Download PDF | Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez, Amélia Aguiar Andrade - Portugal in a European context_ essays on taxation and fiscal policies in late medieval and early modern — Western Europe, 1100-1700 _ BY Rodrigo da Costa phic Amélia Aguiar Andrade, palgrave macmillan, 2023.
340 Pages
FOREWORD
For millennia, states have been preoccupied with their own formation in contexts of threats to security, internal conflicts with aristocratic and urban, ecclesiastical hierarchies with rebellions, peasantries and a need to integrate diverse populations into polities of compliant subjects. Histories of when, how and why between 1453 and 1815 hundreds of ruling regime and elites from all parts of Europe were conquered by rivals or merged by agreements (often cemented by dynastic marriages) into empires, dominions, realms, princedoms, churches, republics and cities fill university libraries.
Led by North’s restoration of insights first elaborated by the German historical school, the dominant concern for the modern generation of economic historians has been to investigate connexions between institutions and long-run economic development. As economists, they have unfortunately remained under-informed about the origins and evaluation of promotional, neural and malign states behind the constructions, maintenance and political destruction of the institutions selected by economic theory as preconditions for the supply of three indispensable public goods for private investment, the extension of markets and innovation—namely, external security, internal order and protection from predation.
Nevertheless, the reorientation of economic history to accord a central weight to institutions has implied a re-engagement with traditions of political history concerned with state formation. Attempts by economists to cut out or through that body of scholarship by resorting to analyses based on rational choice, rent-seeking behaviour by elites’ constitutions for freedom exposés of the logical errors of mercantilism and the futility of warfare could only be dismissed by historians as ontologically superficial and by econometricians (as the frontiers of that enticing discipline) as theoretically naive.
Economic historians have anticipated that a middle range of grounded generations about paths and patterns of state formation could emerge (as Schumpeter suggested) from comparative investigations into pathdependent variations in the relative fiscal and financial capacities of European states to fund the provision of external securities, internal order and political stability required for the formation and operation of an interrelated set of institutions required to promote and sustain economic growth over long spans of time.
To date, such comparisons have been limited to a small sample of states that happen to have preserved records of amounts of taxes, loans and credits that some central governments assessed and borrowed as funds available to spend for purposes that can be retrospectively recognised as promotional for the growth of economies. Furthermore, most publications on the “rise of Europe’s fiscal and financial states” not only exclude important countries such as Portugal and major provinces of modernday Italy, but work with a chronology that virtually ignores the medieval foundations of European states.
The editors of this volume are to be thanked and congratulated by those of us who have explored the tax revenues, loans, credits and fiscal institutions for later centuries, that possess both data we have fortunate enough to access, and primary sources for the study of institutions. Their evidence reveals that their origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Narratives comparing the rise, decline and disappearance of European states that neglect influences, developments and divergences that originated in this period are seriously under-specified. All the essays in this book go a long way towards repairing the intellectual myopias of truncated chronologies and expertly qualify our views on the formation of European states and Portugal’s insertion in this context.
London, UK Patrick K. O’Brien, FBA Professor Emeritus of the University of London
Patrick K. O’Brien is Centennial Professor of Global Economic History at the London School of Economics (retired). He was Director from 1990-1998 of the Institute of Historical Research and before that Reader in Economic History and Professorial Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests include world trade, technology and historiographical traditions; historiographical traditions in the construction of global economic history; the evolution of intercontinental trade from Roman Empire to 1846; macro inventions and macro inventors in English cotton textiles from Kay to Cartwright; the economics of European expansion overseas from the conquest of Ceuta to the Imperian Meridian; the formation and efficiency of fiscal states in Europe and Asia 1500-1914.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Andrade Amélia Aguiar is Full Professor in Medieval History at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon (NOVA FCSH). She has held numerous scientific and university positions, in Portugal and abroad, being recently accepted in the College of Expert Reviewers of the European Science Foundation (ESF). Since 2011, she has been Director of the Mario Sottomayor Cardia library and the NOVA FCSH Documentation Centers and, since 2016, the National coordinator of DARIAH—Description the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities and the ROSSIO’s Infrastructure Representative. She is also a member of the Scientific Council of NOVA FCSH, including the vice-presidency from 2006 to 2008. From 2009 to 2012, she was ViceDean of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), for which she received a public praise [DR n° 7599/2012]. She was the coordinator of the doctoral course in history of NOVA FCSH (2011-2013), as well as the coordinator of the doctoral course in medieval studies within the framework of a partnership between NOVA FCSH and Universidade Aberta (2016-2018). Amélia Aguiar Andrade also headed the Institute of Medieval Studies of the same faculty between 2011 and 2016. Among her international curriculum, it’s to highlight that she chaired Scientific Committee of the European Association for Urban History (2012-2014). During her career, she received 4 awards and honours. Her research areas are related to medieval urban history, the study of spaces and powers in the Middle Ages and their forms of articulation, as well as to the exploration of medieval royal inquiries as a privileged source of treatment for these themes.
