Regulating the Poor through Internal Borders: The EU in Historical and International Perspectives

Tensions surrounding internal migrants’ access to welfare and the associated politicisations about who should shoulder the ‘fiscal burden’ are not unique to the European Union (EU). Based on a Most Different Systems Design and following an institutionalist approach, this article analyses the developments associated with freedom of movement and access to poor relief/social assistance in four economically and politically diverse jurisdictions. It also considers the implications of these developments for the EU. The four cases analysed are industrialising England, contemporary China, Germany, and the United States. Although economic integration was a necessary, it was not a sufficient condition for the abolishment of residence requirements for internal migrants in all four jurisdictions. Moreover, it took political power, various coalitions, or the leadership of actors to overcome the barriers and hurdles on the path to social citizenship in the wider territorial jurisdictions. Solidarity as a precondition did not play a significant role.

Faith in Drugs: The Material and Immaterial Effects of Medication in the Early Modern French Catholic World

This article explores a set of medications, called les remèdes des pauvres, that were distributed from the late seventeenth century onward to the sick poor of rural France and to French missions abroad. Although it was eventually absorbed into the French state as a form of royally sponsored poor relief, this drug distribution network began in 1670 as a distinctly ecclesiastical endeavour, aimed at allowing parish priests, missionaries, and charitable laywomen to imitate the healing ministry of Christ and his apostles. While critics saw them as peddling a dangerous chemical drug in poor villages, their promoters argued that the active charity involved in distributing the remedies, and even the faith placed in their effectiveness by the sick, played an important role in effecting their cures. As such they offer a useful perspective on the shifting boundaries between medical charity and medical commerce, as well as between natural and supernatural healing.

Spread of Information About Urban Elberfeld Social Care System in Riga (Late 19th – Early 20th Century)

Paper analyses the principles of poor relief of Elberfeld social care system that spread outside the Prussian Empire and Baltic provinces were among of the first territories of Russian Empire, where those ideas emerged. Urbanised and industrialised Riga was one of the empire’s cities where the system was incorporated. It was the first level of developing a future national social care policy in Latvia after 1918. The paper aims to restore the term and achievements of the Elberfeld system known to the social elite before the Soviet occupation when this term disappeared from academic research.

Aging Without Children in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Rural Estonia

This article explores living arrangements and both informal and formal support for the elderly who had no surviving children in the Russian Baltic province of Livland from 1850 to 1905. The article examines with whom the elderly who had no spouse and descendants to rely on lived out their twilight years; whether there were differences between the farmers and farm laborers; the role of poor relief, and whether adoption served well to ensure upkeep in old age.

Sheltering refugees: ephemeral architecture and mass migration in early modern Venice

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

Stuck in the Poorhouse

When Americans think of welfare before the twentieth century, we usually think of the poorhouse. Poorhouses were expensive investments, though, rising and falling in popularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter focuses on the generation of Americans most affected by poorhouses through the life of William Fales, an articulate, devout Christian who suffered from severe rheumatism. Voters’ great hopes for poorhouses were that they would save towns’ money in the long run, and provide more humane care. Fales’s experience shows what these poorhouses were actually like. While Fales does not stand in for every poorhouse inmate, his life shows how isolating and dangerous poorhouses could be, and what opportunities for fellowship inside a poorhouse could be. His life also shows how private philanthropy could complement poor relief.