Chinese historians have long assumed that under China’s earliest imperial rulers, the Qin (221–206 B.C.) and Han (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) Dynasties, farmers turned over a fixed amount of their crops to the state as a land tax. In recent years, the discovery of official documents in the form of bamboo slips with inked characters has given scholars new insight into the early Chinese taxation regime. These include examples from a collection of more than 36,000 such bamboo slips discovered by archaeologists in wells at the Qin Dynasty site of Liye. One slip features one of the earliest known multiplication tables. Nankai University historian Zhenhong Yang examined nearly 100 Qin and Han Dynasty bamboo slips related to taxation and found that the system was more sophisticated than previously thought.

The artifacts reveal that, under the Qin and Han Dynasties, taxes actually fluctuated from year to year, and even from field to field, because local officials took into account soil conditions, weather, and crop yield before determining what was owed. The bamboo slips show that officials followed a procedure that involved inspecting all the land farmed by a particular village, after which they exempted fields that failed to produce. Then, they sampled each taxable field to determine what its actual harvest should be for that year. Finally, they calculated the amount of taxes for each household. “This process seems cumbersome,” says Yang, “but the intention was to maintain fairness and reduce corruption among local officials.”

Which came first, the taxes or the kings? It seems logical that in order for there to be taxes, there has to be some sort of central authority to administer them. But what if it were actually the taxes that were the kingmakers? That, according to zooarchaeologist Pam Crabtree of New York University, is what happened in the Anglo-Saxon period (A.D. 410–1066) in England. The end of Roman Britain and the demise of its towns and cities in the early fifth century A.D. left an administrative vacuum across the island. In the short term, people returned to a more self-supporting Iron Age lifestyle with no central government and focused on consuming the food and goods they produced locally. As the centuries went on, Crabtree explains, farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses, setting England’s inhabitants on a different course—one that included taxes. Soon, local chieftains began to claim these surpluses for their own enrichment. This eventually allowed them to declare themselves royalty. “Taxation is an important way in which this agricultural surplus can be mobilized,” says Crabtree. “The taxes and the kings grew in tandem and this led to the emergence of new kingdoms.”

One tax Middle and Late Anglo-Saxon kings relied on was called feorm in Old English. This was a tax paid to the king and his entourage as he traveled across his kingdom to settlements in royal territories known as vills. The tax consisted of a healthful variety of foodstuffs and animal products, including honey, pigs, and wool. In the Middle Anglo-Saxon period (ca. A.D. 650–850), kings also increasingly came to rely on tolls paid in coin—evidence of a return to a type of monetized economy that hadn’t existed since the Roman period—on goods coming through trading settlements known as wics or emporia. One such spot was Lundenwic, Anglo-Saxon London. These emporia eventually led to the rebirth of towns and cities. The Anglo-Saxons were so successful at collecting taxes that it may have spelled their downfall. “One of the main reasons why England was so attractive to the Vikings, and eventually to the Normans,” says Crabtree, “is because the country had become a very wealthy place.”

Citizens of the Roman Republic (509–27 B.C.) were occasionally required to pay tributum, a tax that helped finance the state’s activities. As Rome conquered its neighbors, land and the spoils of war were confiscated to replenish the Republic’s coffers. After defeating the Kingdom of Macedonia in 168 B.C., however, the Romans had amassed so much territory that they no longer needed to collect tributum from citizens in Italy. Instead, they could maintain their large army and fuel further expansion solely by taxing conquered provinces in Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and Asia Minor. “Taxes were a price that provincial communities paid because they had been subjugated,” says historian Peter Fibiger Bang of the University of Copenhagen. “In a way, it was a system of oppression. On the other hand, this oppression was maintained by the Roman army, which also kept the peace and offered a kind of protection.”

Under the emperor Augustus (r. 27 B.C.–A.D. 14), taxes on provincial land and agricultural products, as well as customs duties and taxes on inheritance and the sale of slaves, funded free grain for citizens of the city of Rome, infrastructure projects for the growing empire, and the standing army, by far the state’s biggest expenditure. Since the second century B.C., governors and, later, imperial officials had technically overseen taxation in the provinces. From the outset, however, rich tax collectors called publicani partnered to form private companies that bid at public auctions in Rome for the right to collect a province’s taxes for a five-year period. In turn, they offered their property as collateral. “The publicani were notorious,” Bang says. “Whatever surplus they could create was theirs to keep. They made sure they weren’t going to lose money, so they squeezed as much from the provincials as they could.” The Roman historian Tacitus writes that in response to complaints about the “excessive greed” of the publicani, the emperor Nero (r. A.D. 54–68) instituted strict reforms to curb their exploitative activities and decreed that tax laws should be posted publicly for transparency.