Tax collection is an intriguing area of activity in which power relations and other aspects of ideology and culture find expression. The protagonists of Likhovski’s comprehensive, insightful, and entertaining study are cabinet ministers, legislators, judges, officials, tax farmers, lawyers, accountants, economists, and taxpayers. Authors and illustrators, satirists, and even children also play a role. Employing both a top-down and a bottom-up methodology, the book focuses on income tax, a trademark of modernity, and discusses a long line of other excises and duties, including community levies. Such was the tax policy in Palestine/Israel during the first eight decades of the twentieth century, through three regimes—Ottoman, Mandate, and Israeli. In the process, the book depicts the emergence and formation of the modern individual in this country, through the prism of state–taxpayer relations. It illuminates the path followed by the individual, community, and state in the twentieth century.
The study centers on an...