Introduction to Part III

In Part II of the book I turned to the Hansard archive on bingo—a regrettably untapped scholarly source—to understand how lawmakers saw gambling within national visions of welfare, risk, and insurance. In the remainder of the book (Parts III and IV), I move on to explore how gambling regulation actually works—or fails to work—in practice. I am interested in how regulation feels; how it distributes benefits across gambling sectors; how it both shapes and reflects social relations (including class and gender relations); and how it has sometimes unintended material consequences....