When transportation is poor and government officials control vast
areas, citizens as well as government officials can easily avoid detection;
they will not be detected unless monitoring costs are low [Weber 1968].
One of the binding pre-industrial restrictions, for example, was probably
poor control of territorial perimeters. As messages, officials, etc. moved
slowly, it was difficult to control the far ends of large countries [Finer
1997]. As Kiser and Kane [2001, p. 214] write: “The timing of the
bureaucratization of indirect taxes in France lagged far behind that in
England. This difference can be traced primarily to the monitoring
problems caused by size and the slower development of communications
and transportation technology.”
In consequence, we would expect theft to be rare and monitoring to
be common within the English administration, and theft to be common
and monitoring rare within the French administration. This is supported
by Swart [1980], Brewer [1988] and Kiser and Kane [2001]. For the case
of England, Brewer [1988, p. 108], for example, notes: “The idle officer
was discouraged by the high probability of detection and punishment”.17
As regards France, Kiser and Kane [2001, p. 203] state: “Prior to the
significant development of communications and transportation technolo-
gies in France around 1780...the monitoring capacity of French rulers was
too limited to control fixed provincial officials.”18
Historical evidence also shows that the default risk in England and
France diverged around the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688.
[Gerschenkron 1970 and Acemoglu and Robinson 2000]. Szostak [1991] suggests that
this can explain why the French infrastructure developed so slowly.
17We note, however, that remote areas of England, such as Scotland, sometimes
escaped taxation [O’Brien 1988].
18 For example, in the sixteenth century, it took three weeks to get from Paris to
Lyon. In the seventeenth century, Paris to Toulouse took fourteen days. In 1765 it
still took ten - sixteen days to get from Paris to the edges of France [Kiser 1994].
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