Study of the English poor has been dominated by attention to the Poor Laws, which after 1601 guaranteed relief from destitution to those with legal settlements in a given parish, although the laws did little to eliminate poverty. But what of those denied relief or given too little? Using the concept of “the economy of makeshifts” first developed for the French population by Olwen Hufton (The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) Stephen King and Alannah Tomkins direct attention to the range of tactics and resources needed for survival during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because they see the Old Poor Law as regionally uneven and unpredictable, the poor, they argue, had to work for subsistence through multiple channels. Their collection of essays uses a wide range of documents to explore welfare strategies and, most originally, the relationship among alternative sources of income in particular communities. The introduction does a fine job of situating findings in the context of earlier scholarship, while tagging differences between north and south, urban and rural communities, and men and women for special attention. In contrast to optimists who see the Old Poor Law as a complete, sometimes generous, social welfare system and the economy of makeshifts as a sign of individual success, King and his co-authors adopt a more pessimistic view both in reference to parish relief and to the economy of makeshifts, which King calls “an expression of despair and communal failure” (p. 251).

The economy of makeshifts is easier to delineate than to document. The book offers multiple paths into the topic—through the study of charities, crime, kinship networks, pawning, and the defense of common rights, each an alternative source of income for some of the poor. The difficulty comes in discovering who used which resources in what combination and with what particular costs and benefits. Because the essays center on different tactics in disparate places and periods, meshing the results is not a straightforward matter. In that sense, the collection is as much a call for further research as it is a presentation of clear-cut results.

Stephen King's essay, “Making the Most of Opportunity: The Economy of Makeshifts in the Early Modern North,” offers the book's most complete picture of the balance of locally available resources. King analyzes the funding available in the Lancashire township of Cowpe via charities, mill employment, credit, parish work, and relief to show that the poor law was “a significant source of welfare, but nonetheless a minority player in the overall resources available (p. 250)” Between 1800 and 1830, he concludes, parish relief offered only between 40 and 50 percent of the money available to a sample of poor families identified through local records. By linking together multiple lists of local names, he demonstrates that wages, credit, and public employment made up the rest of their budgets. Sam Barrett's work on the West Riding uses family reconstruction techniques to outline the ways in which kinship networks shaped access to and provision of welfare. He goes well beyond the familiar argument that the “kin-poor” disproportionately had to rely on the poor law to show ways in which the kin-rich had access to other resources, such as local charities, job opportunities, and gifts to increase incomes. Social credit, whether in the forms of reputation or of extended family resources, is an understudied subject applicable to the poor as well as to elites. Alannah Tomkins's work on pawnbroking in the town of York shows how an important urban institution granted small amounts of credit to a large number of people. A pawnbroker's journal of pledges and redemptions enables her to categorize the money and goods that flowed through George Fettes's shop in 1777 and 1778. Although little frequented by paupers or tradesmen, the pawnbroker allowed around 15 percent of the York population credit based upon resources stored in the form of clothing and other household items. Women's disproportionate use of pawning gives clear evidence of gender differences in strategies of income maintenance.

The relationship of welfare strategies to the law is tackled by Steve Hindle, who studies common rights, and by Heather Shore, whose subject is London petty crime. Clearly, the extent to which poverty served as an excuse for challenges of either forest rights or the criminal law varied with social status and ideology. Both authors do a good job of outlining clashes in cultural assumptions, as does Sarah Lloyd in her investigation of the Welsh Charity School in London. All three articles bring out the ambiguities inherent in the concept of the agency of the poor. Although an expense of energy in the interests of survival is integral to the concept of an economy of makeshifts, this volume demonstrates wide differences not only in tactics but in the language and self-presentation of the poor. Rights could be asserted individually and indirectly via deference, or communally and stridently in a court case. Just as the Old Poor Law was not one system of relief, the poor were not one cultural group. King and Tomkins's collection of essays effectively advances the discussion of welfare strategies beyond core economic issues to the cultural categories that informed them.