Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700-1850: A Regional Perspective
Published by EH.NET (October 2001)
Steven King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700-1850: A Regional
Perspective. New York and Manchester: Palgrave and Manchester University
Press, 2000. x + 294 pp. $74.95 (hardback), ISBN: 0-7190-4939-3; $29.95
(paper), ISBN: 0-7190-4940-7.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Stephen Ziliak, Department of Economics, Georgia
Institute of Technology and Emory University.
In courses on the history of economic thought, students get introduced to the
great debates concerning the English Poor Laws. Rather, it used to
happen that way. And yet to speak of the willful erasure of economic history
and the history of economic thought from college curricula is to write a
begging letter too many. Nowadays when an economist tells a colleague in an
American university that he is an economic historian the response is something
like this: “That’s great! I remember liking my course on the history of
economic thought. Are you into Marshall or what?” No, Smith. Heh heh. A
beau only in his books. Like you, I have witnessed the costs of the
decline in demand for historical knowledge, in pretty much these same words,
at Ph.D.- granting institutions and liberal arts colleges. It’s like not
knowing the difference between Ricardian rent and rent control. Or not
realizing that welfare was handed to private charities in the nineteenth
century. Or, worse yet, not caring. In each case the economist was under age
45, and was looking to hire an economist. Hmm.
Steven King, an historian at Oxford Brookes University (England), is facing a
different hurdle. The historical scholarship is voluminous. In England the
scholarship on the Poor Laws is so vast, so valued, and so well-known, that
King can assume his readers (even the undergraduates) to be familiar with
institutional, administrative, and legal approaches to the subject (pp. 2,
18). Concerning the legal approach — as exemplified by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb — and how local administrators might have interpreted the law, King
shrugs: “This is an old potato, and one which has been covered in a variety
of other works” (p. 18).
The novelty of the book is in its attempt to establish a “regional picture”
(p. 4) in the interpretation of poverty and welfare. King wants to “refocus
attention” away from “enormous generalizations” about a national system and
towards regional and therefore multiple stories of “community responses to
poverty.” It’s easy to sympathize with King’s desire. In the United States
even the diligent reader could be pardoned for believing that America had no
Poor Laws west of the Great Lakes or south of the Ohio River: a leading text
by Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic
Books, 1986), tells the nation’s story with a couple case studies of Erie
County, New York. Unfortunately, King grieves over the proper methodology for
mapping distinct regions — grieves long and hard (pp. 4-14, chapter 4, and
throughout) — and triples the length of the book.
Drawing upon primary and secondary materials, collected from scattered attics
and archives for more than a decade, King argues “there was a distinct
spatial flavour to the character and role of the old and new poor laws” (p.
256; his emphasis). He pulls back from the emphasis, of course: he’s a
historian of English Poor Laws, not a game theorist. “[T]he southern and
eastern old poor law in particular may have intervened early in the descent of
individuals and families into poverty, may have recognised relative as well as
absolute poverty and on balance probably turned down relatively few people. By
contrast, communities in the north and west had a narrower definition of
entitlement and devoted fewer resources . . . not because they had
insufficient money or there was no demand for welfare, but because they chose
not to” (p. 256). May have. An examination of account books allows King to
observe that the benefit package in the south “tended to be substantially
higher than the package offered in the north and west. By the end of the
eighteenth century, regular allowances of at least 2-3s. per week were common
in southern and eastern communities, and regular pensioners could expect to
supplement their pension income by an average of 30 per cent through irregular
payments in cash and kind” (p. 257).
He believes that relief in the south and east was given “with good grace;”
that southern welfare — including the workhouse — was “humane.” By contrast,
King finds that the income replacement in the north and west was 10 or 20
percent. He distinguishes “two cultures” of welfare: a “harsh north and west
against a more relaxed and inclusive south and east — a culture of making do
against a culture of dependency” (pp. 258-59).
It is too bad the book does not contain a statistical appendix, showing how
data were collected and statistics estimated. King’s interpretation of Figure
4.1, “National welfare expenditures in England,” does give one pause: the
figure suggests little change in capital and administrative expense, 1813-1850
— an odd constant, to say the least, for a nation of workhouses. But the
expenditure data are suggestive of regional differences, a point I would
concede much faster than it seems his intended audience might. Indeed, I would
go further and suggest an Anglo-American pattern. In 1976 Stanley Lebergott
showed evidence that the United States provided a “guaranteed income” between
1850 and 1970: at 25-30% the wages of common labor (Lebergott, The American
Economy [Princeton: Princeton University Press (1976), pp. 53-69]). To be
sure, Lebergott found regional difference: the Northeast and Middle West
tended to give more. Yet recent updates to the Lebergott data suggest that
nationwide the replacement ratio has remained constant through the 1990s (so
too have other key indicators of social welfare: S. Ziliak, “A Variation on
Klein’s Constants: Some Tendencies of Social Welfare and the Problem of
Interpretation,” Cato Journal [forthcoming, Winter 2002].) In other
words, King’s findings on southwest England, 1700-1850, when added to the
Lebergott and Ziliak data, provide more evidence that linear stories of
progress or decline are in need of repair: generosity — and spells of relief
and exits to higher wage jobs — are remarkably constant.
King’s chapter 4, “Defining and Measuring Poverty,” obscures more than it
reveals. And more importantly — for the blemish it puts on the book — the
chapter is on a meaningless and anachronistic search for a “foundation” to the
line of poverty. (Note above, similarly, his use of a 1980s American and
conservative neologism, “culture of dependency,” to describe 150 years of
eighteenth and nineteenth century England.) King struggles through his own
speculations to suggest “one-third” were “in poverty;” later, it’s “a half,”
before he retreats to the attitude that maybe this is all too “ambiguous” (p.
82). It’s an old potato. I agree with Gertrude Himmelfarb and Amartya Sen: the
search for a poverty line in eighteenth century England is not the worthy
enterprise of an historian. Begin with Booth and Rowntree and work your way
up.
For all its grieving and posturing Poverty and Welfare in England is
difficult to read. Example: “It uses intensive mining of local sources to
understand the real manifestations of poverty and welfare.” And:
“Deciding between competing regional boundaries of this sort is an unenviable
task. It is also a task that yields potentially uncertain results.”
Undergraduates will need guidance to locate the main points. Still, King’s
book should not be forgotten when one is preparing to speak on the English
Poor Laws. (In my model I assume someone is preparing.) Just don’t look
here for words by Malthus or Smith: they’re in my afternoon class.
Steve Ziliak teaches economics at Emory University and the Georgia Institute
of Technology. Recent publications include “Pauper Fiction: Paupers in
Almshouses and the Odd Fit of Oliver Twist,” Review of Social Economy
(forthcoming, 2002), and “D. N. McCloskey and the Rhetoric of a Scientific
Economics,” in S. T. Ziliak, editor, Measurement and Meaning in Economics:
The Essential Deirdre McCloskey (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2001).