First Modern Risk

Julia Moses is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield, co-founder and co-chair of the Risk, Policy and Law Research Group at Sheffield's Centre for Medical Humanities, and currently Marie Curie Fellow in Sociology at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany. Her previous publications include The Impact of Ideas on Legal Development (with Michael Lobban; 2012) and Marriage, Law and Modernity: Global Histories (2017).

• List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Accidents, freedom and modernity in the nineteenth century; 2. Occupational risk, work and the nation state; 3. Spreading risk, forging solidarity; 4. Taking risks and dismissing fate; 5. Workers, citizens and the state; 6. Risk societies as 'people's communities'; Conclusion; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

'Based on detailed work in three countries and languages, this book looks broadly and comparatively at how governments dealt with workplace accidents in the nineteenth century, one of industrialization's earliest dilemmas. With both empirical substance and theoretical sophistication, it also illuminates the more general problem of the contemporary state first undertaking what is now its foremost task, managing modernity's ever-growing risks.' Peter Baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles