in the style to which it was accustomed by the rotten and corrupt affair that was the collection of taxes. Pre-revolutionary France was absolutist, Catholic and feudal. The people of France were divided into three estates – First Estate – the clergy, Second Estate – the nobility, and Third Estate - everybody else – from the wealthiest merchant to the lowliest rat catcher. It was the rising prosperity yet political disenfranchisement of a large rump of the Third Estate – the prosperous (albeit tax-paying) middleclass - who were desperately looking for acceptance, that underpinned the revolution.
On the eve of the French Revolution, the nobility - the one per cent - owned over a fifth of the land and held most of the power across all spectrums of society. Next most powerful was the church, who owned approximately[5] ten per cent of the land. The nobility and clergy paid no tax, but they were very good at collecting it from the Third Estate. These privileged buffoons were free to extract tax in whatever manner they deemed fit, but they were also good at creaming off some of the takings. Suffice it to say that a substantial proportion of the king’s revenue went into building or refurbishing the grandiose mansions of his nobility and clergy.
Not only did Louis XVI inherit the French throne in 1774, he also inherited a French debt of four billion livres and defeat by Britain in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). But a temporary stopgap emerged in the form of colonial trade, which thrived and facilitated an enthusiastic growth in consumerism. This nascent experimentation with capitalism was championed by the new, commercial bourgeoisie. From a materialistic perspective at any rate, class distinctions were blurring with this ‘new money’, one of the first warning shots of the old order being diluted.
The chief government tax, the taille, was arbitrary and inequitable (two words you could also associate with the poll tax). In fairness though, the more far-sighted finance ministers of Louis XVI did try to modernise the taxation system, but they were always obstructed by the privileged orders. The last finance minister before the revolution, Necker, described the taxation system as ‘a real monstrosity in the eyes of reason’. The most hated tax of all was the tax on the consumption of salt, known as the gabelle. Unsurprisingly, the nobility, the clergy, and certain other privileged persons were exempted. The high rate and unequal distribution of the gabelle simply encouraged a flourishing trade in contraband salt by smugglers. It was the unpopularity of the gabelle in particular that was added to the list of grievances drawn up for the Estates-General of 1789 on the eve of the revolution. It was abolished in 1790.
Preoccupied with the French and Indian War, from about 1650 to1763, Britain left its American colonies to run themselves in what became known as the age of salutary neglect. Being left home alone suited the colonial Americans very well. They set up their own governing systems in the form of representative legislatures and democratic town meetings to address their very different New World needs.
With the end of the French and Indian War came the end of the age of salutary neglect, but it was too late; the New World had established its own new order while the Old World was preoccupied with yet another pointless war. Now Britain very unwisely, tried to replenish its war drained treasury by imposing intolerable taxes on its American colonies, and there is no doubt that this propelled the American colonies into rebellion. This ‘taxation without representation’ would lose Britain its thirteen American colonies. The intolerable taxes came hot on the heels of each other. The Sugar Act was the first fully enforced tax levied in America solely for the purpose of raising revenue. The American response was to boycott certain imported British goods. The Currency Act was imposed to remove paper currencies from circulation, the Stamp Act taxed printed materials and the Quartering Act required Americans to house and feed British troops.
Colonial leaders held the Stamp Act Congress in New York to petition Parliament and King George III to repeal the tax. Bowing to public pressure, it was repealed in 1766, but bizarrely, the Declaratory Act was passed, which gave the British Parliament the right to tax the colonies anytime it chose. Refusing to pay these taxes landed you in front of a bewigged British judge without a jury. So, now the American colonists were feeling violated on two fronts, and this feeling would never go away, but simply foment into rebellion over the next decade. Now there was no going back. In December 1773, the Boston Tea Party occurred as a reaction to the hated Tea Act of that year. The revolutionary war would start just two years later.
The water charges of recent notoriety are not a new thing in Irish history, or Dublin’s history at any rate. In 1244, King Henry lll’s chief governor of Ireland, Maurice Fitzgerald instructed[6] in a letter dated April 29th of that year, the city sheriff to gather a jury of twelve men to figure out “where water can be best and most conveniently taken from its course and conducted to the king’s city of Dublin.” The project would be financed through a water tax imposed on the city dwellers, and anyone who resisted paying the water tax would be arrested.
