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 nominated for the CESifo Award in Public Economics (2025)! Abstract. We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions.