Title: State Metallurgy Factories and Direct Taxes in the Urals, 1700–50: Paths to State Building in Early Modern Russia
Abstract: State Metallurgy Factories and Direct Taxes in the Urals, 1700–50Paths to State Building in Early Modern Russia Mikhail A. Kiselev (bio) Translated by Anna Graber Historical-sociological descriptions of the rise and development of the modern bureaucratic state attribute great significance to war and taxation. According to the so-called military-taxation theory, the state collects taxes, which grant it the resources to survive in geopolitical competition. The ability of a state to regularly raise the necessary tax revenue to conduct war is viewed as one of the most important indicators of successful state building. According to this theory, “states that adopt the most productive taxes and institutionalize the most modern forms of tax administration are able to mobilize ever greater quantities of labor and materiel and therefore have the edge in this perpetual arms race. … In the long run, military competition led all surviving states to converge on efficient and productive tax systems, and those tax systems in turn led to the militarization and bureaucratization of society.”1 The history of the early modern Russian state, too, has been analyzed through the prism of military-taxation theory. Chester Dunning and Norman Smith detect a fiscal-military state in Russia in the 16th century, while Endre Sashalmi prefers the period between the second half of the 17th [End Page 7] century to the first quarter of the 18th century for the emergence of a Russian fiscal-military state.2 By contrast, Janet Hartley concludes that Russia could hardly be defined as a fiscal-military state even in the 18th century.3 The observations and conclusions of these authors (as well as my own) should be taken as preliminary and open to discussion, because of both the current state of historical research and the existence of important theoretical problems that still require further attention. From the 20th century through the present day, historians of taxation have reconstructed the state budget, the yearly fluctuation of returns from various types of taxes, and the structure of the tax apparatus. They have also reconstructed the composition of the tax apparatus and its daily activities related to the collection of taxes and revenue from the population.4 Yet more research is required, working with sources of the 16th through 19th centuries to resolve new and important theoretical problems. One such question concerns the manner in which we approach the state itself. As Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast note, “economists and social scientists concerned with understanding how the state develops and interacts with the larger society have modeled the state as a revenue-maximizing monarch, a stationary bandit, or a single-actor ‘representative agent.’ By overlooking the reality that all states are organizations, this approach misses how the internal dynamics [End Page 8] of relationships among elites within the dominant coalition affect how states interact with the larger society.”5 Their approach may not be entirely new, after all, Max Weber already recognized the state as a “human community,” one that claims a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”6 North, Wallis, and Weingast are right, however, to remind us that the state as a “human community” is an organization, and that its internal structure and institutions have had a decisive effect on the course of state building.7 In Russia, the “state” emerged in the late 15th century as an organization of the hereditary landowning class (termed “nobility” in the 18th century), centralized and united around the figure of the monarch. Social collaboration within the ruling class was in many respects what allowed the Russian autocracy to function. Regionally based, independent magnates were absent. As David Goldfrank notes, “the aristocracy contributed only glue, not centrifugal counter-force to the central establishment.”8 Occupying a state office was both the right and the duty of the ruling class. The Russian administrative apparatus of the 17th and 18th centuries performed the function of a corporate structure for the ruling class.9 The Russian state was therefore peculiar in that it lacked significant rivals, the suppression of which would have required a strong, multifaceted, and far-reaching governing apparatus. The structures of the noncrown administration—the patrimonial estates...
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 12
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