Caselli Fausto Piola is Professor of Economic History at the University of Cassino and Meridional Lazio, in Italy. He has researched the papal financial network in the late Middle Ages, with particular attention to state balance sheets and to the development of public accounting. He has also dealt with public finances in the early modern period, focusing on the creation of national public debts and the development of tax systems in a comparative perspective. He edited Government Debts and Financial Markets in Europe (2008).
Dominguez Rodrigo da Costa was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated in History from the University Center of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais (2001), MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2006) and PhD in History (2013) both from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. He is currently Junior Research Associate and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Social Sciences (CICS.NOVA) at the University of Minho, in Braga, Portugal. He is also a member of international economic, fiscal and social history associations in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Latin America and the United States, being also President of the Economic and Business History Society (EBHS—USA) for the mandate 2022-2023.
His main areas of study have been: Economic and Fiscal History of Portugal in the long run (15th-19th centuries); Portugal’s trade and shipping in the modern times; the impact of modern European conflicts, as the War of the Spanish Succession and Napoleonic Wars, on the Portuguese economic diplomacy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the building and consolidation of economic and fiscal institutions in Portugal.
He was Visiting Scholar at Appalachian State University (North Carolina, USA) during the Fall Semester 2016, and is referee of Medieval and Early Modern History Journals and Economic History Journals in Portugal, Brazil and the United States.
Farelo Mario is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded project VINCULUM: Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th17th Centuries) [agreement ID 819734]. He also developed between 2009 and 2014 a Postdoctoral Project at the Institute for Medieval Studies (NOVA FCSH), Centre of Religious History Studies (Portuguese Catholic University) and LAMOP (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and CNRS) concerning the kingdom of Portugal and the interventionism of the Papacy of Avignon (1305-1377). His research relies on the institutional study of the entailment information system in Portugal (14th to 17th centuries), along with the history of the relations between the realm of Portugal and the Papacy of Avignon; the history of Medieval Lisbon; ecclesiastical, urban and cultural history of medieval Portugal.
Garnier Florent is Professor of the History of Law and _ Institutions at Toulouse 1 at the Faculty of Law, member of the Center Toulousain d’Histoire du Droit et des Idées Politiques (CTHDIP) laboratory (2018). Aggregate in economics and administrative management. Aggregate in Law. He was also Professor of legal history at the University of Auvergne-Clermont 1 (2006). His current research focuses on medieval urban institutions, taxation in the Middle Ages (learned rights and practice), commercial doctrine (19th—20th centuries), norms, cultural heritage law.
Miranda Susana Miinch is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Nova University of Lisbon. Her current research interests comprise Colonial Governance (Iberian Empires), Fiscal History and Business History. With Leonor Freire Costa and Pedro Lains, she is the author of An Economic History of Portugal, 1143-2010 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Moore Tony K. is Lecturer in Finance at the ICMA Centre. He is Programme Director of the MSc in Financial Regulation, a part-time degree for practising regulators offered in collaboration with the Financial Conduct Authority. He is currently the programme director of the MA by Research in Economic History in the Centre for Economic History and has taught for the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of History. His chief research areas are the history of finance and medieval history—and especially the history of finance during the Middle Ages. Other interests include contemporary perceptions of finance, the social utility of finance and the history of regulation.
