Wang an-Shih of the Sung Dynasty, 11th Century, was a leading figure in the
history of land taxation in China. There's an abundant English-language
literature about him, and other aspects of public finance in China over many
centuries. There's no doubt that there was plenty for the Physiocrats to
rediscover by studying China.

They needn't have looked so far, however. The Roman Empire lived on heavy
land taxes for a long time. Diocletian revived and reformed the system,
ordering a forerunner of the Domesday Book, which King Wm. I of course used
to tax English land, beginning in the 11th Century. For Diocletian the unit
of land was the caput jugatio, the area that would support one man (family?)
with one ox. This indicates that these ancient land taxes were workably
sophisticated, for their times, and NOT based simply on area, regardless of
quality. After the Western Empire fell, Byzantium survived for nearly a
millennium, supported by a land tax. The works by Hudson and Levine, that I
cited last week, also indicate that a land tax was the basis of ancient
regimes in the fertile crescent, Egypt, Persia, and elsewhere.

Mason Gaffney