Human Toll

Anthony C. Infanti is the Christopher C. Walthour, Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and author of Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination and Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves.

"Shows that taxes were not merely part of early American society, but rather embedded deeply in its social fabric and central to normalizing slavery as everyday practice. If the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, The Human Toll enriches our understanding of colonial American social, legal, and labor history." - Jared Ross Hardesty, author of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate "Taxation has always been central to nearly all aspects of U.S. law and society, including the horrors of American slavery. With his brilliant new book, Anthony Infanti turns his critical gaze to the past to show how colonial tax laws, fiscal policies, and public administration protected and promoted the evils of America's "peculiar institution." This book highlights the inextricable historical link between taxation and slavery. With prodigious research in primary historical sources and his deep knowledge of tax law, Infanti not only demonstrates how colonial officials nefariously used taxation to advance white supremacy; he also provides a "usable past" to help us navigate contemporary concerns about reparations and modern American race relations." - Ajay K. Mehrotra, author of Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877 – 1929 "A path-breaking investigation of the use of taxation to regulate slavery in the American colonial era…Infanti is able to provIde glimpses of individuals affected by these tax regimes - both enslaved people and their slaveholders. This book provides an excellent look at the centrality of race and slavery as our nation was developing through its colonial period and beyond." - Carolyn Jones, Dean Emerita, University of Iowa College of Law "By examining in engrossing details, the ways in which taxation supported slavery in colonial America—especially in South Carolina, but in all the other colonies as well—Anthony Infanti exposes the hollowness of modern anti-tax rhetoric equating taxation in the twenty-first century with slavery." - Lawrence A. Zelenak, author of Figuring Out the Tax: Congress, Treasury, and the Design of the Early Modern Income Tax