Abstract

Government's attempts to coerce the production of information from employers of labour in order to verify the income tax returns of their employees was one of the symbols of the growing reality of state intervention in the mid‐19th century. The resistance from politically influential industrialists and manufacturers which this engendered arose ostensibly from fears of a system of state surveillance and commercial espionage, in which employers were required to inform on their workforce and in which employees might retaliate by informing on their employers. An examination of the practical problems of evasion and compliance of the income tax in this sphere and hence of the local enforcement of national legislation allows us to approach more intimately the relation between the state and civil society, bureaucrats and the local community in the third quarter of the 19th century. Income tax laws, in many important respects, were badly drafted and ambiguous but remedial legislation which was perceived as extending the tendrils of state control was bitterly opposed. The extra‐statutory practices which Government officials had to adopt in order to circumvent this problem meant that regulatory laws of this kind were often only imperfectly realized as they were modified or became detached from their statutory moorings. This example of the difference between the rule of law and actual practice demonstrates, too, that change was often accomplished not within the Parliamentary arena but in the field without legislative interference