The Future of Welfare History: the Local Perspective

This short article examines what local perspectives have added—and continue to add—to welfare history. The paper begins by summarising the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure on households and the ways they functioned and shows how work on local populations set many of today's research agendas. It then argues that a fruitful way forward might be to use national and regional studies to identify local case studies that would be particularly interesting or informative. This point is illustrated by discussing a range of examples. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of 'big' data and digitisation for local studies of welfare in the past.