Abstract

The «welfare state» is a slippery concept. For some scholars, it has a fairly narrow meaning. For many others, though, the welfare state is a much broader idea, covering not only fairly obvious social services but also an accompanying set of strategies for governing society, built around ideas such as full employment. For this reason, histories of the welfare state have always seemed most coherent when contained within clear boundaries, which have allowed scholars to frame their work with ideas about the nation and nationhood, among other things. As this review essay explores, however, an important challenge for future historiography is imagining what histories of welfare states look like without borders.