In July 1939, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, fifty-nine-year-old Beatrice Alexander was found incapable of managing her own property and affairs. Although Alexander and those living with her ...

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social ...

Established in 1853, after the end of penal transportation to Australia, the convict prison system and the sentence of penal servitude offered the most severe form of punishment – short of death – ...

Hundreds of thousands of British and Irish men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth century as indentured servants. Many had agreed to serve for four years, but large numbers ...

Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial ...

In 1949, the Communist Party of China pledged that its approach to health care would differ markedly from that of the former Nationalist government and the 'imperialist' West. For the next thirty years ...

From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the English Old Poor Law was waning, soon to be replaced by the New Poor Law and its dreaded workhouses. In Writing the Lives of the English ...