Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Inferior Politics explores how social policy was created in Britain in a period when central government was not active in making it. Parliament proved capable of generating national legislation nonetheless--and provided a forum for debate even when it was impossible to mobilize consensus behind any particular plan. In this setting, there was a lively, and surprisingly inclusive, "politics" of social policy-making, in which "inferior" officers of government (what we might call "local…