Julia Moses has written an excellent comparative history of British, German, and Italian state-directed workplace accident insurance in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized around the “legal gaze” (255) — or how states evaluated workplace accidents for compensation within a field — determined by “the relationship between risk, responsibility and statehood” (10). The main material out of which she constructs this history is the “grey” literature (18) that state and parastate entities produced to explain, justify, and occasionally propagandize for their procedures. This source base allows her to “illuminat[e] the interactive bureaucratic-societal dynamics that drove the evolution of social policy” (10). Moses draws on archival work as well as substantial secondary literatures for all three national contexts and languages, taking a broadly chronological approach to the period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War. Put differently, this is the path...
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