Julia Moses. The First Modern Risk

In The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States, which focuses on Great Britain, Germany, and Italy from the mid-nineteenth century onward, Julia Moses argues that modern European states and their policies to compensate injured workers were mutually constitutive. As European nations industrialized, it became clear that industrialization’s externalities were not evenly distributed; the notion, however, that the state should oversee ameliorating risk or providing compensating for accidents was new. For Italy, the least developed economically of the three and, at least initially, the least sophisticated at collecting statistics, the state’s ability to oversee social provision became proof of modernization. The Italian state, newly unified, not only had centripetal tendencies by region but also faced both destabilizing demonstrations by angry workers and resistance to change from a Catholic Church that had long viewed the care of the poor and the disabled as its own remit. The Italian government did what little it could, pressuring jurists to make more generous settlements under the civil code, and attempting to create a voluntary national accident fund, but the vast majority of Italian workers lay outside the protection of the law.

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