Antecedents

Abstract

The quest for origins is a never-ending task. That applies to the welfare state as much as to other aspects of historical experience. De Schweinitz traced England’s road to social security back to the Statute of Labourers of 1348. Many other studies of Britain’s welfare inheritance have focused on the growing codification of the Poor Law that occurred during the sixteenth century. Yet another tradition of historical writing locates the growing encroachment of the state’s welfare activity in the nineteenth century, linking it to the concurrent historical processes of industrialization, urbanization and the extension of political democracy. The twentieth-century welfare state — as well as the debate about welfare — has been shaped by each of these antecedents. But central to that century’s experience has been the extension and changing role of the public sector in welfare supply.

Now government is the organised expression of the wishes and wants of the people and under those circumstances let us cease to regard it with suspicion … Now it is our business to extend its functions and to see in what ways its operations can be usefully enlarged. (Joseph Chamberlain, 1914)