There is, as Tocqueville remarks, almost no political question which is not connected in some way with the imposition or the granting of taxes. At any rate, problems of taxation dominated public life in England from the end of the Middle Ages and became in the seventeenth century the immediate cause of the revolutionary movements.

Chapter 2. The New Reading Public - The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999