Imperial inequalities takes Western European empires, and their legacies, as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. Specifically, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in the modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. It uses the idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ as a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, in part at least, for the shape of present inequalities. The diverse contributions examine processes of fiscal governance that were not confined to either nations or colonies, but rather transcended the normative spatial and temporal boundaries of these units of analysis to provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée.