Abstract:

The world’s first nationwide, publicly funded welfare system emerged and solidified in England over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence on society and economy during this period was profound, but this article is the first attempt to determine the scale of its impact by examining the amount of money annually spent on relief across the whole period. Drawing on data from 184 widely dispersed parishes over more than two centuries and a new estimate for spending in c.1600, it shows that poor relief experienced alternating phases of rapid expansion, relative stability and occasionally outright retrenchment. Levels of redistribution were pushed higher by both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ factors. Specifically, trends in relief spending are compared to other indices such as population, economic expansion, central government revenues, labourers’ wages and inflation to show how the growth of poor relief related to wider demographic and economic changes. Such comparisons make it possible to think more clearly about causation: how much of the growth in spending can be attributed to such developments? While law, demography, inflation and other well-attested factors certainly contributed to the rise of this early modern welfare system, the poor themselves may well have played an important role.

中文翻译：

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英格兰教区福利国家的兴起，c.1600–1800**

摘要：

17 世纪和 18 世纪期间，世界上第一个由公共资助的全国性福利制度在英格兰出现并得到巩固。它在这一时期对社会和经济的影响是深远的，但本文首次尝试通过研究整个时期每年用于救济的资金数额来确定其影响的规模。利用两个多世纪以来广泛分布的 184 个教区的数据以及对c支出的新估计.1600，它表明救济差经历了快速扩张、相对稳定和偶尔彻底收缩的交替阶段。“供应”和“需求”因素都推高了再分配水平。具体而言，将救济支出的趋势与人口、经济扩张、中央政府收入、劳动者工资和通货膨胀等其他指标进行比较，以显示贫困救济的增长与更广泛的人口和经济变化之间的关系。这样的比较可以更清楚地思考因果关系：支出的增长有多少可以归因于这种发展？虽然法律、人口、通货膨胀和其他公认的因素确实促成了这种早期现代福利制度的兴起，但穷人本身很可能发挥了重要作用。