Product Description: This is a study of one of the central themes of pre-1914 British history: the move toward social reform and the accompanying growth of collectivism and bureaucracy. Focusing on Britain's efforts to adopt compulsory social insurance, which was pioneered by Germany in the 1880s and has since been instituted across the world, Hennock probes into the problems inherent in borrowing from a vastly different political culture...read more

Product Description: The nature of the British "Welfare State", established in the 1940s through the acceptance of the Beveridge Report's recommendations and assumptions, has long been the subject of an inconclusive debate, although knowledge of its history has been rapidly increasing as official papers have become open to access under the thirty year rule...read more

Product Description: In 2008 the Social Fund had been in operation for 20 years. This has provided a timely opportunity to not only critically reflect upon its introduction in 1988 and its operation in the past two decades, but also to place it within its historical context...read more