Welfare Regimes and Welfare Regions in Britain and Europe,c.1750s to 1860s

Abstract

Welfare Regimes and Welfare Regions in Britain and Europe, c.1750s to 1860s

This article is concerned with the models that might be used to classify and compare welfare regimes in different European states prior to the broad convergence of welfare debates and structures of the late-nineteenth century. Reviewing existing models («Nordic» welfare systems, confessional divides, welfare peripheries, etc.) the article contends that a more sensitive set of comparative yardsticks is needed if welfare historians are to break out of a cycle of research that has come to focus overwhelmingly on intra-state regional and intraregional differences in welfare inputs and outputs. It suggests that welfare historians might talk in terms of four broad regime types – entitling, exclusionist, obligatory and disciplinary – anchored less in how welfare was funded or organised and more in issues of sentiment and intent. Taking up such a model, the article argues, allows a much more sophisticated frame of comparative reference than one which is based upon broad confessional divides or the sense that countries like England and Wales were somehow «different».