www.historyandpolicy.org
‘What Have Henry VIII and Elizabeth I got to do with
21st-century development policy?‘
History and Policy Public Lecture at Gresham College
18 June 2013
Simon Szreter
Professor of History and Public Policy U. Of Cambridge.
History and Policy 2002-13: now a network
of 400 historians, from UK and elsewhere
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‘What Have Henry VIII and Elizabeth I got to do
with 21st-century development policy?‘
Economists’ prior implicit historical knowledge
about welfare states, growth and development:
• Overall evaluation: not optimal for growth-promotion but
perhaps an affordable luxury for more prosperous democracies;
• Acknowledged virtues addressing market failure: safety net for
casualties of economic progress; improving human capital of the
impoverished; defusing injustices that can fuel discontent (Bismarck)
• BUT:
• A burden on ‘the productive economy’
• A tax on ‘wealth-creators’
• A moral hazard creating welfare-dependency, disincentives to work
• Raises the price of labour
• Disincentives to charity, philanthropy, volunteering, civil society
• THEREFORE:
• Inadvisable for development in low income countries where
informal, familial social security cheaper and more appropriate
Structure of presentation
• A) Historians’ revisionism over the chronology of Britain’s
industrial revolution
• B) Economists’ revisionist focus on the importance of
institutions for the growth of markets
• C) The differential experience of Holland and England
1600-1800- an institutional explanation
• D) historians’ new knowledge of the ‘Old’ Poor Law
• E) A welfare state as a key pro-growth institution in the
paradigm case: England’s emergence from low income
• F) History > Policy: the influence of the history of Tudor
legislation and social policy on Development Policy
Contemporary Development Policy still reflecting
the Historical Scholarship of the last generation on
the Industrial Revolution in Britain
• The 1950s-70s orthodoxy: ‘take-off’ 1780-1840
• I.C.O.R.: Capital Investment, technological
innovation, entrepreneurship and private enterprise:
producing explosive growth of markets1780-1840:
steam engine, factory, railway, international trade.
• Phyllis Deane and W. Cole, British Economic
Growth 1688-1959 (1962)
• W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth
(1960; 3rd edition 1990)
1980-2000: the era of ‘Washington consensus’ in
development policy; but also of a ‘revisionist
historiography: ‘slow growth’: gradual, long-term
• E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield: The Population History
of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (1981)
• C.K. Harley, ‘British Industrialisation before 1841:
evidence of slower growth during the industrial
revolution’ Journal Of Economic History 1982
• N. Crafts, British economic growth during the industrial
revolution (1985)
Institutions matter for markets!
Douglass North (1993 Nobel Prize in Economics):
Structure & Change in Economic History (1981)
• Three interlocking institutions emerged in
leading market economies of Holland and
England between C12th and C17th:
• Formal law: Individual private property rights (to
buy or sell land without kin/community restraint)
• Social norms: a rationalising belief system
acknowledging the morality of commodity
relations: interest (not usury), wage labour
• State enforcement of laws and norms with
credible and universal sanctions- ‘the rule of law’
A unique English institution?
Universal social security: the ‘Old’ Poor Law
• A complete shift by c.1660 from crisis management in
government response to dearth (food insecurity)
through use of the Book of Orders, which abrogated the
market through price and quantity controls, to a system
of ‘entitlements’ (as defined by Amartya Sen) which left
the grain market undisturbed while endowing the urban
and rural poor with sufficient purchasing power
(exchange entitlements) through transfer payments of
the Poor Law (‘outdoor relief’)
• Peter Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development before
the industrial revolution’. Economic History Review 1995
• Steve Hindle, On the Parish? (Oxford 2004)
• Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare’s Forgotten Past (Routledge 2010)
The Elizabethan or ‘Old’ Poor Law: statutes
‘For the Relief of the Poor’ 1598 and 1601
• a universal legal right to relief for every subject
• every one of England’s approximately 10,000 or more parishes
mandated to create a parish fund
• financed by a local tax pro rata to property value
• to support the local poor all year round if necessary, not just in times
of dearth
• orphans, widows, the old and disabled and the unemployed all
covered in principle.
•
By requiring the parish to levy an adequate poor rate from its property
owners, an unstable pre-Reformation arrangement of purely voluntary
Christian charity, dependent on wealthy individuals’ sense of religious
obligation and so subject to the free rider problem, was superseded by a
system of obligatory taxation for all wealth-holders in the parish.
•
(Abram De Swaan, A. (1988). In Care of the State, pp.21-36)
Getting incentives right: The Charitable
Uses Act, passed simultaneously in 1601
•
From 1601 wealthy families were simultaneously further incentivised to earn kudos
through charitable initiatives intelligently designed to enhance the personal
independence of the poor – and incidentally reducing their long-term Poor Law costs!