Ortego Rico Pablo is Assistant Professor in the Medieval History Area at the University of Malaga, Spain. Graduated in History from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2007, with a specialisation in Medieval History, he obtained the Extraordinary Degree Award and the Third National Degree Award for the 2006/2007 academic year. University Specialist in Archives from the UNED, between 2013 and 2015 he carries out his professional activity as Archives Technician at the Library of the Spanish Royal Academy of History. He has carried out research stays at the “Simancas History Institute” of the University of Valladolid, the CIHAM-UMRS 5648 Laboratory of the University of Lyon II (ENS / LSH—CNRS—University of Lyon I), and the “Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica Francesco di Marco Datini” from Prato (Italy).
Pezzolo Luciano is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of Humanities of Ca’ Foscari University, in Venice. He has his PhD in Economic History from Milan—Bocconi, 1989. Researcher in Economic History at the Faculty of Economics of Ca’ Foscari (19932006), he has been Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Department of Economics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). He was also Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He is a member of the editorial board of Acta Histriae. His main fields of interest are military institutions and financial structures in medieval and early modern Europe; the economic and social history of the Republic of Venice; relations between institutions (formal and informal) and economic dynamics in pre-industrial times. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Mars and Pluto. War and Finance in Italy, 1350-1700, under contract to Oxford University Press.
Reixach Sala Albert has a PhD in History at the University of Girona (2015) with international mention and extraordinary award of the doctoral programme on Human and Cultural Sciences, after being trained as predoctoral researcher at the Institucid Mila i Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council. From April 2021, he is Juan de la Cierva— Incorporaci6n Researcher at the Department of History of the University of Lleida. He has been Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Girona. He has been visiting scholar at Ghent University and University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His area of expertise combines studies on several aspects of the society and economy of Late Medieval Crown of Aragon, with a special attention to finances and local institutions.
‘t Hart Marjolein is Head of the History Research Department of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague and Professor of the History of State Formation in Global Perspective at VU University Amsterdam. In 1989, she obtained her PhD degree in History at the University of Leiden with a thesis on the rise of the fiscal-military state of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, supervised by Prof. Charles Tilly (New York) and Prof. Wim Blockmans (Leiden). She was Visiting Scholar at Trinity College Dublin, Fellow of the New School for Social Research at New York, Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar and Visiting Professor (Queen Wilhelmina Chair) at Columbia University. She was also a member of the editorial board of a number of periodicals, among others of the International Review of Social History, which she chaired. Her research topics privileges social and economic history, with focus on State formation, warfare and bureaucratisation, Revolts and revolutions, Environmental history, Institutional economic history, in particular the role of finance.
Verdés Pijuan Pere has been a tenured scientist at the CSIC’s Institucion Mila i Fontanals since 2005. PhD in Geography and History (Medieval History) from the University of Barcelona (2004), he is currently in charge of the line of research “Taxation and Public Finances in the Crown of Aragon (13th—15th Centuries)”. With regard to his research subjects, to date he has concentrated fundamentally on the study of the origins, the structure and the evolution of the municipal tax office in Catalonia during the Middle Ages. In relation to this subject, he has also studied the origin of public debt, the making of the fiscal discourse and the construction of political identity in Catalan cities from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Mention should be made of his particular interest in the processes of urban fortification. He also directs the Critical Glossary of Medieval Taxation, together with D. Menjot, and he belongs to the management committee of the thematic research network “Arca Comunis”, dedicated to the study of taxation in the Hispanic kingdoms since the thirteenth century.
Vilar Herminia Vasconcelos is Assistant Professor with Aggregation at the University of Evora. She has published 20 articles in specialised magazines and 13 works in proceedings of events, has 27 book chapters and 9 published books. Her works privilege the Humanities area with an emphasis on History and Archaeology. In her professional activities, he interacted with 15 collaborators in co-authorship of scientific works, privileging topics as the Portuguese Medieval elites, medieval urban history, economic and social practices and Religiosity.
Introduction
Améha Aguiar Andrade® and Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez®
During the second half of the twentieth century, European historiography developed a vast and diversified set of studies of late medieval and early modern economic history, in which those of fiscal themes were one of the most innovative ones, engaging breakthrough aspects.! No wonder that, in the final decades of that century, it was possible to produce important syntheses or comparative approaches, in which, however, Portugal was not included.” This is not surprising given the current state of knowledge on Portuguese medieval and early modern taxation, which led to a reading, still persistent in many other themes, that the Portuguese medieval kingdom follows models and practices from the kingdom of Castile, something that, however, more recent investigations have been contradicting.
