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Wed 23 April
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    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
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Fri 25 April
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Sat 26 April
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Wednesday 23 April 2014 14.00 - 16.00
Y-3 SOC14 Mutual Aid in Comparative Perspective
UR3 Germanistik second floor
Network: Social Inequality Chair: Bernard Harris
Organizers: - Discussant: Bernard Harris
Jackie Gulland : Witnesses of Truth and Moral Cowards: Discourses of Morality in Appeals about Sickness Benefits in the Early 20th Century UK
The first national insurance based sickness benefits scheme in the UK was introduced by the National Insurance Act 1911. This scheme has been seen as a break from the Poor Law tradition with its moralising discourses of deserving and undeserving poor. The scheme was administered by ‘approved societies’ ... (Show more)
The first national insurance based sickness benefits scheme in the UK was introduced by the National Insurance Act 1911. This scheme has been seen as a break from the Poor Law tradition with its moralising discourses of deserving and undeserving poor. The scheme was administered by ‘approved societies’ but was subject to the statutory rules laid out in the National Insurance Act and oversight by the National Insurance Commission and later the Ministry of Health. The scheme was contributory and rights based: those who were certificated as ‘incapable of work’ were entitled to benefits based on their contributions without any subjection to a means-test or tests of ‘less eligibility’. However, strong discourses relating to the work ethic and the necessity of returning to work as soon as possible remained, while moral overtones could be found in the membership rules of the approved societies which ran the scheme. This paper explores these discourses of work ethic and morality, based on an analysis of appeals against refusal of benefit. The appeals cases suggest that the approved societies and the appeal adjudicators considered moral issues and concerns about claimants’ work ethic in making decisions about incapacity for work and that claimants themselves used these moral issues in attempting to challenge refusals of benefit. In attempts to cut costs and ‘activate’ benefit claimants, welfare regimes today have turned their focus to claimants of incapacity benefits and have raised new moral questions about deservingness and claimants’ willingness to return to the labour market. The cases discussed in this paper and dating from the last century provide a comparative lense through which to view pressing issues of inequality and welfare today. (Show less)

Julie Marfany : Mutual Aid in Early Modern Spain: Guilds, Confraternities and Public Granaries
Mutual aid is a neglected aspect of welfare in the European past, compared with other forms of poor relief and charity. With one or two exceptions, historians have tended to focus on the economic and political functions of guilds, and the role played by confraternities in shaping religious life and ... (Show more)
Mutual aid is a neglected aspect of welfare in the European past, compared with other forms of poor relief and charity. With one or two exceptions, historians have tended to focus on the economic and political functions of guilds, and the role played by confraternities in shaping religious life and sociability. The focus has also tended to be on urban, rather than rural societies, particularly in southern Europe, where it has been claimed that little or no poor relief was available in the countryside. Yet guilds and confraternities also had important welfare roles, providing help to their members with funeral costs, sickness, unemployment and dowries. Confraternities were certainly central to rural society, though guilds were also to be found in the countryside as well as in the towns in many areas of Europe. Guilds and confraternities were a prominent feature of urban and rural Spanish society. In addition, the eighteenth century saw the growth of another important form of self-help in rural areas: the pósito, or public granary, which loaned out grain at interest for planting and also for consumption.

This paper forms part of a wider project investigating the extent and nature of poor relief in southern Europe before the emergence of the welfare state in the mid-nineteenth century, through a case study of one Spanish region, Catalonia. Traditionally, the view has been that guilds and confraternities had ceased to play a welfare role by the end of the eighteenth century, when economic crisis combined with political reform put paid to most of their activities, with the guilds eventually being abolished. According to this narrative, mutual aid was only revived later in the nineteenth century, in a new, secular form of mutual aid societies and savings banks from the 1840s onwards. We lack evidence, however, to confirm or deny the lack of welfare provision by guilds and confraternities. Unlike the guilds and confraternities, the pósitos were actively encouraged by the government, particularly after the liberalisation of the grain trade in 1765, and survived or re-emerged after the crisis of the end of the eighteenth century to become the key form of rural credit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their relationship to the grain trade, however, is not well understood. Did they compensate for a lack of market integration and continued subsistence crises, or were they themselves vulnerable to these same problems? In particular, we lack local studies of how they functioned, even though they were municipal or parish institutions by definition.

This paper will attempt to assess the extent of welfare provided by these different forms of mutual aid. The focus will be primarily on Catalonia, from where local examples will be drawn, but the paper will also use two sets of national investigations, the first into guilds and confraternities in 1770-1771, the second into pósitos over the period 1751-1773, with some additional later material, in order to provide context. Local sources include the accounts and statutes of guilds, confraternities and pósitos from a range of archives.
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Gerrit Verhoeven : The Tearing Tissue: Family, Friends, Neighbours, and the Resilience of Social Relations (Antwerp 1750-'95)
Late eighteenth-century Antwerp. The world has gone topsy-turvy. Fathers are given a good thrashing by their unruly sons, while mothers are taunted by their little girls. Friends are found bickering over a tankard of beer, a pinch of snuff, or a crust of bread. Neighbours hesitate to help one another, ... (Show more)
Late eighteenth-century Antwerp. The world has gone topsy-turvy. Fathers are given a good thrashing by their unruly sons, while mothers are taunted by their little girls. Friends are found bickering over a tankard of beer, a pinch of snuff, or a crust of bread. Neighbours hesitate to help one another, even in death throes. Literally hundreds of testimonies taken before the Hoogere Vierschaer, the local criminal court in Antwerp, reveal a society under stress. Political rifts between royalists and republicans ran straight through neighbourhoods, fraternities, and craft guilds, while families and friends were torn apart by the economic slump and soaring individualization. Religious communities and brotherhoods of the Virgin Mary were put to the test by the smouldering secularization. Poverty and pauperization frayed the social tissue of Antwerp even more, until it threatened to snap in the late eighteenth century.
During this lecture, I want to explore the resilience of everyday social relations in more detail by delving into the Vierschaer files. We will use close reading to analyse the testimonies, yet, in addition, a quantitative approach is tested. Moreover, we try to uncover some slow-burning evolutions between the middle and the close of the eighteenth century. Three phenomena are being scrutinized in detail. First, we want to look more closely into the relations between neighbours by examining the unwritten law of assistance. Were people in the eighties equally eager to save a neighbour in perilous situations as they had been some decades before? Did they intervene in cases of burglary, rape, fire or fights? Secondly, we want to examine the social make-up of pub-goers. Was the traditional web of fellow craftsmen, friends, and tipplers, who were used to share ale and gin, gradually falling apart and giving way to a more anonymous drinking culture? Finally, we try to assess changes in family life. How reluctant were young relatives to care for their old or sick kinsmen? Were relations between parents and their children jeopardized by political, economic, and social tensions?
Drawing a conclusion from these various cases, our aim is to find out whether these tensions really threatened the social tissue of early modern Antwerp or to prove – in the other case – that urban communities were much more resilient.
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