•
•
•
Schools for Poor Scholars
Almshouses for the elderly
Subscription Hospitals
•
Encouraging a culture of creative local initiatives in Poor Law administration, too:
•
•
•
•
•
Apprenticeships for orphans
Salubrious cottages for the poor
Support for single mothers (cost recovery from fathers)
House of Industry in urban parishes
Poor Law Infirmaries (in Houses of Industry)
The Poor Law: a universalist and
mandatory but devolved system
• Strengths:
devolved administration
high quality information
• Potential weaknesses:
local corruption
free-riding between parishes
unlimited liability
Solutions to potential problems
• J.P.s (Justices of the Peace; ‘Magistrates’) holding office
at pleasure of the Crown but locally resident, providing
cheap accessible justice available for the poor to make
personal appeal ‘‘at the justice’s home or on the hunting
field’ with immediate decision (Charlesworth, p.51)
• Exclusion of free-riding parishes by Privy Council (the
inner council created by Thomas Cromwell in the 1530svigorous until 1660, a precursor to the modern Cabinet)
• The Settlement Laws (1662) plus parish registers
‘The Poor Law’ c.1660-1834
• Four interlocking institutions of local
governance, mandated by central govt,
providing an effective accessible welfare state
•
•
•
•
Poor Laws
Justices of the Peace
Settlement Laws
Parish Registers
English Levels of Poor Law Relief
• 1696 (Board of Trade returns): Poor Law funds
sufficient for 6 months support for 10% of whole
population (approx 1% National Income)
• 1783-5 (Parl. Enquiry): Poor Law funds sufficient
for 12 months support for 10% of whole
population (approx 2% National Income)
• 1802-3: 1 million (11% total population) on Poor
Law relief (93% ‘outdoor relief’)
• Source: Richard Smith’s chapter in Bayly, Rao, Szreter &
Woolcock,eds, History, Historians and Development Policy
(Manchester U. Press 2011)
Evidence for Poor Law
effectiveness for Population Health
• Cambridge Group for the History of
Population 4% sample (404 parishes)
found no evidence of national or regional
famine crisis mortality after 1623/4.
• English population free from food
insecurity over 150 years before any other
countries of Western Europe
Economic development and growth-enhancing
properties of England’s welfare state
institutions
• Enhance planning, saving, prudential
perspectives in a food-secure populace
• Facilitated genuinely productivity-raising
innovations in agriculture
• capacity to promote labour mobility around
the economy
• capacity also to facilitate mobility and
security of intergenerational capital (parish
registers)
Parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials
in Henry VIII’s new Church of England
• Instituted in 1538 by injunction of Thomas Cromwell,
Henry VIII’s Vicar-General and chief minister 1532-40.
• ‘…for the avoiding of sundry strifes and
processes and contentions arising from age,
lineal descent , title of inheritance, legitimation of
bastardy, and for knowledge, whether any
person is our subject or no.’
• (statement issued by Cromwell to the Justices of the
Peace in every county, explaining the primary function of
the new parish registers
Thomas Cromwell, 1485-1540
(portrait by Hans Holbein 1533)
blacksmith’s son who became First Earl of Essex
Land ownership in early modern England
(% cultivated area): 1436
1688
• Church and Crown
• Great Magnates
25-35
15-20
5-10
15-20
• All others (middling
45-55
& lesser gentry, yeomen farmers, small-holders)
70-75
CGA Clay, Economic Expansion. England
1500-1700 (CUP 1984), p.143, Table V
The Settlement Laws and Labour
Mobility?
• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776):
• ‘The obstruction which corporation laws give to
the free circulation of labour is common, I
believe to every part of Europe. That which is
given to it by the poor laws is, so far as I know,
peculiar to England. …The difficulty of obtaining
settlements obstructs even [the mobility of]
common labour.’ (Book I, ch.X).
Settlement Laws and the endemic
mobility of young adults in practice
• 60-90% marriages in parish registers 1600-1800
show at least one partner not born in the parish
• Portable certificates
• Non-resident relief agreements between
parishes (circumventions of the Settlement
Laws) by late 18th century
•
i) J.S.
Taylor, Sojourners’ Narratives (1989): 1,300 surviving
letters from Kirby Lonsdale 1809-36 demonstrate an
informal system in operation throughout West Yorks &
Lancashire; ii) T.Sokoll Essex Pauper Letters 17311837(2001) demonstrates similar practices in
London/Essex
Development Policy Options for Africa & India
Suggested by English Poor Law History
• Investment in social security/welfare systems is not
just ‘humanitarian assistance’ but foundational market
institution: for a population of mobile, empowered
agents, with respect to labour, land and capital
• Local administrative responsibility can be highly
effective, but only if independently monitored with
cheap access to impartial justice for grievances of the
poor, against corruption and exploitation
• Systems of social security entail resource transfers
from rich to poor. For political legitimacy they depend
on designing systems to prevent evasion of
responsibilities by rich and to define agreed limits of
liability to entitled claimants, Both require effective (and
trustworthy) identity registration system
• All this takes time and policy commitment over the longterm of 2-3 generations, not 2-3 years.
Tudor History to 21st Century Development Policy
in India
•
•
•
•
•
Nandan Nilekani Imagining India (2008), p.350: "Unique identification for each
citizen also ensures a basic right -the right to "an acknowledged existence" in the
country, without which much of a nation's poor can be nameless and ignored,
and governments can draw a veil over large-scale poverty and destitution. … No
one else can then claim a benefit that is rightfully yours, and no one can deny
their economic status, whether abjectly poor or extremely wealthy "
[Citing Szreter historical article on 16th-18th century England published in World
Development Jan 2007 'The right of registration: development, identity registration
and social security - an historical perspective‘
President of India, Pratibha Patil’s address to the newly-elected 15th Lok Sabha (Indian
Parliament) in New Delhi June 4th 2009, paragraph 13:
‘The Unique Identity Card scheme for each citizen will be implemented in three years
overseen by an Empowered Group. This would serve the purpose of identification for
development programmes and security.’
Biometric registration system currently being implemented across all-India by the
Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI), Chairman Nandan Nilikani.
www.historyandpolicy.org
‘What Have Henry VIII and Elizabeth I got to do with
21st-century development policy?‘
History and Policy Public Lecture at Gresham College
18 June 2013
Simon Szreter
Professor of History and Public Policy U. Of Cambridge.