The Lightweight State: New Histories of Tax, Money, and Public Debt in the United States

Abstract New fiscal histories of the United States are in a state of efflorescence. Revisionist work infused with economic heterodoxy and social histories of capitalism have rescued fiscal topics from staid institutionalists, producing work that should enrich the study of inequalities of all stripes. By assembling a collection of recent works on money, public debt, and taxation—subjects treated in isolation within the literature, but which form a totality in practice—this review attempts a composite portrait of the United States’ fiscal state formation in the long run. Present in the foreground and at each stage is real estate: the iconic plot of farmland or single-family home.