The kind of taxes that we mostly pay today are incredibly new. The US federal government is mainly funded by income and payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are specific contributions geared to social welfare and have different names in other outcries. Though there were experiments earlier, income taxes as a significant source of government in the United States only really date to 1913 and the Sixteenth Ammendment. Before that, most federal government monies were collected through tariffs and excise taxes. Payroll taxes only come with the expansion of the welfare state under FDR.
Most other developed countries use some form of value-added tax to raise money. The OECD average is about 26% social welfare contributions (like American payroll taxes), 24% of revenues from income taxes, 20% VAT, 12% from non-VAT goods and services (the American equivalent here is things like state sales taxes), 9% from corporate income taxes, and 6% from property taxes. See here.
The thing is, all these taxes require a lot of surveillance from the state. I live in a country now, Turkey, a recently industrialized country, where there’s an income tax and a VAT but tremendous tax evasion on both fronts. For example, many employers report paying even skilled employees the minimum monthly income to miminize the amount of social welfare contributions and income tax withholding they have to pay. There are often cash discounts at stores, with this cash income often going unreported. Such things are much rarer in countries with more developed surveillance infrastructures that can more accurately trace the flows of money.
It simply wasn’t feasible to have such taxes on individual people and even individual transactions with the state capacity of the 18th century. The history of state development is intimately tied to the development of infrastructure to collect these taxes. The sociologist and social historian Charles Tilly coined a famous aphorism about state formation:
States make wars and wars make states.
What does this mean? War is one of the primary functions of the state. But wars are expensive. States often borrow money to for this. This money must be payed back. To do this, states need to build up their infrastructure in order to more efficiently extract value. Eventually, some people (whether they be barons writing the Magna Carta, American revolutionaries demanding “No taxes without representation”, or workers demanding various forms of social insurance) start making demands back on the state for services or guarantees in exchange for all the money they’re giving to the state.
Tilly has a great chart of how this all develops, from the most primitive form of revenue extraction. It makes a shift from things like tribute and rents, which are both assessed only once and can be paid in kind, to more complex asssessments of stocks (like periodically reassessed property taxes) and flows (like tariffs paid on import). These revenues were often collected by things like the cadastral survey and the customs house for the two examples above. These are actually ancient innovations (you can find similar things in the Roman Empire, for instance) but their scope and capacity was greatly expanded in the early modern state. This expansion created new, educated bureaucratic positions of people who recorded and monitored these transactions.
Tilly sees a sort of continuum where we start at the least systematic forms of revenue extraction and get to more cashed based systems that require more surveillance:
tribute—rent—flows—stocks—income
VAT would potentionally exist as a sixth category here. (For more on the VAT as a “money making machine”, the Weeds podcast has an episode on it, mainly drawing from T.R. Reed’s A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System.)
Obviously, in 1700, in modern states, few people would be paying tribute, though peripheral states with low capacity (for example, the Otttoman Empire) still collected tribute and I imagine some overseas colonies also collected tribute. The amount of state lands up for rent varied tremendously between states, with it being huge in the Ottoman Empire and much lower in, say, the American colonies. In most Western European states, we would expect most taxes to be on stocks (particularly land) and flows (tariffs, excise taxes, monopolies, etc). These would end up as being direct taxes on landowners and companies but mostly indirect taxes on non-land owning consumers. In many European countries, peasants would pay in-kind rent (i.e. a proportion of their harvest) to their landlord and these landlords would then in turn pay taxes on their land stocks. The state may also demand other forms of payment, for peasants most notably the much hated corvée. The idea of corvée goes back to antiquity—the Bible gives accounts of King Solomon, for instance, extracting a much hated corvée for his massive building projects, which ultimately helped lead to the split of the Southern and Northern Kingdoms. See for example, the line in 1 Kings 12:14, where Rehoboam says to Jeroboam, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions,” this is generally understood to be at least partially about the corvée.
Given that most people in 1700 were still peasants, I believe most people would still be paying their direct taxes in-kind, either labor as in the corvée or a portion of their crops as rent. Land and business owners would pay other sorts of taxes, like property taxes (assessed through increasingly sophisticated cadasters), taxes for the rights (monopolies, the right to marry, the right to run a mill, tolls for the rights to use a road, etc), taxes on imports (tariffs), taxes on manufacturing (excise taxes, especially on product and like alcohol and tobacco), and so forth. Some of the taxes seems strange today: tariffs, for instance, could be collected on internal and international trade. Goods entering Paris, for instance, had to pay tariffs until the French Revolution. Taxes could also vary regionally due to different deals being struck: salt in Paris was 30x more expensive than salt in Brittany before the Revolution, as another example.
I should add that in many less developed states, taxes were not collected directly by the state but rather they were “farmed out” to local tax collectors. The tax collector paid the state a certain fee and then collected taxes themselves over and above that fee. Tax farming continued in France until the French Revolution. Ottoman tax farming continued for much longer and was much less systematized than the French example. People hated tax farming, as it was often capricious, inconsistent, and arbitrary. I think the fact that even relatively developed states, like France, had to rely on contracted tax farmers shows how weak the state infrastructure was to actually extract revenue in this period. States would give up higher revenue extraction to endure lower costs of collection. The state further lacked the detailed local knowledge to accurately assess dues and effectively minimize shirking. You should think of it as a form of rent (these rights to tax were generally rented for a set fee) rather than a tax on a stock like land. States also developed different systems: England, for example, ended customs farming in 1671 and excise farming in 1683, centralizing both under government, rather than private, control. In the same period, France was expanding its tax farming system.
There were also religious taxes, the tithe in Europe (10%) and the zakat in the Muslim world (2.5%). Like all other taxes, these were frequently resisted and shirked to the degree it was possible.