markk

This book is proving to be a perfect example of what I find so limiting about economic history. Boyer is examining the impact of changes in welfare law upon the poor and unemployed in Britain. It's all well and good, but he never bothers to explain why Parliament changes the law. Was it a shift in morality, or because of the increasing shift of the population from rural to urban? Evidently Boyer doesn't think this worth addressing.

This might be a minor complaint, but it also highlights another problem with the book, this one being a lack of differentiation in his statistics. He tosses around numbers about the "population" and "the poor" as they were a uniform category between 1832 and 1951. He should know very well that this isn't the case, and that a lot of what was happening involved adapting a system geared towards addressing poverty in a predominantly agrarian economy to a predominantly industrial one. Given some of the arguments he makes, not addressing this leaves it flawed and subject to substantial revision, which is a shame because he makes some interesting points in his economic analysis.