We welcome paper proposals for our session on “Fiscal contracts around the world: the changing relations between state and citizens”, which has been accepted for the World Economic History Congress 2021 (Paris). We aim to discuss about the evolution of fiscal structures in developed and developing countries, with a focus on the emergence of different kinds of “fiscal contracts”. The session abstract, participants, and current paper titles can be found at:
https://www.geschichte.uni-frankfurt.de/84598860/WEHC_2021_fiscal_contract_session.pdf

State building relies on the capacity to collect revenue (Besley and Persson, 2009). Citizens are required to give up a fraction of their resources, which to some extent they do voluntarily because they expect the state to provide services in return – a concept that is called ”fiscal contract” (Levi, 1988; Timmons, 2005). The last years have seen a resurgence of historical fiscal studies, from economic history but also from neighbouring disciplines like sociology and political science. Some well-known contributions cover the period of formation of modern states (Yun-Casalilla et al., 2012) and the long nineteenth century in Europe (Cardoso and Lains, 2010), while more recent endeavours have addressed the second half of the twentieth century in rich countries (Hürlimann et al., 2018; Buggeln et al., 2017). Martin et al. (2009) joined together scholars from various disciplines around the fiscal sociology perspective. Frankema and Booth (2019) represents the last addition to the list, which seeks to define the fiscal traits of the developing, colonized part of the world.
The research gap is obvious: most studies on the fiscal contract are limited to the frame of one nation or at the most one broader region. The ”border” between the global South and North is seldom overstept. Thus the innovative idea of the session is to bring together researchers on the fiscal contract in different parts of the world. We will discuss taxing and spending principles and practices during the nineteenth and twentieth century, including both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. How did they vary in different historical, economic and cultural circumstances? The fiscal contract framework is a fertile basis for exploring the variations of societal relationships across the world, how they were formed and how they evolved through time.

Please send your proposal as an abstract of 150 words max, together with a short cv (1 page), to sara.torregrosa_hetland@ekh.lu.se. The deadline for submitting proposals is the 31st of March 2020. Acceptance or rejection will be notified by the 30th of April 2020. We particularly encourage submissions that complement the session by covering other aspects than the current contributions.