States, People, and the History of Social Change – serie

In 1949, the Communist Party of China pledged that its approach to health care would differ markedly from that of the former Nationalist government and the 'imperialist' West. For the next thirty years under Mao's leadership, the People's Republic of China made improving the health of the entire population a central pillar of its policy. International health stakeholders came to view it as a statistical outlier in its ability to achieve better health outcomes with limited resources.The People's Health is the first systematic study of health care and medicine in Maoist China. Drawing on hundreds of files from rarely seen party archives and oral testimonies from experts, local cadres, and villagers across China, Zhou Xun shifts her historian's gaze away from official statistics towards the records of local institutions and personal memories that reflect and give voice to lived experiences. Through the everyday interactions of policy makers, national and local administration, and communities, Zhou illustrates the dynamic relationship between politics and health, and between individual lives and the political system. Presenting case studies of the two internationally acclaimed public health initiatives in the PRC – the anti-schistosomiasis campaign and the Barefoot Doctor program – this book offers the first thorough, politically neutral analysis of their background, execution, and national and international repercussions.Opening a unique window into the lives – and health care – of individuals living under communism, The People's Health examines the links between local interest, cultural sensibilities, resources, and abilities, exploring the often unforeseeable consequences of political planning and social engineering.

In 1949, the Communist Party of China pledged that its approach to health care would differ markedly from that of the former Nationalist government and the 'imperialist' West. For the next thirty years under Mao's leadership, the People's Republic of China made improving the health of the entire population a central pillar of its policy. International health stakeholders came to view it as a statistical outlier in its ability to achieve better health outcomes with limited resources.The People's Health is the first systematic study of health care and medicine in Maoist China. Drawing on hundreds of files from rarely seen party archives and oral testimonies from experts, local cadres, and villagers across China, Zhou Xun shifts her historian's gaze away from official statistics towards the records of local institutions and personal memories that reflect and give voice to lived experiences. Through the everyday interactions of policy makers, national and local administration, and communities, Zhou illustrates the dynamic relationship between politics and health, and between individual lives and the political system. Presenting case studies of the two internationally acclaimed public health initiatives in the PRC – the anti-schistosomiasis campaign and the Barefoot Doctor program – this book offers the first thorough, politically neutral analysis of their background, execution, and national and international repercussions.Opening a unique window into the lives – and health care – of individuals living under communism, The People's Health examines the links between local interest, cultural sensibilities, resources, and abilities, exploring the often unforeseeable consequences of political planning and social engineering.

Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial expansion efforts. Young Subjects explores the lives and experiences of these youth, revealing their role as active and vital agents in the shaping of early modern France.Through a set of regional case studies, Julia Gossard demonstrates how thousands of children and youth were engaged in the service of the state. In Lyon, charity schools cultivated children as agents of moral and social reform who carried their lessons home to their families. In Paris, orphaned and imprisoned youth trained in skilled trades or prepared for military service, while others were sent to the French colonies in North America as filles du roi and sturdy labourers. Young people from merchant families were recruited to serve as cultural brokers and translators on behalf of French commerical interests in the Ottoman Empire and Siam. In each case, Gossard considers how these youth played, negotiated, and sometimes resisted their roles, and what expressions of individual identity and agency were available to subjects under the legal control of others.As sources of labour, future taxpayers, colonial subjects, cultural mediators, and potential criminals, children and youth were objects of intense interest for civic authorities. Young Subjects refocuses our attention on these often overlooked historical subjects who helped to build France.

Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants.In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt.Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers had been trafficked or “spirited away” or were sent forcibly by government agencies as criminals, political rebels, or destitute vagrants.In Indentured Servitude Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of these people. The British government, Suranyi argues, profited by supplying labour for the colonies, removing unwanted populations, and reducing incarceration costs within Britain. In addition, it was believed that indigents, especially destitute children, benefited morally from being placed in indenture. Capitalist entrepreneurs who were influential at the highest levels of government made their fortunes from Atlantic trade in goods, indentured servants, and slaves, and their participation in the servant trade contributed to the commercialization of criminal justice. Suranyi breaks new ground in showing how indentured servitude was challenged: once in the colonies, indentured servants adapted resourcefully to their circumstances and rebelled against unfair conditions and abuse by suing their masters, by running away, or through outright revolt.Emerging ideas about race and citizenship led to vehement public debate about the conditions of indentured servants and the ethics of indenture itself, prompting legislation that aimed to curb the worst excesses while slavery continued to expand unchecked.