With no wish to advance a more detailed explanation of the past situation regarding research on Portuguese medieval taxation that will be presented in a specific chapter—put the title?—we believe that this omission was fully justified but can be explained by different but complementary causes that are important to know. On the one hand, a scarcity and both chronological and thematic asymmetry of the primary tax sources then known and/or published, made the study of certain thematic lines unfeasible, since they were limited mainly to acquittance letters (cartas de quitacwo) and scarce records regarding the imposition of extraordinary contributions.*
On the other hand, the lack of interest in economic and fiscal history particularly in Portugal can also be explained by the consequences of a political and ideological dictatorship that prevailed in Portugal between 1926 and 1974, which very clearly conditioned the guidelines of the Portuguese historiographical production, especially regarding medievalism. Based on an apologetic vision of the past that favored themes such as the political autonomy of the kingdom in the twelfth century or the discoveries made from the fifteenth century onward, the official historiography was especially refractory to economic issues that it tended to associate with Marxist perspectives, then strongly repressed. Furthermore, the political isolationism of the Portuguese dictatorship within the European framework made it difficult for researchers to make contact with their foreign peers, contributing to their association to tendentially nationalist perspectives.* However, in the 1960s, there were perceptible signs of openness, led by figures such as Virginia Rau® or A. H. de Oliveira Marques,° responsible for introducing lines of research on economic history, in line with the guidelines then followed by French historiography, the one to which the Portuguese academy was culturally more connected.
However, the knowledge about medieval and early modern taxation was still mostly based on studies produced in the context of the implantation of positivist historiography in Portugal in the nineteenth century” and on publications of primary sources in an unsystematic and sometimes late manner. Only the preliminary studies by Virginia Rau on tax institutions such as the Casa dos Contos® and the early works written by Iria Gongalves on extraordinary taxation,’ in line with the European historiography of the time, as well as the entries she prepared on taxes for a collective work,!° contradicted the desert that was the study of medieval taxation. Yet, none of these authors published outside Portugal, so their work had a very limited dissemination.
The post-1974 period meant an opening up of Portuguese historiography and, consequently, of Medievalism, not only regarding contacts with the outside world, but above all to a plurality of themes and problems to which it was not easy to respond with consistency and continuity, given how much there was to investigate, the limited human resources available and unstable funding for university research. In this renewal of issues and methodologies that took place from then on, fiscal history continued to be a merely marginal topic.!! However, fiscal studies benefited from the development of research strands launched at that time and present within Portuguese Medievalism. This growth provided the discipline not only with a broadening of perspectives in relation to the primary sources that could serve to support research on fiscal themes but, above all, promoted a renewal, eliminating the history of institutions, moving the topic away from the exclusive view of law historians, or those resulting from the study of urban societies and their political role in the context of the complex of powers in question.!* The reinterpretation of Portugal’s formation process allowed, in turn, a new way of equating the dimensions of royal power and its strategies of affirmation throughout the medieval period, in which taxation emerged as an important element of support and, therefore, a constant concern.!%
From the end of the twentieth century onward, the consolidation and expansion of university education and the creation of financial support systems for research made it easier for Portuguese researchers to participate more frequently in scientific meetings and in national and international projects. Moreover, it enabled their integration in European research teams, which contributed to a revival of interest in economic history and fiscal history, which allowed the presence of studies on medieval and early modern taxation in works published abroad!* to become more visible since 2012. A new generation of researchers interested in economic history is being able to combine a wider and more diversified primary information with the economic, social and political conjunctures of the Portuguese kingdom, major theoretical lines in the meantime developed by European historiography, thus integrating the Portuguese case with a vision wider and more systemic, in European terms.
The recent situation that we have just mentioned has contributed to nuance and even sometimes to lead to opposing interpretations of Portuguese medieval taxation as an almost mimetic of Castilian taxation. Undoubtedly, there are common heritages shared by these two kingdoms, such as Roman, Visigoth and Islamic, the latter still insufficiently studied for the Portuguese case.!> Portugal and Castile also shared a common process of territorial gains—the reconquest (Reconquista)—which had as a corollary social and economic specificities that were transformed in the medieval diachrony, and both starred in moments of opening to the world beyond the Pyrenees and to the influences that came from it, albeit with different chronologies and degrees of depth.
