Social capital and the history of mortality in Britain.

history has a significant contribution to make in the debate about the role of social capital in shaping health patterns. They illustrate this by focusing on the impact of social welfare on mortality in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While agreeing with the authors about the importance of history, we will present evidence to suggest different conclusions about the historical role of social capital. The authors' thesis on the historical relationship between social capital and mortality may be summarized in their own words as follows: The British polity had by the beginning of the 19 th century established itself as the most prosperous, socially cohesive, and socially secure in Europe, proven through the capacity of its national security system, the Poor Law, to protect its citizens from local famines since the 17 th century. .. . There was abundant and burgeoning bridging and linking social capital, particularly in the towns. .. . For almost a century, from the 1730s until the 1820s. .. its average life expectancy also steadily improved. .. . But then all this changes. For about a half a century, from the 1820s until the 1870s. .. the growing towns' physical environment were simply allowed to deteriorate as ever more workers crowded in to work in the money-making factories. .. the industrial urban workers and their families experienced a catastrophic crises in the second quarter of the 19 th century. .. in the central parishes of cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, life expectancies dropped to about 25 years. .. . The breakthrough did not come until the 1870s. .. pioneered in the city of Birmingham through the political leadership of Joseph Chamberlain. .. [who] legitimized the moral and politically energizing imperative for the collective attack on squalor, poverty and disease. 1 Although data on the history of mortality is incomplete, new research on long-term mortality raises serious questions about the above thesis. Detailed work, using parish registers for London and the county of Bedfordshire, suggests that infant and child mortality approximately doubled between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, both amongst wealthy and non-wealthy families. In London mortality peaked in the middle of the eighteenth century, whereas in Bedfordshire and possibly elsewhere this peak in infant and child mortality did not occur in the general population until the second half of the eighteenth century. 2 This is the period in which Szreter and …