Poor Yield of a Rich Field: An Undeserving 'History of Poverty' in Early Modern Europe

The new Routledge History of Poverty, c. 1450-1800 provides neither a "history" nor a coherent concept of "poverty" and rests on an inappropriate time scale. However, a closer discussion of these flaws enables a more consistent perspective, based on the idea that the interplay of "labour" and "poverty" (epitomized in the notion of the "labouring poor") forms the crucial key to the understanding of the decisive long-term theme in the history of poverty and poor relief in Europe from 1350 to 1850. It was in the aftermath of the Black Death and again during the "crisis of pauperism" in the early nineteenth century that the experience of severe crises of the labour market led to changes in poor law policy aimed at the combined social control of both "labourers" and the "poor".