Established in 1853, after the end of penal transportation to Australia, the convict prison system and the sentence of penal servitude offered the most severe form of punishment – short of death – in the criminal justice system, and they remained in place for nearly a century.Penal Servitude is the first comprehensive study to examine the convict prison system that housed all those who were sentenced to penal servitude during this time. Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and David Cox detail the administration and evolution of the system, from its creation in the 1850s and the building of the prison estate to the classification of prisoners within it. Exploring life in the convict prison through the experiences of the people who were subjected to it, the authors shed light on various details such as prison diet, education, and labour. What they find reveals the internal regimes; the everyday endurances, conformity, resistance, and rule breaking of convicts; and the interactions with the warders, medical officers, and governors that shaped daily life in the system.Reconstructing the life histories of hundreds of convict prisoners from detailed prison records, criminal registers, census data, and personal correspondence, Penal Servitude illuminates the lives of those who experienced long-term imprisonment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.

In July 1939, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, fifty-nine-year-old Beatrice Alexander was found incapable of managing her own property and affairs. Although Alexander and those living with her insisted that she was perfectly well, the official solicitor took control of her home and money, evicted her “friends,” and hired a live-in companion to watch over her. Alexander remained legally incapable for the next thirty years. In the mid-twentieth century, Alexander was one of about thirty thousand people in England and Wales who were, at any time, legally “incapable” and under the auspices of what is now the Court of Protection. Focusing on the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, Looking After Miss Alexander explains the workings of the court, using Alexander’s unusual case to consider the complexities of this aspect of mental health law. Drawing on Court of Protection archives – some of which were made publicly available for the first time in 2019 – and micro-historical methods, Janet Weston also highlights the role of chance, subjectivity, and uncertainty in shaping how events unfolded then, and the stories we tell about those events today.An engaging and accessible history of mental capacity law, Looking After Miss Alexander examines ideas of citizenship and welfare, gender and vulnerability, care and control, and the role of the state. It also offers reflections on historical research and writing itself.

In July 1939, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, fifty-nine-year-old Beatrice Alexander was found incapable of managing her own property and affairs. Although Alexander and those living with her insisted that she was perfectly well, the official solicitor took control of her home and money, evicted her “friends,” and hired a live-in companion to watch over her. Alexander remained legally incapable for the next thirty years. In the mid-twentieth century, Alexander was one of about thirty thousand people in England and Wales who were, at any time, legally “incapable” and under the auspices of what is now the Court of Protection. Focusing on the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, Looking After Miss Alexander explains the workings of the court, using Alexander’s unusual case to consider the complexities of this aspect of mental health law. Drawing on Court of Protection archives – some of which were made publicly available for the first time in 2019 – and micro-historical methods, Janet Weston also highlights the role of chance, subjectivity, and uncertainty in shaping how events unfolded then, and the stories we tell about those events today.An engaging and accessible history of mental capacity law, Looking After Miss Alexander examines ideas of citizenship and welfare, gender and vulnerability, care and control, and the role of the state. It also offers reflections on historical research and writing itself.

Between 1860 and 1935, about 100,000 impoverished children were emigrated from Britain to Canada to seek a new life in the “land of plenty.” Charities, religious workers, philanthropists, and state-run institutions such as workhouses and orphanages all sent children abroad, claiming that this was the only way to prevent their becoming criminals or joining the masses of working-class unemployed.Friendless or Forsaken? follows the story of child emigration agencies operating in North West England, tracing the imperial relationships that enabled agents to send children away from their homes and parents, who often lost sight of them forever. The book sheds light on public support for the schemes, their financial beneficiaries, and how parents were persuaded to consent to sending their children across the world – frequently without fully realizing what rights they had signed away. The story charts the legal measures introduced to maintain and regulate child emigration schemes, as well as the way “home children” were portrayed as both needy and dangerous on each side of the Atlantic and how the children themselves sought to overcome prejudice and isolation in an unfamiliar country.Exploring the transnational economy of child emigrations schemes, Friendless or Forsaken? records the bravery and resilience of those children whose lives were altered by this traumatic and divisive episode in the history of empire.

