land tax

…to be raised by a land tax. By 1610 negotiations began for the Great Contract between the king and his taxpaying subjects that aimed to raise £200,000 a year. But at the last moment both royal officials and leaders of the House of Commons backed away from the deal, the…

Rudimentary notions of land revenue developed. Each village had a headman who was responsible for collecting taxes and another set of officials who supervised the collection and conveyed the revenue to the royal treasury. But the full understanding of the utilization of land revenue as a major source…

…was provided by income from land revenue and, to a lesser extent, from trade. The gradual expansion of the agrarian economy and improvements in the administrative machinery for collecting revenue increased the income from land revenue. This is confirmed by both the theories of Kautilya and the account of Megasthenes;…

…sufficient to supplement fully the land revenue in financing the empire.

…expansion was not arrested, and land revenue continued to be a major source of income, but profit from trade made a substantial difference to the urban economy, noticeably improving the standard of living and registering a growth in the number and size of towns.

…which the French system of land register (cadastre) was introduced at the end of the 18th century. The theoretical income of each piece of real property is then determined by the administration of the land register and remains fixed for a relatively long period, except when important changes are made…

The use of a land tax as the chief source of revenue has often been proposed. It was favoured by the Physiocrats in 18th-century France. Probably the best-known exponent was a 19th-century American, Henry George. His Progress and Poverty (1879) drew upon economic analysis in the tradition of British…