However, these two political units also experienced significant discrepancies, such as those resulting from different territorial and social scales, from a non-coincidental form of articulation between the powers, since in Portugal, a more intervening presence and assertiveness from the monarchs was more evident during much of medieval chronology. All of this, as demonstrated by José Mattoso, underpinned the counties’ political support of which they were lords and which constituted the overwhelming majority of the kingdom’s urban network.!°
Divergences that justify that lexical similarities cannot be considered without much prudence and critical spirit, as is the case, for example, with Portuguese Alcavala and Castilian Alcabala, which despite being almost identical in their spelling, however, do not correspond to identical scopes.!7 In the same way, these peninsular kingdoms differ in the role granted to extraordinary taxation or taxation on consumption—the sisas—in the structuring of the tax systems they implemented.!®
The study of Portuguese medieval taxation and its consequent integration into global and systemic approaches to the taxation of medieval Christian Europe may have the potential to be an attractive contribution to the analysis of the problems of the relationship/tension between center and periphery. Indeed, the Portuguese kingdom appears in this chronology as a clearly peripheral space, both in the peninsular and in the European context. Yet, peripheral but not isolated, well-linked to other kingdoms, and favored by its pivotal position in maritime contacts between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Additionally, throughout the medieval centuries, it was possible to establish political and cultural contacts with other kingdoms, although not always in coincident chronologies. Recollecting, for example, the stay of the future King Alfonso HI (1248-1279) between 1227 and 1246 at the court of his cousin, Louis IX of France (1226-1270),!° the intense mercantile contacts with the European Atlantic fagade since the second half of the thirteenth century,”° the political proximity to Aragon—its preferred ally in the context of disputes between Iberian kingdoms”!—or the close links with England were carried out by the Avis dynasty during the fifteenth century.?? All moments were capable of generating significant synergies and influences. Portugal can thus constitute a space for observation of the way in which a peripheral kingdom in the European and peninsular contexts received, assimilated and transformed influences from tax systems implemented in other European regions, economically and politically more capable of constituting dominant poles and, as such, of imposing models of taxation practices.
The beginning of Portuguese maritime expansion which started with the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 provided a territorial expansion of the kingdom. An extension very different from those experienced by other European monarchies, which they would only undertake in later chronologies. Marked by a clear territorial discontinuity, it reached all known continents at the end of the fifteenth century, thus assuming itself as what we can consider as a global reality, it implied a capacity to respond to enormous challenges of military, political and economic deployment. It is not up to us here to detail these processes, which historiography increasingly elucidates in a more problematizing and detailed way.?*? However, we want to point out that the diversity of military solutions and of occupation and colonization that had to be applied demanded a higher financial burden while the new products entered in the mercantile circuits proved to be highly resilient, as was the case with gold, African slaves and spices, as well as sugar from Madeira.* All of them had repercussions on the tax system then in operation in Early Modern Portugal, overlapping with previous taxation practices, which had their roots back in the late middle ages.