Between 1860 and 1935, about 100,000 impoverished children were emigrated from Britain to Canada to seek a new life in the “land of plenty.” Charities, religious workers, philanthropists, and state-run institutions such as workhouses and orphanages all sent children abroad, claiming that this was the only way to prevent their becoming criminals or joining the masses of working-class unemployed.Friendless or Forsaken? follows the story of child emigration agencies operating in North West England, tracing the imperial relationships that enabled agents to send children away from their homes and parents, who often lost sight of them forever. The book sheds light on public support for the schemes, their financial beneficiaries, and how parents were persuaded to consent to sending their children across the world – frequently without fully realizing what rights they had signed away. The story charts the legal measures introduced to maintain and regulate child emigration schemes, as well as the way “home children” were portrayed as both needy and dangerous on each side of the Atlantic and how the children themselves sought to overcome prejudice and isolation in an unfamiliar country.Exploring the transnational economy of child emigrations schemes, Friendless or Forsaken? records the bravery and resilience of those children whose lives were altered by this traumatic and divisive episode in the history of empire.

Railway commuting is today a mundane and routine necessity, yet for the Victorians it was a novel experience. It opened up new possibilities of living at a remove from the crowded urban centre while staying connected to its places of work. Commuting helped transform London’s urban landscape, as the compact city of Dickens’s London gave way to the suburban sprawl of the British capital in the early twentieth century.Slow Train to Arcadia is a history of London’s suburban railway network from the 1830s to 1921 and its impact on urban mobility. The book charts the relationship between the three main actors in the formation of the suburban railway: the state, the railway companies, and the travelling public. While the railway age came quickly to Victorian Britain, commuting took a slower journey to commonplace status. In the 1840s William Gladstone sought to make railway travel accessible to all, but commuting was experienced differently according to class and gender. Slow Train to Arcadia explains why the democratization of commuting proved to be an elusive goal.Today’s workers are living through a fundamental reversal in the relationship between home and the workplace. For many, a daily commute is being consigned to history, a shift that will have long-term social and economic consequences. Slow Train to Arcadia is a timely exploration of the origins of mass commuting, a similarly transformative period for the daily patterns of working life.

Railway commuting is today a mundane and routine necessity, yet for the Victorians it was a novel experience. It opened up new possibilities of living at a remove from the crowded urban centre while staying connected to its places of work. Commuting helped transform London’s urban landscape, as the compact city of Dickens’s London gave way to the suburban sprawl of the British capital in the early twentieth century.Slow Train to Arcadia is a history of London’s suburban railway network from the 1830s to 1921 and its impact on urban mobility. The book charts the relationship between the three main actors in the formation of the suburban railway: the state, the railway companies, and the travelling public. While the railway age came quickly to Victorian Britain, commuting took a slower journey to commonplace status. In the 1840s William Gladstone sought to make railway travel accessible to all, but commuting was experienced differently according to class and gender. Slow Train to Arcadia explains why the democratization of commuting proved to be an elusive goal.Today’s workers are living through a fundamental reversal in the relationship between home and the workplace. For many, a daily commute is being consigned to history, a shift that will have long-term social and economic consequences. Slow Train to Arcadia is a timely exploration of the origins of mass commuting, a similarly transformative period for the daily patterns of working life.

The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes.In Fraudulent Lives Steven King focuses on the British case in the first ever long-term analysis of the scale, meaning, and consequences of welfare fraud in Western nations. King argues that an expectation of dishonesty on the part of claimants was written into the basic fabric of the founding statutes of the British welfare state in 1601, and that nothing has subsequently changed. Efforts throughout history to detect and punish fraud have been superficial at best because, he argues, it has never been in the interests of the three main stakeholders – claimants, the general public, and officials and policymakers – to eliminate it.Tracing a substantial underbelly of fraud from the seventeenth century to today, King finds remarkable continuities and historical parallels in public attitudes towards the honesty of welfare recipients – patterns that hold true across Western welfare states.

