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.

Table of Contents:
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