In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization-challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations-neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed-it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe.

Lutz Raphael is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Trier. His recent books include Imperiale Gewalt und Mobilisierte Nation: Europa 1914-1945 (2011) and (together with Altay Coskun) Fremd und rechtlos?: Zugehörigkeitsrechte Fremder von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ein Handbuch (2014).

Illustrations
Figures and Tables

Introduction: Poverty and Endangered Social Ties: An Introduction
Beate Althammer and Tamara Stazic-Wendt

Chapter 1. Poverty and Social Bonds: Towards a Theory of Attachment Regimes
Serge Paugam

PART I: ENDANGERED CHILDHOODS

Chapter 2. Living at the Edge of Society: Wallchian Orphans in Nineteenth-Century Bucharest
Nicoleta Roman

Chapter 3. Orphans, Pauper Children or Wayward Children? The Lives of Children Cared for by Public Institutons in Hamburg, 1892-1914
Katharina Brandes

Chapter 4. The Reduction of Poverty Starts with Children: Swiss Societies for Educating the Poor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Ernst Guggisberg

Chapter 5. Compassion for the Distant Other: Children's Hunger and Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War
Frederike Kind-Kovács

PART II: VAGRANCY AND HOMELESSNESS

Chapter 6. Traditional Mobility and Solidarity in Crisis: Jeremias Gotthelf's Response to Pauperism in the Vormärz
Andrew Cusack

Chapter 7. Controlling Vagrancy: Germany, England and France, 1880-1914
Beate Althammer

Chapter 8. The Prolbem of Homelessness in Postwar Britain
Tehila Sasson

PART III: UNEMPLOYMENT

Chapter 9. 'United Idle Men with Idle Land': The Evolution of the Hollesley Bay Training Farm Experiment for the London Unemployed, 1905-1908
Elizabeth A. Scott

Chapter 10. An Unbearable Social Existence: The Unemployed in Rural Poor Relief (Germany, 1918-1933)
Tamara Stazic-Wendt

Chapter 11. How Unemployment was Normalized by the Establishment of Public Labour Exchanges in Austria, 1918-1938
Irina Vana

Chapter 12. The Poor Unemployed: Diagnoses of Unemployment in Britain and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s
Wiebke Wiede

PART IV: RE-ESTABLISHING SOCIAL TIES: NARRATIVES AND APPEALS FROM THE POOR

Chapter 13. Voices from the Lower Depths: Russian Poor in Their Own Words
Hubertus Jahn

Chapter 14. 'They Sit for Days and Have Only Their Sorrow to Eat': Old Age Poverty in German and British Pauper Narratives
Andreas Gestrich and Daniela Heinisch

Chapter 15. Seen With Their Own Eyes: Self-Presentation of the Poor in Freiburg and Schwerin, 1950-1975
Dorothee Lürbke

Conclusion: The Twisted Paths of Recognition and Protection: Vulnerability and Welfare in European Societies
Lutz Raphael

Bibliography
Index