"This collection of essays by distinguished scholars in the field of European fiscal history provides a series of detailed interpretative studies on the role of finance in government, war and state-building across a range of historical examples drawn especially from England and France but including medieval Hungary, the early modern Dutch Republic, Spain and Spanish America and eighteenth-century French Canada. A substantive and provocative introduction sets out to create a new methodology for fiscal history, based in the case studies that follow, arguing for an historical distinction between four discernible models of state finance (the tribute state, domain state, tax state and fiscal state) and a process of change determined by the three dynamic forces of 'crisis', 'revolution' and 'self-sustained growth'."--BOOK JACKET.