The fishing village of Helmsdale was constructed in 1814 to accommodate people displaced in highland clearances and enclosures. Above the town, there stands a memorial featuring flags of Britain’s settler colonies. This memorial reminds us that those who suffered the violence of land dispossession at home could, in principle, find benefit in enacting the same processes abroad.

Famous imperialist Cecil Rhodes proposed a solution to the “bread and butter question” by agitating for the acquisition of “new lands for settling the surplus population” of Britain. Indeed, even as the moral crisis of squalor grew across the nineteenth century, Britain was in part able to manage and mitigate the consequences of its unequal development via imperial expansion. In the eight decades after 1850, just under 17 million people emigrated from the British Isles, about 41 per cent of the 1900 population. Yet increasingly, politicians and policymakers sought to undertake social reforms at home. Why the turn around?

David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, led a series of Liberal reforms from 1908 to 1916, which attempted to copy social insurance policies that underpinned Germany’s industrial rise to power. Inter-imperial competition gave way to world war and that war cleared the stage for the Russian Revolution. In 1919, Lloyd George, now prime minister, justified an expanded social insurance system by reference to the threat of Bolshevism thus: “Even if this were to cost hundreds of millions of pounds, what is that to the stability of the state?” (cited in Jones & Murie 2006).

Faced with such a threat to the capitalist system itself, some began to judge the piecemeal voluntaristic character of philanthropic organization as unfit for purpose. Helen Bosanquet and Octavia Hill’s Charity Organisation Society was neither sufficiently organized nor nationalized. Thus, early-twentieth-century leaders of industry, politicians and reformers increasingly entertained the prospect that the state might have to be used as a lever for domestic reform. Lloyd George is exemplary of this shift. But even Beveridge considered social reform less in moral terms and more and more through the impersonal metrics of national coordination and planning.