Tax revolts

Tax revolts is the common name for the most common form of popular movement in the beginning of modern times. That is, the time when the European upper class, with the help of royal military dictatorships and colonial lootings, regained the control they had lost during the late medieval popular movement vawe, pushed living standards of the majority below the starvation limit and provided themselves with a luxury unknown in the Middle Ages.

The name implies that what triggered it was almost always an attempt by the king to raise taxes to afford larger armies. Such higher taxes were often illegal, from the point of view of the peasants, artisans and also the local upper class. Consequently, they did not consider themselves acting illegally when, with all the ceremonies observed, they killed the bailiffs the king sent out to plunder the rural population.

Hundreds or thousands of tax rebellions have been documented. Almost all were defeated by force – but most of the time they were still successful insofar as the kings backed off and became more cautious next time. And two tax revolts – in the Netherlands in the 1590s and in England in the 1640s – were fully successful, and the European development turned against the increasingly harsh dictatorships and moved instead towards the increasing inclusion of the majority of the people and the fulfillment of its demands.

The costs for the European authorities were recovered in other parts of the world, where the colonial looting now began in earnest. Even there, peasants, artisans and local upper classes went to tax rebellions to defend themselves. With much less success, however, because they were less threatening to the authorities as they were long away and had even less access to modern weapons than European provincial residents had.

Reading
Jack Goldstone: Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world, University of California Press 1991
Yves-Marie Bercé: Revolt and revolution in early modern Europe, Manchester University Press, 1987
Perez Zagorin: Rebels and rulers, Cambridge University Press 1982
Charles Tilly: The contentious French, Belknap 1986.