From charity reform to the New Poor Law

Chapter 1 traces the origin of modern social policy debate back to the early capitalist development in sixteenth-century Europe. The chapter presents a discussion of the socioeconomic transformations which have changed both the character and the perceptions of work and poverty and led to the emergence of publicly funded social assistance measures implemented by lay political authorities. Continuity and change in the approaches to poverty and the working poor is discussed through the age of mercantilism and the progress of industrial development until the nineteenth-century market-dominated capitalist order. Rival perspectives on economic development and the requirements of social justice are presented by revisiting the ideas of humanist writers of the sixteenth century or the different eighteenth-century approaches to social policy-related problems of writers such as Defoe, Mandeville, Smith and Burke.