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The regionality of welfare systems in Britain and Europe
The issue of how, where and whether to draw lines on maps of Europe so as to define
regions has tormented legions of historical geographers, historical sociologists and
historians with interests stretching from industrialisation and labour markets to
courtship networks, local cultures and language. Welfare historians have, as we shall
see, largely insulated themselves from this debate. With certain notable exceptions
(Riis, Jutte, Petersen or, more recently, Lowe or Baldwin Petersen) they have tended
to focus on the regionality of national welfare systems. Indeed, there has been a
tendency in much of the secondary literature (strongest in that dealing with England,
but also seen in histories of Scandinavian, Dutch and Italian welfare systems) to focus
away from the question of the regional dynamics of welfare to focus on the
complexities of intra-regional variation in welfare practices and official sentiments.
Moreover, much by way of generalisation on the nature of European welfare systems
(for instance from Ole Grell and others) has tended to focus on the broad differences
fostered by religious divisions and changes, rather than on detailed analysis of the
essential characteristics of European welfare.
In many ways, the uncertainty with which welfare historians have approached the
issue of regionality is not surprising. Regions tended to have fluid boundaries and
might even change their character over time according to exogenous influences (the
occupation of a country for instance) or endogenous factors (the rise of a new town or
the development/dislocation of industry). Such influences could have substantial
knock-on effects for the extent of poverty and attitudes towards the poor, as well as
shaping the potential supply of welfare resources. In turn, however, the fluidity of
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underlying socio-economic conditions makes it very difficult indeed to talk with
confidence about welfare regions in the longer term, or, rather, welfare regions that
might have spanned country boundaries. A further problem is that it has become ever
clearer, particularly from the work of those who have studied regional labour markets,
that regions existed and were created and re-created at numerous levels. Cultural
regions (often small and local) would overlap with, contradict or reinforce economic
regions based upon labour market architecture, demographic makeup or production
structures. Transport regions would interact with demographic regions. Architectural
regions would interact with product regions. Physically mapping such overlapping
‘regions’ would be an heroic task, and in any case Schwarzer and others have argued
that welfare regions were dependent variables. They formed and reformed according
to exogenous stimuli and were often relatively short-lived compared to economic or
industrial regions.
These problems notwithstanding, historians such as DeRooy, Petersen, Seip and Innes
have begun to seek a bigger European picture. They have variously, for instance,
pointed to the fact that information on poverty and the responding welfare structures
flowed easily and in some volume between European states. Equally they have shown
that while the welfare regimes of different regions or states may have been
underpinned by distinct ideological profiles, the mechanisms for responding to the
poor had much in common. Increasingly, for instance, we have come to realise that
the individual and collective charity that underpinned local and regional welfare
structures in early modern France had a mirror image in English philanthropy,
notwithstanding the operation of the Old Poor Law. Moreover, my forthcoming edited
volume (with Professor John Stewart) on European welfare peripheries in nineteenth
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and twentieth century Europe will show unambiguous similarities in the welfare
regimes of peripheral countries, irrespective of their physical location, religious
infrastructure or socio-economic typology.
My article builds upon these themes, analysing the character of (and overlaps
between) regional welfare regimes in Europe between the early eighteenth and later
nineteenth centuries. The latter cut-off point reflects the point at which there was a
pan-European discussion of the purpose, structure and delivery of welfare centred
particularly round the rights of the unemployed, aged, sick or children. The article
first addresses the question of English (and Welsh) exceptionalism, in particular the
idea that the Old and New Poor Laws somehow mark England and Wales from other
European states and even component parts of the UK. It will argue that,
notwithstanding the intent of the law, we must properly regard England and Wales not
as one welfare regime but several distinct welfare regimes, with very different
experiences of poverty and welfare solutions. Following on from this argument, the
article will suggest that some English regions had much more in common in terms of
poverty and welfare with similar regions on the continent or elsewhere in the UK,
than with other parts of England. It will then shift its tack, looking at the nature of
regional welfare regimes in Scotland, Ireland, France, The Netherlands, SwedeNorway-Denmark and Germany. This substantial central section of the article will
argue that we can identify a core set of typological welfare regimes which emerge
irrespective of country and mean that, for instance, West Yorkshire (England), the
western Netherlands, the northern French textile districts centred on the Pays de
Cambresis and the German textile regions centred around Aachen, might properly be
regarded as a single ‘type’ of welfare regime. The article will close with a discussion
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of the idea that European welfare regimes were dependent variables, arguing strongly
that in fact the way in which welfare structures were structured in any locality was an
independent variable working on local characteristics such as the nature and speed of
industrialisation, the pressure of the local demographic system, the role of the church
and the nature of social systems.