Tax History
Rated: 
The earliest form of tax can be traced back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Egypt had tax collectors, called scribes. Eisphora is a type of tax imposed by the Athenians for wartime expenses. They also imposed metoikion, a monthly tax for foreigners. In Rome, the first taxes were called portoria, since they were applied to imports and exports.
Augustus Caesar was considered the most adept leader in handling the taxes of the Roman Empire. He decreed that cities were responsible for collecting taxes, and provided retirement funds for the military through an inheritance tax — 5% of all inheritances, except those that were given to children and spouses. This system of inheritance tax was used as reference by the English and Dutch.
In Great Britain, significant taxes included land and excise taxes. By the 14th century, taxes had become very progressive: the Duke of Lancaster's tax was 520 times higher than that of the peasant. In 1800, the British invented an early form of what we know today as income tax, which was used to finance the war against Napoleon.
In post-revolution America, the first income tax was first suggested during the War of 1812, based on the British Act of 1798, and made use of progressive taxation. It was drafted in 1814 but was never imposed. Similarly, the Tax Act of 1861 which proposed that "there shall be levied, collected, and paid, upon annual income of every person residing in the U.S..." was never coercively imposed. Several more Tax Acts in the following years were developed, but compliance rates had yet to grow. (For more information about the history of taxes in the United States, visit The Tax History Museum [link] or The Tax History Project [link])
Obsolete tax forms include: scutage, tallage, tithe, Aids, Danegeld, Carucate, tax farming. Seigniorage, which was tax on money creation, was later replaced by central banking.
Print Article
Send to a friend
Save as PDF