In the early 1970s Irish prisons were overcrowded – there were few rehabilitation programs, medical care was limited, psychiatric care was practically nonexistent, and brutality was commonplace. The Irish prisoners unionized, igniting a movement that helped transform the penal system over the next decade and a half, and whose legacy is still visible today.Prisoners’ Bodies is the first book on the history of the prisoner-driven movement that sought to revolutionize the prison system in Ireland between 1972 and 1985. Oisín Wall charts the rise and fall of prisoners’ organizations, their changing social networks, tactics, and splits, and the effect that they had on life inside prison, public policy, and society at large. Considering the public discourse around prisons and prisoners during this period, Wall investigates how it shaped and was shaped by the movement. Finally, the book examines the experiences of more than twenty individuals in prison, setting their activism within the context of their lives and their politics. Their stories are reconstructed through oral histories, court records, press reports, prisoners’ publications, and archival material.Prisoners’ Bodies seeks to amplify the voices of people who have been systemically and institutionally silenced in the history of modern Irish prisons.

Imprisonment was rarely used as punishment in Britain before 1800. The criminal justice system was based on terror and deterrence, sentencing convicts to the gallows at home and transportation overseas, with prisons serving primarily as holding spaces for the accused until the case against them was resolved. A major shift began in the late eighteenth century when imprisonment became an end in itself: a means to reform as well as to discipline criminal offenders.To Detain or to Punish revisits this revolutionary moment as it played out in the metropolis of London. Kiran Mehta charts how Londoners, through their interactions with police, magistrates, and judges, became prisoners, and then follows them into the prison, revealing how these institutions were managed and experienced. Local authorities’ increased use of imprisonment, for punishment as well as for detention, sparked the wholesale reconstruction and redesign of London’s prison estate. It also spurred the consolidation of the modern notion that prisoners who had not yet been convicted of a crime, or who had not been sentenced to imprisonment, should be held separately from and treated differently to those incarcerated for punishment. Most notably, the requirement to labour became a distinguishing feature of punitive confinement.Challenging traditional ideas about who and what prisons were for and how they operated, To Detain or to Punish offers a radical reappraisal of London’s prison system between 1750 and 1840.

French society at the turn of the twentieth century was deeply preoccupied with the conduct and management of its young people, especially those who had broken the law. Legislators and social reformers of the Third Republic grappled with the question of whether children who committed offences should be held criminally responsible for their actions or if their age should exempt them from liability.Dangers of Youth examines foundational debates – about young lawbreakers, their criminal liability, and their appropriate treatment – at the origins of France's modern juvenile justice system. In a context of overcrowded prisons, frequent recidivism, a sluggish birth rate, and growing international tension, young offenders were viewed as harbingers of the nation's decline and as dangerous agents of disorder. At the same time, young people, including juvenile delinquents, were seen as victims of neglect and necessary vehicles for national regeneration. In 1912 legislators established a distinct criminal justice system for juveniles, enshrining probation at its heart and decriminalizing offences committed by children under the age of thirteen. Legislators drew on recommendations from France's pre-eminent penal reform association, the Société générale des prisons, introducing measures that enabled the state to intervene as never before in children's upbringing.Dangers of Youth is a detailed historical account of the emergence of greater age consciousness in the criminal justice system in modern France, which contributed to the creation of a distinct branch of justice for juveniles.

During the First World War, Russia relied on the mass mobilization of its peasant population. In the summer of 1914, approximately four million peasants answered the state’s call to arms, while the millions who remained at home donated labour and other resources to the cause. Within three short years these same peasants were refusing to pay taxes or turn over their grain, dooming the autocracy to collapse.The Peasants’ War argues that the experience of total war convinced peasants that the measure of a state’s legitimacy was its ability to safeguard the wellbeing of its subjects. When the autocracy failed to meet this standard, peasants rejected its authority by challenging four areas of wartime policy: the prohibition of vodka, the conscription of peasant families’ only workers, the redistribution of land belonging to enemy subjects, and the provisioning of the home front. The war awakened peasants to the reciprocal nature of the relationship between a state and its people. Colleen Moore investigates how peasants leveraged their wartime service to negotiate with the state for improved rights and privileges and how they used this power to shape the contours and legitimize the authority of the world’s first socialist state.The Peasants’ War charts the timing and success of the 1917 Russian Revolution by showing how total war flipped the script on peasant–state relations, transforming the state from something that peasants existed to serve into something that existed to serve peasants.