Tiberius Gracchus writes about Chris Wickham and the use of methods of taxation to analyse the nature of a state or other polity. The argument certainly has legs and I think a comparative analysis of taxation systems could be an effective means of categorising states; however, it will not be a primary comparator.
I should say here that I have not read Wickham’s book, so I may be grossly unfair here.
The Spanish Empire in Latin America (I’m leaving the Spanish Indies aside) underwent various administrative changes between their origins in the sixteenth century and independence in the nineteenth century. These ranged from means of exploiting local resources (including humans) as effectively as possible through to complex bureaucratic and impositive systems that acted as states because of their distance from metropolitan Spain. These changes were brought about for various reasons – the need to develop Buenos Aires, preventing Viceroys from becoming too powerful, pacifying criollos by granting them audiencias. At various times, different amounts of money, in relative and absolute terms, flowed to Spain, in part due to Spain’s need for cash to fund its various activities (including trying to hang on to the Philippines).
These changes never dealt with the legacy of previous attempts to cement Spanish rule in Latin America. The expansionist nature of Spanish colonisation of Latin America was based, in no small part, on the religious fervour of Ferdinand and Isabela, codified by the Inter Caetera Papal Bull, that saw the Christianisation of southern Spain – al-Andalus – and the New World as goals that justified all manner of action and reward, including the pillaging of those areas. This resulted, from the beginnings of empire, in local authorities being a mixture of civil, military and religious power. Anyone connected to the chain of command had control over the minds of local inhabitants in a particularly potent manner; the stage was set for the caudillismo that still plagues parts of Latin America in the form of today’s clientelism.
However, it is much easier to see that with hindsight. Many of the actions that were taken in the Spanish Empire ended up reinforcing the problem and making it easier for sections to to be hived off. Not least of these was the setting up of audiencias below the viceregal level in an attempt to counter the grievances that led to local bosses setting taking too much power to themselves that ended up consolidating the problem. In short, the nature of the taxation system is based on how the state is perceived by the taxer not how the state actually is. This can be further qualified by the fact that states rarely give up forms of raising revenue; the federal income tax in the US might be an indicator of a solidified, federal polity when it was in fact brought in to raise funds during the Civil War. The use of taxation in this instance is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and needs to be used as such in analyses of states.
xD.
Actually the Visigoths in Spain did give up taxation partly because they didn’t use it and it became a useful political price to pay for other things they wanted.
As to the wider question, yes taxation is merely a descriptive not a prescriptive feature of states- but its one of the most important descriptive features of states and I would argue as well that there are very few prescriptive determinants of state conduct. What a state is is a complex dialogue between the exactions that government exercises and those that the subject are willing to yield. Tax is part of that and one of the most important powers a state can hold- in the 6th century many of the sucessor states to Rome used their control of the apportion of land to replace it.