This collection examines the variety of relationships between statutory and voluntary sectors, and considers two hundred and fifty years of welfare provision on an international scale.

Bernard Harris is Professor of the History of Social Policy at the University of Southampton (UK). He has published a wide range of articles on different aspects of the social history of health and welfare and is the author of The origins of the British welfare state: social welfare in England and Wales 1800-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

Paul Bridgen is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Southampton. He has published a range of articles on different aspects of twentieth-century British public policy and is the coeditor (with Traute Meyer and Barbara Riedemÿller) of Private pensions versus social inclusion? Non-state provision for citizens at risk in Europe (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2007).

1. Introduction: the 'mixed economy of welfare' and the historiography of welfare provision, Bernard Harris and Paul Bridgen 2. Charity and poor relief in England and Wales, circa 1750-1914, Bernard Harris 3. The mixed moral economy of welfare: European perspectives, Thomas Adams 4. Supporting self-help: charity, mutuality and reciprocity in nineteenth-century Britain, Daniel Weinbren 5. Historical welfare economics from the old regime to the welfare state. Mutual aid and private insurance for burial, sickness, old age, widowhood and unemployment in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century, Marco van Leeuwen 6. Welfare state formation in Scandinavia: the political significance of third-sector organisations for the emergence of sickness-insurance programmes in Norway and Sweden, Peter Johansson 7. Housing charities and the provision of social housing in Germany and the United States of America, Great Britain and Canada in the nineteenth century, Thomas Adam 8. 'New alignments': American voluntarism and the expansion of welfare in the 1920s, Andrew Morris 9. Voluntary failure, the middle classes and the nationalisation of the British voluntary hospitals, 1900-1946, Paul Bridgen. Contributors. Index