An ambitious inquiry into the historical relationship between war and welfare. Warfare and Welfare asks the big question about how wars affect welfare states, and answers it by comparing detailed case studies from over a dozen industrialized nations in the twentieth century. The contributors challenged themselves to examine interactions between more than one armed conflict and the entirety of the welfare state in each nation. While scholars will find many warfare-welfare interactions they identify familiar, theyâll find just as many to be new. And more importantly theyâll find novel questions to ask of their own research. This book will become necessary reading for scholars of war and of the welfare state.
Jennifer Mittelstadt, Professor of History, Rutgers University.
Warfare and Welfare is one of those rare books which bring us path breaking research. The influence of wars on the evolution of welfare states has been discussed for decades, but has, so far, never been given any systematic empirical treatment. In this pioneering comparative study, the authors identify with impeccable scholarship the multiple and quite complex causal pathways that link the dynamics of war to welfare state development. It is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in the history of social policies.
Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Professor of Sociology, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Though they seem like opposites, warfare and welfare are in fact kissing cousins. The argument of this masterful work is that war has not just drained the coffers that might pay for social programs, but also stimulated their growth and development: creating new groups requiring assistance (veterans and the wounded), prompting worries about demographic decline that needed intervention, raising expenses and taxes and thus potential sources of funding for other programs, empowering formerly unrepresented social classes whose needs commanded attention after the end of hostilities, stimulating the state to regulate the economy in new ways that could later be channeled into social policy.
Peter Baldwin, Professor of History, UCLA and NYU.