Michael Keen and Joel Slemrods new book, Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages, attempts to convince readers that taxes are interesting. As someone whose decision to pursue graduate study in economics was motivated by an interest in taxation, I am not qualified to judge whether the book is successful in this respect. However, I can confirm that their book is highly entertaining: I frequently laughed out loud while reading it.

The book is intended to fill a crucial gap in introductory public finance pedagogy. It is organized around the main ideas of tax economics: equity, efficiency, incidence, avoidance, evasion, and implementation. For students interested in taxation but intimidated by the abstractions of economic modelsand for students who grasp formal models but need examples to fully grasp their real-world applicationsthis book uses examples from history to provide intuition for major ideas in public finance. It is an ideal supplemental text for introductory public finance courses or for non-economists looking for broader context in understanding debates over tax policy. It is also an excellent resource for teachers of public finance looking for new examples to enliven their classes.

The book is less satisfying as a work of economic history, though still potentially useful for teaching undergraduates. Because the book is organized around principles of public finance, it is not organized chronologically. The result is that it jumps around quite a bit, which is useful for pointing out similarities across places and times but makes it hard to provide appropriate historical context around every example.

The most frustrating aspect of the book is that some historical episodes are described in bits and pieces scattered across multiple chapters. For example, the tax policies of Pitt the Younger are first alluded to on page 31 and introduced on page 38. Important specifics of his tax policies and their context are introduced briefly on pages 68, 100, and 104. The main discussion of Pitt the Youngers tax policies appears on pages 109-110, with further details given on pages 243, 247, and 361. The index makes it relatively easy to find the sections relevant to any particular historical episode but does not address the lack of cohesion that results from such fragmentation. This is frustrating precisely because Keen and Slemrods book is otherwise so approachable and engaging. Attempting to contain discussion of each individual historical episode to as few places as possibleeven maintaining the organization around tax conceptswould have made for a stronger, more coherent book. While the fragmentation is particularly frustrating from the standpoint of an economic historianfor whom understanding the historical context is always imperativeit poses unnecessary difficulties for every reader by making the text harder to follow.

Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is best in the places where its story is most cohesive. The chapter on the emergence of the modern income tax (Chapter 5) is particularly strong and will serve as an excellent reading assignment for any undergraduate course on the appropriate periods of American, British, or French economic historyor any class focused on the emergence of modern economic institutions. The chapter on global taxation (Chapter 11) is similarly excellent, though more focused on modern policy debates.

I appreciated Keen and Slemrods attempts to find tax examples from outside of Europe and North America. The fact that their book still draws so heavily from evidence from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States is an indictment of the economics profession as a whole: especially in this kind of survey, the efforts of individual scholars are limited by the bodies of knowledge they draw from. Still, the authors might have found it easier to say more about the history of taxation of other parts of the world if they had chosen to organize the book by historical episodes rather than by principles of taxation. For example, they include scattered references to the enduring legacies of colonialism in modern taxation, such as the endurance of the patente in Francophone Africa (p. 106). Dedicating more attention to this topic would be extremely useful for facilitating communication between economists specializing in public finance, economic history, and development economics.

No single book can do everything well, and economics teaches us that every choice comes with tradeoffs. Keen and Slemrods new book will be an excellent resource for anyone looking for examples to illustrate the real-world applications of public finance. Economic historians are likely to find it most useful for teaching the history of the modern income tax, although the books organization makes it less useful for teaching other topics in economic history.