State Capacity

PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE VERSION: A Historical Geographic Information System of the Grandes Gabelles in Early Modern France. Abstract This note presents the development of a parish-level historical geographic information system (GIS) for the seventeenth-century French salt tax system of the gabelles based using an original manuscript map collection from 1665: Sanson’s Atlas des gabelles.

Paper selected for the NBER SI Political Economy 2025 Paper nominated for the CESifo Award in Public Economics 2025 Abstract. We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France.