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A groundbreaking account of how the welfare state began with early nineteenth-century child labor laws, and how middle-class and elite reformers made it happenThe beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers' efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform, Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws.Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state's capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions.Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors' ideas and coalition-building strategies

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- PART I -- Introduction to Part I -- 2 Securing the Social Order: The Politics of Child Labor Regulation in Prussia -- 3 A Tale of Two Reformers: Success in France, Failure in Belgium -- 4 Defending Democracy: Cultural Consensus and Child Labor Reform in Massachusetts -- Conclusion to Part I -- PART II -- Introduction to Part II -- 5 Restoring Solidarity and Domesticity: Conciliatory Factory Inspection in Imperial Germany -- 6 Appeasing Labor, Protecting Capital: Conciliatory Factory Inspection in Massachusetts -- 7 Social Justice Feminism and Labor Law Enforcement in Illinois -- Conclusion to Part II -- 8 Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This study is an attempt to discover who the northern Xhosa were, where they had come from and why they had moved so far from their original homes, to settle along the northern frontier of the colony. It also sets out to recount and critically assess the processes whereby most of these independent stockfarmers and traders were dispossessed and reduced to labourers by 1879

AbstractWhile existing research suggests that nineteenth-century child labor laws largely failed to significantly reduce children's workforce participation, we examine whether policies that tackled the problem by providing aid – rather than by penalizing work – were more effective. Between 1910 and 1920, forty U.S. states enacted mothers' pension programs, giving needy "deserving" mothers, typically widows, cash aid to support their dependent children. One purpose of the programs was to reduce child labor. However, we find no negative relationship between child labor and the generosity of states' mothers' pension laws. Furthermore, we find no negative relationship between child labor and county-level mothers' pension generosity, in terms of expenditures, in the seven states for which we have data. We attribute this to the small size of the pensions as well as the programs' limited coverage and general lack of conditionality on children's behaviors, such as attending school or not engaging in paid work. We also note states' and counties' limited administrative capacity to enforce eligibility requirements, such as school attendance, where these existed.

Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation. An important chapter in the history of consumer credit regulation came between 1909 and 1941, when policy experts at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) engaged in a national campaign to transform small loan markets and policy in the United States. Concentrating its efforts on state-by-state passage of the Uniform Small Loan Law, the foundation's political success hinged upon an alliance with the American Association of Personal Finance Companies. While most scholarship portrays experts as being dominated or co-opted by industry, our case provides a countervailing example. Far from controlling RSF experts, lenders became dependent on the foundation for legitimating their political lobbying and their business activities. We explain how the foundation built its expert reputation through a process of reputational entrepreneurship, and we trace how RSF experts deployed this reputation as a power resource in their negotiations with small loan lenders.