Mehrotra's "Making the Modern American Fiscal State"

Out this month, and available for preorder now, is Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877–1929, by Ajay K. Mehrotra, Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington.  The book appears in the series Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society, edited by Christopher Tomlins.

Mehrotra has posted the Introduction and Conclusion on SSRN.  CUP helps with the rest:

Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the U.S. system of direct and progressive taxation. Ajay K. Mehrotra provides historical perspective on the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the current U.S. tax regime. In doing so, he uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of a fundamental transformation in American tax law and policy that took place at the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity – a new form of statecraft guided not only by the functional need for greater revenue, but also by broader social concerns about equity, fiscal citizenship, bureaucratic authority, and economic justice. This book explores what tax reformers at the turn of the twentieth century were able to accomplish and how their limited achievements were contested at nearly every turn.

The TOC and blurbs by Brian Balogh, Richard Bensel, Michael A. Bernstein, -Andrea Louise Campbell, and Lawrence M. Friedman appear after the jump.

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