The question of how to establish mutuality and collective responsibility is at the heart of Trust among Strangers. From the late seventeenth through the late nineteenth century, when migration, urbanization, and commercialization destabilized trust, social welfare, and the parish system, Penelope Ismay finds the answer in friendly society. The “concept and practice” (1) of friendly societies—mutual-aid organizations formed to protect members against debts incurred in illness, death, or old age—replaced local knowledge and face to face relations, ultimately providing welfare for 75 percent of Britons. Ismay claims that the friendly society created conditions of belonging “incorporating people who were unknown to each other” (10) spread out over vast distances. The book argues that these organizations—entered into voluntarily by laborers and artisans—created practices of mutuality and produced international networks of reciprocity. These were based as much on a commitment to brotherhood as they were on actuarial science.

Ismay begins by tracing the origins of mutual aid societies to medieval trade and craft guilds and the successful “box clubs” and “sick clubs” of the eighteenth century that became known as friendly societies in the 1780s. The protection they received in legislation from 1793 is especially remarkable given the repressive measures taken in the period of the French Revolution to restrict membership in and attendance at the meetings of other organizations. Chapter 2 discusses the friendly societies in relation to the new Poor Law. As with all schemes for relief, reformers were concerned with distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor. Given greater mobility and the inaccessibility of local or moral knowledge about the recipient, friendly societies offered a way to draw and police that line providing a new basis of social trust. But friendly societies were not the only institutions to offer up a solution to economic distress. In the midst of the social and fiscal crisis between 1815 and 1817, the savings bank detailed in chapter 3 seemed to provide an individualistic alternative to mutuality. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Manchester Unity. With this case study, Ismay reconstructs how this vast institution deployed male sociability and brotherly love through ritual and conviviality to establish trust and mutual charity among members in lodges across England and the empire, many of whom remained strangers to each other.

Ismay asserts that “the social relationships and cultural systems that creditors used to make assessments of trustworthiness were not created for the purpose of facilitating the credit economy—rather they formed the social fabric through which economic life was woven” (19). She promises to “recenter questions of collective responsibility and the way that the concept and practice of friendly society helped contemporaries to grapple with them. In doing so, this book fleshes out this larger social world” (19). Given this starting point and the extensive studies of England's diversity in the eighteenth century, the omission of any examination of religious differences, racial differences, and ethnic differences as they related to the friendly society's membership and operation in England is surprising, especially in light of Ismay's concern with the lines of inclusion and exclusion. She never engages with how the lines were drawn and who fell on which side over the course of the 120 years covered by the study. The top-down approach relies on prescriptive literature featuring the approving commentary from reformers and the biographies of the leadership of the movement. Voices from the men (women were actively excluded) who joined are absent. Gender is sidelined as a category of analysis despite the myriad questions raised by these insistently homosocial societies and what their elaborate social rituals and celebratory toasts might imply about masculinity, patriarchy, and the normative definition of the provider. The extensive mention of the elaborate practices of sociability among the members and their important role in forming bonds of obligation does not substantiate the claim that the societies forged cross-class bonds.

The geographic scope of the book is England. After all the work that has been done in response to J. G. A. Pocock's call for an expanded history of Britain, the brief treatment of friendly societies in Scotland and Ireland is disappointing. Even more remarkable is that after thirty years of the imperial turn, Ismay focuses on modern Britain with only a passing mention of several imperial sites in the West Indies (for example on pages 48–49, note 7). The word empire appears first on page 45, but this passing mention seeks to put this very important context aside. What were the dimensions of friendly societies for enslaved Africans and free laborers of color established by Anglican, Methodist, and Moravian ministers? How did the voluntary element, so foundational to the contentions about friendly societies in England, enter into this configuration? Did the issues of trust and fraud hold the same resonance there as they did in the metropole?

The voluntary nature of these societies among the English membership is another dimension that could have been complicated by more suspicion and skepticism. Ismay's emphasis on the mutual responsibility shared by the friendly society to provide relief to its members directs the responsibility for this care to those who share a class position, excluding the impoverished and freeing the wealthiest from the bonds of obligation.