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Societal responses to epidemics can vary very widely, from extreme flight to apparent indifference. These variations are often considered to reflect structural differences in the extent of disease exposure, or cultural differences in the tendency to fatalism. Smallpox presented a major health challenge to early modern Eurasian societies, and both types of explanation have been used to account for large-scale variations in responses to the disease in Britain, Japan, and Sweden, before the widespread use of vaccination. This chapter considers the English case. Smallpox was an endemic disease of childhood in northern England, and there is little evidence of communal efforts to control it, before the rapid uptake of vaccination after 1800. In the south of England, however, various strategies of isolation and mass immunization were used by parish officials to reduce transmission, and smallpox remained a relatively rare and epidemic disease there outside the major cities. There are no obvious economic or geographical factors that would explain this pattern, and therefore this chapter considers cultural explanations first, before turning to an analysis of the roles that welfare institutions and uncoordinated local responses played in generating large-scale mortality patterns.

In this paper, we examine the long-run social mobility experience in England. We present evidence for surprisingly constant levels of social mobility over the period 1550–1749, despite huge structural changes. Examining regional differences, we show that the North of England exhibited higher rates of social mobility than the South. We link this to the hypothesis that historically high levels of social mobility can lead to a culture of non-acceptance of redistribution and welfare provision. Taking advantage of the fact that welfare provision was determined at the local level at the time, we are able to compare social mobility rates and welfare spending within a single country. Consistent with the hypothesis, we find evidence for historically higher levels of social mobility as well as lower welfare spending and less acceptance of redistribution in the North.