Although this book is self-contained, it may also be read as a continuation of my previous study of the politics of taxation, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. The concern of the earlier book was the process of containment of the British state, as government revenues fell from a peak of 23 per cent of GNP in the Napoleonic wars to about 10 per cent in the later nineteenth century. It explained containment, and also the emergence of legitimacy and acceptance. After the Napoleonic wars, taxes were central to political controversy, at the centre of disputes over the incidence of taxes and the distribution of benefits. The success of politicians in early and mid-Victorian Britain, and especially of Peel and Gladstone, was to remove taxation from the centre of disputes and to make it appear ‘normal’, a symbol of British liberty and stability. Although problems reappeared around 1900 with the costs of the Boer war and social reform, Britain entered the First World War with a fiscal system that appeared more flexible and less contentious than in most other major nation-states. The subject of the present book is the massive displacement caused by the First World War, when the level of taxation returned to the peak of the Napoleonic wars – and stayed there.

The previous book provides the basis for the present study, but I hope that this volume will appeal to a different audience.