JAN DE VRIES
Catharina Lis and Hugo Sol3' have written a book that offers, in five chronologically ordered chapters, a panoramic view of a process of impoverishment from the high Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century, a process they hold to be closely linked to the development and triumph of the capitalist mode of production. A second, analytically distinguishable, purpose of their book is to describe the methods by which society sought to relieve poverty and to analyze the changing strategies of poor-relief in the light of the imperatives of capitalist accumulation.
The analysis of poor-relief is easily the more novel contribution of the book. Lis and Soly apply to a broad sweep of European history some recently developed insights about the functions and logic of poor-relief. They seek to show how the changing character of the labor market -brought about by capitalist development -forces the abandonment of indiscriminate and uncoordinated alms giving in favor of a systematic, labor-controlling and regulating system of relief, and how this system assumed full-employment and structural-unemployment modes, depending on local circumstances.
One can regret that the authors did not devote more space to the development of these themes and to their reconciliation with the many exceptions and ambiguous cases that come to mind. For example, their approach offers a convincing explanation for the rise of workhouses in eighteenth century