In some ways, the fifteenth century and the new territories will constitute the time and space for testing, the success and failure of adapting the tax system to the new needs generated by new products, by fragile administrative frameworks in a permanent ongoing change, and for social alterations that the expansive process had brought about. The implementation of new taxes, the management of the royal monopolies then established, the creation of new institutions for the economic framework of the new territories, such as the Casa de Ceuta or the Casa da Guiné, attest to this adaptation effort. We therefore believe that the medieval roots of Portuguese taxation and the adaptations put into practice in the expansive beginnings, still in the fifteenth century, constitute an indispensable element for understanding what will be, later, the tax framing implemented in territories such as India or Brazil.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought to light the rise of modern states and the necessity of a systematic organization of their finances, in order to cope with the competition between them for the domination in the first global age. Conquering, coand sustaining recently subjugated territories and supporting demanding warfare needs became the ultimate priority for Western European kingdoms. In this sense, the field of Economic History of warfare and state formation has been key to understand why economic policies—in which taxation was key to—were fundamental for their prosperity and growth.?°
In this sense, Portugal was not different from other European powers in many structural ways. However, the Portuguese were different in the sense that they were the pioneers of the oceanic expansion. For this reason, much of their knowledge of fiscal and financial matters was built tapping into new features and challenges, creating ad hoc solutions for a worldwide empire in permanent change, developing new structures and institutions and embedding them with the existing ones without destroying them.*° Here, it is important to point out the intervention of the Portuguese crown as a determinant of a policy that redirected all the efforts toward the conquest, in search of an alternative for closing trade with Asia via the Middle East. The expansion of the colonization framework to Africa, Asia and South America was based on fiscal and commercial privileges. With this relationship, the Portuguese crown strengthened its links with colonizers, and expanded a patronage network that gravitated closer to the royal orbit. Likewise, the system of donatary captaincies made possible, at the same time, the occupation of the territories by the Portuguese, a fundamental fact to reinforce and justify before the other maritime powers the question of Portuguese sovereignty in these same spaces.?” However, this scenario of sovereignty and stability was disrupted by the Iberian Union (1580-1640), when much of the differences between Portugal’s and Castile’s fiscal practices would become evident, despite their political union and the maintenance of most of social and economic practices.7®
The organization of this volume intends to point out what seems to us the most important of the set of situations mentioned above. The first part, under the responsibility of Portuguese researchers, focuses on the comprehension of Portugal’s medieval and early modern fiscal roots, analyzing fundamental aspects of the Portuguese taxation practices by a set of relevant case studies done in a comparative perspective to what was happening in Western Europe.
In this sense, Amélia Andrade’s chapter on the study of Medieval Fiscal History in Portugal, its results and problems provide a broader scenario of what has been done in terms of research in terms of the study of taxation practices, financial institutions and economic-administrative practices over the last seven decades. It is a complete and fundamental state of the art regarding the construction of Portuguese fiscal historiography for the later Middle Ages, a period that underpins the assembling of further modern fiscal institutions within the Portuguese empire. Besides, it discusses the long path gone by Portuguese scholars so far and debate some of the blanks that are still to be filled in.
Next, Mario Farelo approaches one of the least known features of Portugal’s fiscal history: the ecclesiastical taxation. His case study regarding the Ammates collection procedures in the Portuguese collectorate, gives us precious details about the interaction between the Crown and the papacy of Avignon. Moreover, it addresses one of the bigger challenges of our historiography, which is to assess the big picture in terms of a larger operability of apostolic taxation within the Portuguese kingdom in a comparative way to what happened in other cases within the Western Christendom.
Following the sequence, Herminia Vilar engages the Portuguese fiscal framework from the law’s perspective. Her view of the legal structures provided the cornerstones to the first fiscal practices in Portugal. It addresses the importance of political economy in the construction of a body of legislation which will endure along the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in a key period when the Reconquista was finished and the reconfiguration of fiscal institutions were fundamental to redirect economic practices and separate the king’s treasury from the State’s revenues.
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez’s chapter engages the analysis of a specific context of an “organic institutional development”, i.e., a key period for the Portuguese fiscal constitution, regarding the transition toward a tax state. Based on indirect taxation, the Portuguese Crown put in practice a policy of permanent state of war and an active trade with different European ports, in order to underpin the State’s finances. However, those revenues served most to a redistribution process that hampered some of the empire’s needs and the improvement of fiscal institutions.
Last but not least, Susana Miranda enlightens in her chapter how the Portuguese dealt with the challenges of exercising fiscal jurisdiction in non-European territories and settlements in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By using the cases of Madeira Island and the Estado da India, it demonstrates how the Portuguese fiscal institutions served as a baseline and were adapted to the local circumstances. Moreover, it elucidates how those models served to Portugal’s ultimate goal, which was raising fiscal revenues to sustain imperial desires.
In the end, the editors provide an afterword with an overview of the development of Portuguese state finances. Overall, this part aims to offer the readers, above all, an unprecedented broader and detailed overview of Portugal’s most significant features regarding its fiscal history. Moreover, it is intended to assemble studies that produce interaction between Portugal and Western Europe, following many of the issues previously discussed here. We are pleased to offer this volume which reflects a solid tentative of putting Portugal in the map of Western European Fiscal History.
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