fully, “All’s well.” Real protection, or at least retribution, was also private:
provided by furious citizens or bored bullies in a “hue and cry” mob.
Britain and France also privatized the collection of taxes. Just as in
the “Oriental despotisms”—Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal
India—England and France auctioned to syndicates of merchants or granted
to court favorites the right to collect taxes in a given area for a specified length
of time. The “tax farmers” paid the government lump sums for the right to
squeeze whatever they could get from the peasant farmers, artisans, and mer-
chants. Thus governments got the money they needed to make wars while
their most important supporters were enabled to live in grand luxury. This
system of privilege and exploitation was later to disgust the frugal, hard-
working “middle sort” of Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and con-
vince them of the ultimate corruption of European states. In their eyes, the
sordid reality of Europe justified the American Revolution.
The French state was much more centralized, and it was centralized
earlier than the English state. Whereas in seventeenth-century England the
great landowners tended to live on their country estates, Louis XIV com-
pelled the French nobles to reside at court. In England, usually under the
leadership of the aristocrats, local councils took charge of social issues,
including provisions for the indigent and sick; great and small landowners
organized themselves to be represented in Parliament. Contrariwise, in
France the Estates General was “simply forgotten,” and local institutions
hardly existed. Rather, the central government appointed officials (inten-
dants) who acted as its agents to execute the policies it handed down.
Church in the European countries of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries also meant something quite different to contempo-
raries than it does to most of us. It resembled more closely what today’s
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu “fundamentalists” attempt to insti-
tute than what the “mainstream” actually experiences in Asia, Europe, and
the Americas. Church took up some of the slack of government inaction. It
not only ordered “religion” in the narrow sense of that word, but it also
defined community; provided or stimulated a number of commercial and
cultural activities; and, when given a chance, defined and controlled the
economy and organized and ran government.
Under the surface of organized religion was a substratum of custom
66 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA