I was looking through Hans-Joachim Schoeps' classic history of Prussia today, a book I hadn't read in 25+ years, and I realized that I'd forgotten he'd done a really interesting table of the per-capita cost of taxation in Britain, Prussia, and Austria, for the 17-19th centuries (page 405 in the 1992 reprint edition).

Using the late 19th century Gold Mark as his index currency, he compared the relative tax burden in each state over two and a half centuries.

The Habsburgs come off looking pretty good. I'm not sure whether this is because he doesn't include the local dues-in-kind required by the feudal governments in the non-Austrian parts of the monarchy (but then again, that would be true for pre-1700 Britain also.) Anyway, there's a big spike in each nation during the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period, which comes as no surprise. Here are some highlights:

Britain during the 7 Years War: 62 (GM per capita tax burden)
During the American Revolution: 37
During the Napoleonic Wars: 89 (!)

Prussia during the 7 Years War: 24
During the American Revolution: 12 (peacetime)
During the Napoleonic Wars: 37.7

Austria during the 7 Years War: 7.5
During the American Revolution: 7
During the Napoleonic Wars: 10.4

All three ran deficits during wartime, so this isn't actual outlays; just per-capita tax collection. And of course it's averaged across all the classes and doesn't account for the different systems in each country. BUT...

Austria's 25 million people allowed them to shoulder a massive war cost with less per-capita cost than the 16 million Britons or the 5 million Prussians. Austria's budget in 1790, for example, was 228 million, compared with only @70 million for Prussia. Both are dwarfed by Britain's budget, though, which grew in wartime to five times their combined size.

What is missing, however, is per capita GNP for these places, so that we can see what those tax burdens looked like, in terms of percentages of annual income or productivity. That's much harder to do because so much tax collecting in the 18th century was still done in produce, not cash.

I would love to see somebody add figures like this for France and Russia in the same period: total budgets, population, deficit, per-capita tax burden, and then index it to Gold Marks so we can compare.