A complete analysis of the fragmentary evidence for the Attalid fiscal system is presented, which aims to reveal those strategies of revenue seeking that were available to the kings after the territorial grant of the Settlement of Apameia. Generally, Pergamon’s direct taxes fell on communities, not landholders. The direct taxation of persons – poll taxes – seems to have been limited. The various forms of indirect taxation on movement, usage, and sale are analyzed, including the agoranomia of Toriaion. The personnel of tax collection in the Attalid kingdom are identified at two levels: the royal bureaucracy and the local tax farmers, who purchased tax contracts from polis authorities. Royal tax farmers as such did not exist. An assessment of taxation levels is offered. What becomes clear are the practical limits and enduring ideological framework within which the post-188 BCE Attalids attempted to expand revenues by deepening the incidence rather than the scope of taxation.

A complete analysis of the fragmentary evidence for the Attalid fiscal system is presented, which aims to reveal those strategies of revenue seeking that were available to the kings after the territorial grant of the Settlement of Apameia. Generally, Pergamon’s direct taxes fell on communities, not landholders. The direct taxation of persons – poll taxes – seems to have been limited. The various forms of indirect taxation on movement, usage, and sale are analyzed, including the agoranomia of Toriaion. The personnel of tax collection in the Attalid kingdom are identified at two levels: the royal bureaucracy and the local tax farmers, who purchased tax contracts from polis authorities. Royal tax farmers as such did not exist. An assessment of taxation levels is offered. What becomes clear are the practical limits and enduring ideological framework within which the post-188 BCE Attalids attempted to expand revenues by deepening the incidence rather than the scope of taxation.

The final chapter in Part III examines more directly the claim that parliaments are a consequence of commercial activity by looking at two cases, which have dominated especially neo-institutionalist accounts due to their thriving wool trades, England and Castile. The main mechanism tying trade to representative institutions is that of capital mobility, which is assumed to endow mercantile groups with bargaining powers. The section on England shows that taxes on mobile capital were not key for representation, as they were not bargained for in Parliament. Indirect taxation was also far less than direct taxation in the critical period of parliamentary emergence. Moreover, bargains that did occur resulted in sectoral privileges, not constitutional gains. In fact, the chapter shows how mercantile interests and the collective action of merchants were endogenous to state capacity. The section on the Castilian Mesta shows how the assumed inefficiencies of this commercial system can be traced to the political weakness highlighted in chapter 5.