Bøger i States, People, and the History of Social Change serien

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.

Anna Suranyi provides new insight into the lives of hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants.

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.

Focusing on the words and experiences of the poor themselves, this book rewrites our understanding of English social policy for the period from the 1750s to 1830s.