Dr Tom Crook
Reader in Modern British History, Oxford Brookes University
At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain’s central state assumed few other core responsibilities than defending the realm and administering the taxes required to fund the army and navy. By 1914, the state’s responsibilities had grown enormously to include a medley of ‘social’ functions relating to the welfare of the people. Among other things, it obliged parents to send their children to school; played a key role in administering the poor laws, regulating police forces, and enforcing public health measures; inspected factories and prisons; and directed increasing sums of money derived from central taxes towards local authorities, augmenting the latter’s own rate-funded revenues. In 1911, with the passage of the National Insurance Act, a state-sponsored system of social insurance was created to protect working people against loss of earnings relating to sickness and unemployment. On the eve of the First World War, the British state was a much more pervasive presence in people’s daily lives compared to a century or so earlier, and this was principally owing to measures of social reform.
The growth of the social responsibilities of the state during the nineteenth century was partly a response to the needs of a rapidly urbanising and industrialising society, and partly a product of arguments which insisted that the central state ought to play a bigger role in securing basic standards of health and education for all. But whereas historians of an earlier generation saw this growth as part of a cumulative process that would culminate in the establishment of the post-1945 Welfare State, scholarship since the 1980s has advanced a more cautious assessment. Two features foregrounded by this scholarship stand out. One is that local authorities and voluntary organisations remained crucial providers of welfare up to and including the Edwardian period. Even where the state assumed a key regulatory role – as in the poor laws from 1834, education from 1839, and public health from 1848 – it worked with and through, rather than against, the agency of elected local authorities and voluntary providers. The second is that social reform was politically controversial and not simply on account of a public aversion to spending public money. It also raised important matters of principle about the moral functions of the state, the rights and powers of local authorities, and even, in the case of education, freedom of religion. In other words, if the state underwent a process of expansion during the nineteenth century, this came about in a highly contested, complex, and patchy fashion.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains a variety of primary and secondary materials to assist your research into social reform and the growth of the state. The best starting point is Philip Harling’s video essay on ‘The state and locality: the politics of social reform, 1789–1914’. Useful general accounts include Pat Thane’s The Origins of British Social Policy, an important early work in the reassessment outlined above, and Clive Emsley’s The English Police, which provides an accessible introduction to reforms in this particular arena of governance. In terms of primary sources, the collected works of Herbert Spencer and the writings of the Bosanquets are especially interesting for studying the rich mix of ideological currents which informed – and resisted – the growth of the state during the mid- to late Victorian period. Meanwhile, the two-volume collection on sanitary reform sheds important light on the complex realities of welfare measures as they were agreed upon and enacted locally.