Events

The Annual Isidore I. Benrubi Lecture
“Public Health and Social Security: The Keys to Unlocking Economic Growth in England?”
Britain’s pioneering industrial revolution holds important lessons for proponents of contemporary public and development policy to ponder. Although often dismissed by economists as irrelevant, institutions associated with social and personal security, health preservation, identity registration and local access to justice were essential to promoting economic productivity in early modern England.

England’s precocious universal, social security system – the tax-funded Old Poor Law – offered even the poorest in the community effective protection from food scarcity and from personal misfortune while it also contributed to labour access to justice.

Simon Szreter, PhD, is Reader in History and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge where he teaches modern British economic and social history, the comparative history of population, development and environment in Britain, Africa, India and China. He is a founding member of the History and Policy Network and co-editor of www.historyandpolicy.org. He is the 2009 Viseltear Prize by the American Public Health Association for outstanding contributions to the history of public health.

Reception will follow.