Abstract

There is wide agreement that war affects taxation. Yet, scholars disagree as to how exactly and under what conditions war matters. This chapter reviews the literature on war and taxation. We first discuss the causal mechanisms linking war to taxation: cost pressure, administrative capacity, and calls for redistribution. Second, we examine concerns about these mechanisms related to the introduction of new vs. the expansion of existing taxes, the temporal link between war and taxation, the long-term effects of war, social contract vs. protection racket explanations, selective vs. generative processes, differences in types and attributes of war, and the link between taxation and state building. Subsequently, we explore the scope conditions and conditional effects. We focus on five conditions: pre-war levels of state capacity, access to alternative sources of finance, geography and population density, the role of industrialization, and ethnic fractionalization. We conclude by offering some suggestions for further research.