ABSTRACT

Previous authors have drawn attention to the role played by loan-financed public works in reducing mortality in England and Wales during the latter part of the nineteenth century. These arguments have often been based on an analysis of the loans sanctioned by the Government’s central health departments following the creation of the first General Board of Health in 1848, but little attempt has been made to disaggregate the loans either by function or geographical area. Moreover, as the Local Government Board itself acknowledged, it is also important to take account of the large number of loans which were approved by other means. This paper offers the first large-scale chronological account of the full range of loans which were either approved by Local Act of Parliament or sanctioned by a central department throughout the whole of the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of the First World War. Although it largely supports the outline provided by previous research, it draws new attention to the importance of the loans which were authorised in the wake of the US Civil War in the 1860s. It also explores the relationship between these loans and the decline of mortality in areas which have previously been identified as ‘high-performing and high-contributing areas’ to Britain’s late nineteenth-century mortality decline, and makes an initial attempt to link these loans to the improvements which occurred.

摘要

先前的作者提请人们注意在19世纪后期，贷款资助的公共工程在降低英格兰和威尔士的死亡率方面所起的作用。这些论点通常基于对政府中央卫生部门在1848年成立首个卫生总局之后批准的贷款的分析，但很少尝试按功能或地理区域对贷款进行分类。此外，正如地方政府委员会本身所承认的那样，考虑到大量通过其他方式批准的贷款也很重要。本文提供了从拿破仑战争结束到第一次世界大战整个时期内通过国会地方法案批准或由中央部门批准的全部贷款的第一个大规模时间顺序说明。世界大战。尽管它在很大程度上支持了先前研究提供的纲要，但它引起了人们对1860年代美国内战后批准的贷款的重要性的新关注。它还探讨了这些贷款与以前被认为是英国19世纪末死亡率下降的“高绩效，高贡献地区”地区的死亡率下降之间的关系，并进行了初步尝试将这些贷款与发生的改进。