A state organised around raising taxes and loans to fight wars, with a professional revenue administration, a funded public debt and permanent armed forces; John Brewer's term for eighteenth-century Britain.
In more detail
Brewer's The Sinews of Power (1989) showed that Britain between 1688 and 1783 combined high taxation, especially excise collected by a professional bureaucracy, with a national debt managed under parliamentary authority, allowing it to sustain long wars against France. Historians have since applied the term to the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Spain and others. It is a key concept in bellicist theories of state formation, which link war finance to administrative capacity and representative bargaining.