Dictionaries can, indeed should, be invaluable works of factual reference. Historical dictionaries can be problematic because historical ‘fact’ is often provisional − ripe to be overturned by new research. But there are factual certainties about the past, particularly dates and content of legislation, which a good dictionary can usefully provide and help inform contemporary debate.

This volume starts with a necessarily selective chronology of state welfare since ancient Greece. Then, among other things, it provides brief surveys of the history of welfare in most countries of the world with recognisable welfare states. These are unavoidably short but could be useful, if accurate. The survey of welfare history in the UK starts with a brief discussion of the Poor Laws, then lists new initiatives in social policy from the beginning of the twentieth century, including ‘universal old age pensions’ in 1908. Yet the pensions introduced in 1908 were not universal, but strictly means-tested, intended only for the poorest. Excluded were those who were not British and those proven guilty of ‘habitual failure to work’, which proved almost impossible to implement. Universal pensions were introduced in 1946.

The UK survey continues: ‘reforms were not undertaken during World War 1’. Yet during the war the first rent controls were introduced following protest by women against rocketing rents; the state first paid allowances to the wives, even ‘unmarried wives’, children and dependent parents of servicemen; there were improved health and welfare services for mothers and young children to build a healthy generation to replace that lost in the war; and plans were made for other improvements after the war. The dictionary then tells us that ‘only in relation to unemployment was radical change made in the interwar period’. Yet the period actually saw the first substantial state investment in council housing (an aspect of welfare treated cursorily in the book), in 1925 the first pensions for civilian widows (a group also sidelined, along with all single parents despite their significance as welfare beneficiaries for centuries and still) and further improvements in public health care, especially for mothers and babies which led to a substantial fall in infant mortality by 1939. Despite the Depression, UK public expenditure on welfare increased substantially between the wars. The account thereafter to the present is superficial but without obvious mistakes, though it concludes: ‘the British welfare state compared to other welfare states . . . is nearly a fully private market solution’, which some might question.

There are other errors: the entry ‘Pension’ states that old age pensions were introduced in Germany in 1899, whereas that for Bismarck, who introduced them, locates them in ‘the 1880s’. The actual date was 1889. I am not familiar with the histories of all, or most, welfare states surveyed here so cannot evaluate the many other national entries, but that on the UK makes me cautious. That on Japan attributes the slow introduction of pensions and other social care for older people to the high level of family support, apparently unaware of the evidence of abuse of elders in Japanese families, past and present (Hayashi, Reference Hayashi2013). Indeed, we are told throughout the volume how in ‘the past’ European families provided care for older people but that they no longer can because women work and families migrate, and hence the modern need for welfare states. But poor women always have worked outside as well as inside the home, and older people in better-off families were often cared for by servants. At least in northern Europe, for centuries, many older people had no surviving children, due to high death rates and high rates of non-marriage, and there was much migration in search of work in times when long distance contact was difficult. And elder abuse was/is not confined to Japan. At all times, many families did their best, as they still do even in richer countries, to support older relatives, who give much in return, for example, care for other older and disabled people and grandchildren. The relationship between the family and the state is an important part of the history of welfare and merits accurate evaluation.

Throughout, the ageing of contemporary society is presented as a ‘problem’ due to rising life expectancy and falling birth rates. The author does not mention that in the UK and some other European countries the birth rate has risen since around 2001, or that the growing numbers of fit older people in richer countries make positive contributions to their economies, communities – for example, through voluntary action − and families that balance out the costs of pensions and health care. The always important, always changing, role of voluntary action in many welfare states, including the British, also deserves more considered discussion than it receives.

This dictionary offers some strange definitions. ‘Disability’ is said to mean ‘the inability to do something one could do before’, bizarrely excluding the many born with disabilities. ‘Ghetto’ is described as ‘a term for an area that mainly consists of one group in society’ but does not mention the Jews. Surely, it is important in an historical dictionary to mention the origin of the word as the area to which Jews were confined in sixteenth-century Venice, and its long subsequent association with persecution of Jews?

There are brief biographies of key figures, including Adam Smith, Keynes, Titmuss, but some of these also are too superficial to be helpful, or are even problematic. Seebohm Rowntree is credited with the ‘first attempt’ to measure poverty’ with, curiously, no mention of Charles Booth, who got there first, with a different methodology, with his vast survey of 1890s London.

Greve is professor of welfare state analysis not history. It may be that his many definitions of terms used by contemporary political scientists and economists for analysing welfare states – including ‘pluralism’, ‘public choice’, decommodification, ‘human capital’ – will be more useful to readers if they are more accurate than his history.