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Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750-1890 (review)

state family policy look simultaneously at farm families, businesses and the urban working class. While Marshall’s orientation is primarily political, her profound knowledge of other historical subfields such as family history, result in a rich, sophisticated and contextualized analysis. Even if contemporary policy makers failed to notice, Marshall never treats families as a unit with undifferentiated shared interests for all family members. After nearly ten years from its initial publication the book remains the standard account of these two policy initiatives in Quebec. While its explanation of policy narrative is useful, the book’s exploration of elite, political and popular responses to compulsory schooling and family allowances continues to be particularly compelling and original. Marshall not only considers the ideas and aspirations behind those promoting these new initiatives but also explores the motives parents had for accepting these new policies and the ways in which they used new schooling legislation and family allowances to further their own particular ends. The widespread poverty of postwar Canada is apparent in the number of families who used Family Allowance cheques for rent and food, the provision of basic clothing which permitted children to leave their houses during the winter, and the new availability of medical and dental care. If The Social Origins of the Welfare State’s historiographical insights are no longer pioneering, the book can now be recognized as one of the first of a number of new scholarly offerings which demonstrated that strong elements of liberalism were present in both the Quebec state and the Quebec church before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and that welfare history could benefit from insights of “new political history” and the history of social policy. These two distinct historiographical claims are now widely accepted. Her concurrent examination of both a federal and provincial policy remains utterly unique in Quebec scholarship and is a model for others to follow. English-language readers are fortunate to have this important book finally made available to them in a readable translation by Nicola Doone Danby.