Water tax once again became a reality in Ireland in January 2015. In something akin to the poll tax protests in the United Kingdom, people took to the streets, mainly in fear of the water utility being privatised, and the tax was suspended in July 2016. In the last payment cycle of this water tax just over seventy-two per cent of people did not pay. This mass boycott was an effective response to what was considered an unjust tax, like so many taxes throughout history, from John of Gaunt’s first poll tax to the payment of tithes in Ireland. The payment of tithes in Ireland was a case of taxation without representation brought to its most ridiculous extremes, because it was a tax paid by Catholics and Dissenters to pay for the upkeep of a religion, they were not members of – the minority Protestant Established Church of Ireland. To say that this was a cause of simmering discontent and resentment would be an understatement, especially since most Irish people were Catholic. The Tithe War[7] in Ireland 1830-38 was a passive campaign of non-payment, which on several occasions overflowed into violence and death. The campaign was not centrally organised, but it was a chance for an emerging Irish middle-class to cut its teeth on a cause, a practice run, as it were, for future battles, and the eventual disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871.
The arrogance of the coloniser has often defied belief when it comes to imposing taxes on the colonised. Trampling on the already downtrodden was done with impunity if it facilitated the funding of (usually unjust) wars or paying off national debts. Tariffs were also imposed by colonisers to protect their own manufacturers and farmers, a practice which resulted in the ruination of Irish agriculture and industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Navigation Act of 1660 (amended 1663 and 1666) for example, prohibited all exports from Ireland to the colonies and the import of Irish cattle into England, thus destroying the Irish cattle and shipping businesses. Again, to protect the English cloth industry, Ireland’s one hope of industrial prosperity, the wool trade, was ruined by an act of the Irish parliament in 1699, which placed extortionist export duties on Irish woollen products. Simultaneously, the English parliament passed an act greatly limiting the number of ports from which Ireland could export from, and the number of English ports she could export into.
The linen trade was left alone because it did not impact the English cloth industry. Just like the fallout of the gabelle (salt tax) in pre-revolutionary France, contraband trade and smuggling in all manner of goods increased. Ireland would have to wait for over two centuries before industry could re-emerge; in the meantime, land was king, and preoccupation with its ownership would dominate from hereon in. The most iconic slogan, “Fair rent, free sale, fixity of tenure” became the battle cry of the land wars of the eighteen seventies onwards. The slogan called for an end to exorbitantly high rents, the right to purchase the land you tilled, and removal of the constant threat of eviction. But for these purely protectionist Navigation Acts and import duties on wool, Ireland could have developed an industrial base; reliance on land and the vagaries of landlords would not have been so marked for most of the population, and our story might have been different.
Throughout history, taxes and tariffs have funded unnecessary wars, paid for the sins of greed committed by the worst kind of leaders and private interest groups, or just simply maintained the extravagant lifestyle of some useless monarch or thuggish dictator. It will be interesting to read an analysis of the impact of the Universal Social Charge to fund the Bank Bailout in Ireland, in one hundred years’ time or, from a more global perspective, the fallout from the current trade war between the United Staets and China.
T is for taxes, whose tactless timing will invariably lead to civil unrest, revolution, trade wars, the fall of governments, the collapse of monarchies, unnecessary suffering for the neediest in society, and predictably, opportunities for crooks and downright robbers.
[1] See chapter entitled Is your country doomed in History Repeating: Why Populists Rise and Governments Fall by Sam Wilkin
[2] “There is a record of the parliamentary discussion in 1377 when, after rejecting an income tax, a purchase tax, and other novelties, it was decided to levy the flat rate of 4d. a head ('poll') from everyone over the age of 14 who was not a professional beggar. This was a regressive tax, taking in proportion more of a poor man's income than a rich man's, and when Richard II's Parliament granted a second poll tax in 1379 there was an attempt to make the tax more acceptable by grading the payments according to rank.” https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol4/pp304-313
[3] The Hundred Years' War was waged sporadically from 1337 to 1453, by the Plantagenet kings of England against the French House of Valois, over the right to rule the Kingdom of France.
[4] See https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/when-history-rhymes-brexit-theresa-may-and-the-19th-century-corn-law-fiasco/
[5] Somewhere between six to 10 percent.
[6] Footnote for above - http://chancery.tcd.ie/document/other/henry-iii/1
Samples of the letters - https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/trinity-historians-reconstruct-thousands-of-medieval-documents-bombed-in-the-four-courts-in-the-civil-war/
[7] The lists of tithe defaulters show that the vast majority were ordinary folk: 1,356 widows; six cottiers; 771 labourers; four woodrangers; 90 carpenters; ten pensioners; one soldier; two sailors; 62 shopkeepers; 113 publicans; one constable; five innkeepers; and 54 millers. But they also show that these ordinary folk were in good company, for among those also named are the earl of Clonmel; Earl Glengal; Lord Ashbrooke of London; Lord Clifsten of Ringwood, Co. Kilkenny; Lord Ferrard of Collon, Co. Louth; … https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/the-tithe-war-reports-by-church-of-ireland-clergymen-to-dublin-castle/
