This study re-examines the fiscal collapse of late-Qing China by analyzing how the imperial household’s financial practices destabilized the dynasty’s governance equilibrium. Focusing on the post-1853 period, it argues that the Taiping Rebellion’s devastation of salt tax networks and customary revenue streams triggered a systemic rupture in the Qing’s dual patrimonial-bureaucratic fiscal structure. Deprived of traditional income, the Imperial Household Department abandoned its century-old fiscal segregation from the Board of Revenue, initiating coercive fund transfers in 1857 that persisted until 1908. These transfers eroded bureaucratic control over public expenditures while enabling unchecked imperial extraction through semi-privatized channels. Contrary to previous scholarship emphasizing provincial-central tensions, this study highlights how the imperial household’s ultra-bureaucratic prerogatives subverted fiscal discipline, replacing quota-based budgeting with ad hoc requisitions. The resulting institutional dysfunction – marked by path-dependent rent-seeking and stifled fiscal innovation – exacerbated the regime’s inability to reconcile patrimonial demands with bureaucratic rationalization. By exposing the collapse of the Qing’s historic governance dialectic, this study reframes the dynasty’s fiscal disintegration as a crisis of autocratic institutional design rather than mere resource scarcity, offering new insights into late-imperial state failure.

To constrain legislative taxing power, 16 U.S. state constitutions require a supermajority in both chambers to increase or impose taxes. Both supporters and opponents of the requirement argue that its effect fades away because states circumvent it in various ways, especially by raising fees that are not subject to the requirement. Existing literature, however, offers little and inconsistent evidence on whether the effect decays over time and whether the decay results from fee hikes. This article documents legal cases to show the ways in which states have responded to the requirement, estimates whether the effects of the requirement decay over time, and tests whether states raise fees instead of taxes after adopting such a requirement. Using state-level panel data, I find that the initial effectiveness of the requirement on tax burden does decay approximately a decade after enactment and that the decay is not the result of fee increases.

Traditional historical literature has stressed a generalised crisis throughout the world in the 17th century. First proposed for Europe with its numerous dynastic, religious and state conflicts, it has now been expanded to include Asia and the Middle East as well. It was also assumed that there was a significant crisis in the Americas, a theme which until recently has dominated the traditional literature. The claim that there was such a crisis was based on a series of classic studies by Earl J. Hamilton, Chaunu and Borah, among others. But new research has challenged this hypothesis and we will examine both these new studies as well as offering our own research findings on this subject.