Market solutions for social problems: working-class housing in nineteenth-century London.
F inding a policy framework within which to reconcile social welfare objectives with market economies has been a major concern of politicians and social commentators for over a century. In the early twentieth century these concerns culminated in a set of 'New Liberal' welfare reforms in which the state assumed a larger role as the agency through which market imperfections or failures could be addressed.2 Early welfare subject literature presented these changes as part of a unilinear trend towards the inevitable development of a 'welfare state' in which public provision replaced the outdated and inadequate efforts of charitable agencies.3 More recently, this 'whig' interpretation has been revised and the state is presented as only one provider among others within a 'mixed economy of welfare'.4 )While the 'old' welfare subject literature premised the inevitability of state intervention upon an implicit story of market failure, the 'new' literature has a tendency to forget the market altogether as a possible provider of social welfare. Although Daunton suggests that 'voluntarism and the market may be seen as alternatives to taxation', revisionist historians have focused attention on the relationship between the voluntary sector and the state, while neglecting to consider ways in which the market may offer alternatives to public provision.5 Historians have explored the shifting boundaries between public provision (implying the state) and private welfare (denoting the individual, the family, or the voluntary association).6 This article makes a contribution to the welfare subject literature by considering an example of a social problem-insanitary and over-crowded housing-where joint-stock companies pioneered the most extensive attempts to reconcile the operation of the market and the social objectives of society.