Everyday Welfare in Modern British History

"This carefully compiled book has great potential to renew scholarly discussion on the history of welfare in Britain. By focusing on the welfare cultures that flourish outside the established welfare institutions, and on the entanglements between experience, agency, and societal change, it significantly broadens our understanding of the history of British welfare."
- Johanna Annola, Tampere University, Finland
"Everyday Welfare provides a rigorously coherent collection of essays that will have a major influence on debates in modern British history and social policy. It resituates 'experience' as a central concept of analysis, demonstrating how everyday social and material realities are connected to broader political and policy changes. It reinvigorates established historical concerns and, through a series of empirically rich examples, points the way forward for so much future research."
- Matthew Hilton, Queen Mary University of London, UK
This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who have sex with women, bereaved families, community groups, individuals living in poverty, adults whose status sits outside professional categories, health service users, and people of faith. Chapters trace how these groups have used their experiences to assert an expert witness status and have sought out new spaces to expand the scope, inclusivity, and applicability of welfare services.
Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University, UK.
Eve Colpus is Associate Professor of British and European History post-1850 at the University of Southampton, UK.
Ruth Davidson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Mile End Institute, School of History, Queen Mary University of London, UK.