Edwin Seligman, initiator of global progressive public finance

This article surveys the global acquaintances of Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, a world-renowned authority on progressive public finance and professor of political economy at Columbia University between 1885 and 1933. Through his published writings, networks, and internationalist efforts, Seligman extended an emerging theory of progressive taxation to an international arena. This empowered his students, especially his Asian students, to build an analysis of the limitations of imperial political accountability and suggest bold financial reform. These links are uncovered for the first time and reveal Seligman’s place in the intellectual and political history of tax reform in American and European formal and informal empires. Consequently, the article also sheds new light on the history of what the legal historian Ajay Mehrotra has called the ‘early Columbia school of taxation and economic development’.