Maria Droste zu Vischering was anenfant terrible, who was happier in the fields of her native Münsterland on horseback or in a fight with boys than among her dolls or in the parlour;¹ ‘My wild girl’, her maternal grand-uncle Wilhelm-Emmanuel von Ketteler affectionately called her. He was a well-known bishop, the patron of social Catholicism in Germany. The other famous bishop in her family was her paternal great grand-uncle, Clemens-August Droste zu Vischering (the son of her favourite uncle, Ferdinand von Galen, who himself would later in turn become a famous bishop under the Third Reich, was named after...

Around the year 1896, Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées¹ engineer M. Dupin drew up a sanitation project to create a modern sewage system for Montluçon, a middle-sized provincial and industrial city in France. Dupin’s hundred-page report contained more than one hundred references to other European cities, including Berlin, Brussels and London. This type of document, which can easily be found in a number of other French cities like Dijon and Toulon, among others, not only shows very clearly how, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most sanitary engineers had substantial international knowledge and information, but also how...

Industrial work was a driving concern for many states, social scientists, natural scientists, lawyers, physicians and, of course, workers and their families in the long nineteenth century. It was an issue relevant to both industrialized and industrializing states across the world, from Peru to Japan, and especially throughout Europe, eastwards from Great Britain to Russia, and southwards from Sweden to Italy. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the workplace, and, in particular, accidents at work and industrial hygiene, was the topic of an efflorescence of interconnected transnational networks in the period from the late 1880s to the 1910s. Nor is it...

As Edward Fuller was compiling the third edition of theInternational Handbook of Child Care and Protectionin 1928, he received a note from ‘an official of one of the states’ of whom he had asked ‘questions as to “child welfare” activity’. ‘We do not know what you mean by “child welfare”’, his correspondent had replied. Yet, pondered Fuller, that state harboured ‘public and private activities for the care and protection of children’. In a text that promoted the exchange of information and the production of uniform statistics, Fuller also noted that ‘word agreement’ was urgently required.¹ This chapter considers...

The general aim of this chapter is to make an empirical and methodological contribution to understanding the transnational dimension of social policy from 1840 to 1880. This period more or less coincides with the first of three consecutive ‘circulatory regimes’ in the field of social policy, which Pierre-Yves Saunier has recently identified. Saunier briefly describes the first circulatory regime as the exchange of words and experiences among churchmen and women, political activists, entrepreneurs, men of learning and migrants in order to resist, devise, support or change the response to problems stemming from the industrial and urban revolutions.¹ The first objective...

The Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales (or International Social Science Association [ISSA]) was founded in 1862; by the time of its third meeting – in Amsterdam at its annual congress in 1864 – it had already established itself among the congress movements in Europe. The ISSA aimed at nothing less than setting up a ‘United States of Europe’ by consolidating European law in every aspect. However, many contemporary commentators perceived the Amsterdam congress rather pessimistically. The LondonDaily Newsnoted, ‘[It] has certainly been the means of giving ventilation to a great many theories – some of...

Ethno-religious diaspora populations can look back on a long tradition of formally and informally organized cooperation between distant subcommunities in distinct political and cultural contexts. The historiography of the Jewish and other diasporas, however, remains strongly committed to the nation-state model. The emancipation of Jews in different states during the first half of the nineteenth century certainly constituted a crucial turning point in modern Jewish history. And yet German, British, French and other emancipated Jews did not leave their older loyalties and obligations fully behind as they became fully fledged citizens of different states. The question of how Jewish communities...

Perspectives on twentieth-century foundation philanthropy, especially in the United States, have been marked by the perception that the importance of these large organizations is due to the extraordinary scale of their endowments. Philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller or the Ford Foundation had ‘money to burn’ and used their financial muscle to shape societies around the globe.¹ This focus on finances, however, leads to the neglect of smaller organizations and obscures an aspect of foundation philanthropy that is arguably just as important as the amount of money spent. David C. Hammack, a historian of philanthropy, pointed out more than a...

In 1945 the pioneer English criminologist Leon Radzinowicz noted the existence of a common Western culture in the field of criminal policy.¹ Similar discourses and policies regarding the treatment of crime and criminals circulated in many countries, addressing issues such as the emergence of a modern prison system with specialized penal institutions and new forms of sanction besides imprisonment. This common culture had its roots in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when crucial changes in the field of criminal jurisprudence and policy in the Western world had occurred. Prison reform discourse had developed out of a number of...

At the end of the nineteenth century, the setting up of modern school systems raised a series of common questions and challenges at the European level.¹ Global trends such as demographic transition, industrialization, international migration, urbanization and the intensification of international trade imposed a new way of thinking about and organizing social life. Such trends contributed to shape new forms of youth socialization through the setting up of school structures in response to new educational demands.² The search for a balance between education, the training of qualified economic actors and the production of a social elite thus became the leitmotiv...

Between January and April 1919, the Commission for Labour Legislation (Commission pour la Législation du Travail) gathered in Paris, on the margins of the Peace Conference proper, to discuss the setting up of a new International Labour Organization (ILO) associated with the League of Nations. Reformist union activists, politicians andcommis d’Etatof the victorious powers that met in Paris were brought together against the Bolshevist revolution¹ as well as by the common ideas and experiences gained as participants, members or delegates of the International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL), created in 1900. The most influential among them were the...

This chapter examines aspects of relief and rehabilitation programmes in Poland in the aftermath of the First World War, focusing on the aspirations of actors involved in various operations in Europe after 1918 and on the extent to which these organizations were equipped to deal with emergencies. We define humanitarian action (including aid, relief and/or assistance) as an altruistic action that, according to the agent undertaking it, is intended to contribute to improving the moral well-being and political, social and economic standards of other human beings. In our case, the actors engaged in Poland claimed that their activities aimed to...