Abstract
War has long played a central role in discussions of the rise of the British welfare state. War did not just help create the welfare state, but shaped its nature. This paper, drawing on much recent revisionist literature, retells the story of the relations of war and welfare in this key case. It makes clear that the welfare state for service personnel and veterans was, in both world wars, different from the welfare state for the mass of the population and that there is a need to systematically consider the two over time. In peace and in war, the British state was both a welfare and a warfare state, each operating to different rules. The paper also endorses the view that the reforms in welfare of the 1920s were very much more significant than those of the Edwardian years, and indeed created a working-class welfare state which was extended to the whole population after 1945.
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