Welfare and the State

Author(s):  
Pat Thane

The chapter examines development and change in the welfare role of the British state and the main influences upon it in the context of changing social, economic, and political conditions. It explores the Poor Law and its reform in the early nineteenth century and challenges to it later in the century; the growing role of the state in such fields as education, public health, and labour conditions through the nineteenth century; its more rapid growth through the twentieth century; and finally the challenges to state welfare from the 1980s. Throughout, the shifting but always significant relationship between the state and the voluntary sector in provision for welfare is described and discussed.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
ADITYA RAMESH

Abstract The nineteenth century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. The question that colonial governments faced during the nineteenth century was on how to finance public works. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article shows how different experiments were attempted, including raising capital and labour from local communities as well as corporate investment in irrigation works through London capital markets. The article argues that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a definitive answer had emerged, i.e. irrigation projects on rivers would be financed through state debt. An enormous body of scholarship in Britain and India debated the relationship between public works and public debt. This article rethinks this scholarship as a technological and environmental history. The article argues that colonial modes of raising capital were dependent on speculating on Indian rivers. Historiography wise, in contrast to scholarship which takes for granted the role of the state in building large dams, it suggests that the emergence of the state as the builder of large dams was part of a more fundamental relationship between rivers, technology, and colonial capital that emerged in the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.


Author(s):  
Jim Tomlinson

This chapter falls into two unequal parts. The first charts, broadly chronologically, the shifting understandings, historical and historiographical, of the role of the state in economic life. The second focuses on debates about the performance of the economy, especially notions of ‘decline’ which have been central to those debates since the late nineteenth century. Variegated but overlapping senses of ‘decline’, originating in very specific historical circumstances, have overshadowed much writing on the modern British economy, with, it will be argued, often detrimental effects on our understanding. Such notions need to be historicized—placed firmly in the intellectual, ideological, and above all political contexts within which they arose.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Dawson ◽  
M. Verweij

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrin Maier ◽  
Simon Coleman

AbstractWe explore the tensions evident among Nigerian Pentecostals in London between social and ideological insularity on the one hand, and a more outward-oriented, expansive orientation on the other. Analysis of these stances is complemented by the exploration of believers' actions within a material but also metaphorical arena that we term “London-Lagos.” Such themes are developed specifically through a focus on believers' relations with Nigerian and British state systems in relation to child-rearing—an activity that renders parents sometimes dangerously visible to apparatuses of the state but also raises key dilemmas concerning the proper and moral location of socialisation into Christian values. We show how such dilemmas are embodied in a play, written by a Nigerian Pentecostalist, termed “The Vine-Keepers.”


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