Been thinking about foreign tariffs and how they were necessary before an income tax. But not in the literal “we swapped one for the other as a funding stream” sense but “they were necessary to systems based on point-of-production excise taxes as indirect taxation of population for states too weak to tax directly”

Like, in an agrarian society you can at least put together a Domesday Book every so often to know what productive land you have and do something with that but when you move on to trade and even pre-factory workshop manufacturing…

So you control something narrower upstream – the classic example is French salt monopolies, you need salt for flavor and preservation and human survival, there are a finite known amount of salt mines and trade ports to assign tax agents to supervise…

Free trade is usually contrasted with protectionism these days but why were there internal tariff barriers in centralized Sun King France, it wasn’t to protect the regions from each other but to segregate salt (& etc.) catchment areas so you could levy tariffs targeted to not disrupt each economic region too much

(and secure guaranteed markets for the corresponding sources, governments bid these monopolies out tax farming-style)

These systems were still in memory when America developed its “public utility” model of collective monopolies, but oh, here’s another example you might be familiar with, Gandhi!

You know how “Mahatma” Mohandas Gandhi was arrested protesting against British colonial monopolies in salt production, evaporating saltwater to make his own? But it wasn’t just that a lucrative industry was reserved for gora, salt was so ruinously expensive because that was how a Raj that didn’t have a damn clue what Arjun Sixpack was up to in some remote village extracted wealth on the basis of population – the price included your taxes to the Empire

Gandhi wasn’t complaining about structural racism, it was a tax protest