This book brings together authors working on some of the most significant poverty and welfare research projects on the European stage. The contributions focus broadly on the experience of being poor in England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany between 1800 and the 1940s, a theme that has received inadequate attention in the European historiography thus far. The chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first deals with the experience of being poor: networks, migration and survival strategies; the second with confinement, discipline, surveillance and classification: paths to the welfare state; and the third with the symbolism of poverty.

The Editors: Andreas Gestrich is Professor of Modern History at the University of Trier. He specialises in the social history of childhood and youth and the family, media history, social history of religion and the history of poverty and welfare in European cities. Steven King is Head of the Department of History and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Health, Medicine and Society at Oxford Brookes University, England. He publishes in the areas of rural industrialisation and historical demography, medical history and poverty and welfare. Lutz Raphael is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Trier. He specialises in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Western Europe, the history of historiography, the influence of expert knowledge on the regulation of everyday life and the history of poverty and welfare in rural societies.

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