The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States by Julia Moses (review)

Julia Moses has written an excellent comparative history of British, German, and Italian state-directed workplace accident insurance in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized around the “legal gaze” (255) — or how states evaluated workplace accidents for compensation within a field — determined by “the relationship between risk, responsibility and statehood” (10). The main material out of which she constructs this history is the “grey” literature (18) that state and parastate entities produced to explain, justify, and occasionally propagandize for their procedures. This source base allows her to “illuminat[e] the interactive bureaucratic-societal dynamics that drove the evolution of social policy” (10). Moses draws on archival work as well as substantial secondary literatures for all three national contexts and languages, taking a broadly chronological approach to the period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War. Put differently, this is the path from an 1835 case in which a British laborer tried and failed to win damages when an overloaded cart fell on him (21), to the determination that families of sailors killed in the Titanic disaster would receive British worker’s compensation payments whatever their nationality (162), to crises in the German social insurance system triggered by post–World War I inflation (229).

Moses’s temporal and geographic reach, combined with the depth of treatment in each national context, is extremely impressive and supports her conclusions while also suggesting further questions. The First Modern Risk is a legal history of certain kinds of insurance in which states took an interest. It is thus also a history of the emergence of the “social state,” the creation of which “paralleled the birth of many of [Europe’s] nation states” (9). Many scholars — such as Hannah Arendt and Istvan Hont — have sought to understand this parallel. The wealth of detail and analytic nuance in The First Modern Risk allow us to eavesdrop on the internal monologue of the social state and ought to be part of future attempts to place the social state in a longer history of capitalism or modernity.

Moses distances herself from both Marxist-inflected sociologists such as Claus Offe and “neo-Foucaultian” scholarship such as François Ewald’s major work on the French laws of the same moment. Rather than seeing emerging social welfare systems as either disciplining or freeing, revisionist or revolutionary, she demonstrates the value of approaching the mechanisms of state intervention as semi-autonomous practices and legal logics that embodied “state-ness”: for instance in the post office, where a widow might pick up the pension payments compensating her for the work-related death of her husband, or in the bureaucratic discussions over the desirability of converting such annuities into lump-sum payments to reduce dependency. Moses draws on and takes issue with a large body of scholarship treating the relationship between the state, welfare, statistics, and labor, including historians such as Anson Rabinbach and Wolfgang Schivelbusch as well as philosophers and sociologists such as Niklas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck.

Commercial insurance schemes had existed in Europe for centuries and by the eighteenth century were highly sophisticated. They protected property, not labor. This was part of a liberal form of governance and “a free-market understanding of labour” (33). Indeed, even as liability law began to develop for consumers — for instance because of rail travel — “the assumption was that every worker understood the risks associated with a particular job when agreeing to that job” (33). In the later nineteenth century the conditions of labor and ideas about risk began to change. Industrial work became more anonymous and lower skilled, and catastrophic accidents such as the explosion of a steam boiler came to seem more and more disconnected from any individual person’s actions. At the same time, states began to collect new kinds of statistics. The concept of “occupational risk” arose in this later nineteenth-century...