The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. It explores how the conception of belonging changed over time and space from the 1500s onwards, how communities dealt with the welfare expectations of an increasingly mobile population that migrated both within and between states, the welfare rights that were attached to those who “belonged,” and how ordinary people secured access to welfare resources. What emerged was a sophisticated European settlement system, which on the one hand structured itself to limit the claims of the poor, and yet on the other was peculiarly sensitive to their demands and negotiations.

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Introduction: Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1600-1950: Structures, Negotiations and Experiences
Joanna Innes, Steven King and Anne Winter

Chapter 1. Settlement and the Law in the Seventeenth Century
David Feldman

Chapter 2. Double Deterrence: Settlement and Practice in London’s West End, 1725–1824
Jeremy Boulton

Chapter 3. Poor Relief, Settlement and Belonging in England 1780s to 1840s
Steven King

Chapter 4. Memories of Pauperism
Jane Humphries

Chapter 5. Belonging, Settlement and the New Poor Law in England and Wales 1870s–1900s
Elizabeth Hurren

Chapter 6. Citizens But Not Belonging: Migrants’ Difficulties in Obtaining Entitlement to Relief in Switzerland from the 1550s to the Early Twentieth Century
Anne-Lise Head-König

Chapter 7. Overrun by Hungry Hordes? Migration and Poor Relief in the Netherlands, Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries
Marco H.D. van Leeuwen

Chapter 8. Agrarian Change, Labour Organization and Welfare Entitlements in the North-Sea Area, c. 1650-1800
Thijs Lambrecht

Chapter 9. Settlement Law and Rural-Urban Relief Transfers in Nineteenth-Century Belgium: A Case Study on Migrants’ Access to Relief in Antwerp
Anne Winter

Chapter 10. Trajectories of German Settlement Regulations: The Prussian Rhine Province, 1815–1914
Andreas Gestrich

Afterward: National Citizenship and Migrants’ Social Rights in Twentieth-Century Europe
Paul-André Rosental

Notes on Contributors
Bibliography