Regional Exchanges and Patterns of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century Europe: the Case of the Italian Cadastres

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a large number of European states (France, Austria and the greater part of the German Confederation ‑ England being a notable exception) carried out geometric land surveys in order to establish a land tax. Indeed, the first International Congress of Statistics (1853) passed a resolution in favour of establishing cadastral surveys and valuations based on land maps. The creation of such cadastral surveys as a basis for the introduction of industrial and land taxes can be examined in terms of national history alone, but it can also help us trace the protracted history of administrative transfers which accelerated after 1750 in connection with major fiscal reforms.¹ Antonella Alimento and Jean Nicolas have noted the occurrence of ‘a number of similar decisions taken across Europe and underwritten by the same financial, administrative, centre-driven and modernizing forces’.² Financial burdens on European states first began to increase with the War of Spanish Succession (1705‑14), which the traditional source of state revenue, the domain (regalia), alone could no longer sustain. The political crisis was exacerbated by the installation of new dynasties which upset the traditional use of the domains and encroached upon church properties. Taken together, these factors explain some of the similarities of the decisions. But they do not address the questions of, first, how the agents of public finance came to implement detailed surveys of land rather than levy excise duties; second, by what means and through which conduits individual exchanges gave way to the circulation of ideas and objects; and, third, more generally, how public practices became objects of scientific inquiry.³