This article examines the views of Britain's organized railway, mining, and engineering workers (machinists) and their union leaders about state involvement in workplace accident prevention (1876–97), accident compensation (1876–1911), and the 1911 National Insurance Act. The miners and the railwaymen left numerous comments on these topics because they labored in unusually hazardous trades. (Their unions were large and were relatively democratic.) After 1880, leaders of the miners and railwaymen concluded that it was problematic to rely solely on trade union workplace bargaining power to protect worker life and limb and to compensate injured workers for their economic losses. Faced with what was initially seen as a Hobson's choice between employer compulsion and state compulsion, after the mid-1880s these trade unionists began to lean toward the latter. Historical experience led the trade union leaders whose views are discussed in this article to trust increasingly the Labor Department of the Board of Trade and to endorse Liberal welfare-state programs proposed in 1908 and thereafter. In 1911 the rank-and-file machinists who expressed their views about National Insurance in letters to the labor press were suspicious of augmenting the power of the state, but they were unwilling to scuttle National Insurance, preferring to agitate to expand union rights of participation. Worker opposition to some features of state-mandated income maintenance programs, especially those with compulsory payroll deductions, should not be interpreted as rejection of the welfare state in principle.

It is now more than forty years since Ronald Coase's seminal article on the Federal Communications Commission first appeared in the pages of the Journal of Law and Economics. The article remains important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it offered his first articulation of the Coase Theorem. Of even greater importance for our purposes, the article literally redefined the terms of debate over American broadcast regulation, in both historical and contemporary treatments of the subject.

In 1944, Robert Kuczynski, a demographer working with the Colonial Office, wrote a memo discussing plans for a postwar census of the British Empire. He called for the creation of a Colonial Demographic Service, arguing that Colonial Office programs “offer no guarantee of a decisive improvement unless there is an expert on the spot to make an effective use of these means.” Kuczynski's firm belief in the need for expert knowledge matched the growing willingness of the Colonial Office to call upon experts in a variety of fields to assist in the reshaping of colonial government. This article examines why demography came to be seen as useful for colonial governance in the interwar years and how officials attempted to make use of demographers and demographic information in the final years of the British Empire. At present, this topic falls between several existing literatures. Works by Richard Soloway, Daniel Kelves, and others document the domestic history of demography in Great Britain, particularly its involvement in debates over hereditarian views of population. At the international level, most recent studies deal with the United States and trace the origins of American support for programs of population control after 1945. Still another body of literature chronicles the unique nature of policy formation in Britain and its relationship with social science in the twentieth century. This article seeks to connect these literatures by focusing on the colonial and international role of British demography from the end of World War I to the postcolonial era of the 1960s.