Was there a 'taxation revolution' in late Eighteenth-Century Britain?

Britain's wars against France, sometimes termed 'the second Hundred Years War', started after the
Glorious Revolution of 1689 not ending until the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815. The policies of state
funding enabling the British state to undertake such prolonged warfare have been extensively
studied. Historians and economists have closely investigated the 'financial revolution', manifested in
the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, and the cumulative fiscal shift from direct to indirect
taxation (Brewer, 1988; O'Brien, 1988). In turn, the rising tax yields enabled the warring state to
service an ever-increasing burden of state loans. It is widely accepted that Britain's ascent as an
eighteenth-century world power was enabled primarily by the success of these fiscal policies, which
made Britain into a 'fiscal military state'.
But the exact nature of this 'taxation revolution' has eluded scholars. While tax collections grew by
250% in real terms from 1715-1815, (Harris, 2008), as frequently cited by economic and social
historians and economists, the exact means by which these increases were achieved remains
assumed rather than proven. Nor do we know how and why policy changes took place and where
the shifting burden of taxation actually lay. As a result, the social outcomes of changing taxation
policies have also escaped scholars' attention, while a large body of contemporary social and
economic writing, from newspaper articles to treatises by political economists have not received
due attention, and have sometimes been misunderstood, (Davies, 1786; Forster, 1767).