Week 4. The French State under the ancien régime

Lecture

Doyle, William. Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1999.

Lewis, G. The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate. London: Routledge, 1993. Read selections from either book.

Further

Week 3 readings on the British state.

Aftalion, F. The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.

Horn, Jeff, " 'A Beautiful Madness': Privilege, the Machine Question and Industrial Development in Normandy in 1789," Past and Present, no. 217 (Nov. 2012), pp. 149-85.

Johnson, Noel, and Mark Koyama, "Tax farming and the origins of state capacity in England and France," EEH, vol. 51 (2014), pp. 1-20.

Mathias Peter, and Patrick O'Brien, "Taxation in Britain and France, 1715-1810. A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments," Journal of European Economic History, vol. 5 (1976), pp. 601-650.

Norberg, Kathryn. "The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution of 1789," Ch. 7 in Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450-1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) P. Hoffman and K. Norberg, eds., pp. 253-298.

Potter, Mark, "Good Offices: Intermediation by Corporate Bodies in Early Modern French Public Finance," JEH, vol. 60 no. 3 (2000), pp. 599-626.

--- and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, "Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates of Burgundy, 1660-1790," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 27, no. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 577-612.

Riley, J. The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.

Root, Hilton, "Tying the King's Hands: Credible Commitments and Royal Fiscal Policy during the Old Regime," Rationality and Society, vol. 1, no. 2 (1989), pp 240-58.

--- , "The Redistributive Role of Government: Economic Regulation in Old Regime France and England", Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 338-369.

--- . Peasant and King in Burgundy. Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism. Berkeley CA: U. of California Press, 1987.Develops the idea that the Crown strengthened communal village institutions for fiscal reasons.

--- . The Fountain of Privilege. Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. Berkeley CA: U. of California Press, 1994.

--- , "The Political Economy of Absolutism Reconsidered," in Robert Bates et al. (eds.), Analytical Narratives (Princeton: PUP, 1998), pp. 64-108.

Sargent, Thomas and François Velde, "Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 103 no. 3 (June 1995), pp. 474-518.

Velde, François and David Weir, "The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746-1793," JEH, vol. 52 no. 1 (March 1992), pp. 1-39.

White, Eugene, "The French Revolution and the Politics of Government Finance, 1770-1815," JEH, vol. 55 no. 2 (June 1995), pp. 227-255.

--- , "France and the Failure to Modernize Macroeconomic Institutions," working paper available on-line, presented at 12th International Economic History Conference, Madrid, 1998.