The title Inward Conquest alludes to new state functions. Early states focused outward – conquest of other countries or protection against conquest. But in the 19th century their attention turned inwards towards public services – to the police, prisons, schools, libraries, asylums, vaccination programs and midwifery services discussed in this book. While usually less oppressive than ‘conquest’ suggests, these institutions gave states unprecedented power over their populations.

Ben Ansell and Johannes Linvall’s book is an impressive comparative political analysis explaining why the organisation of public services differs between services and nations. Their book covers nineteen countries, mostly in Europe but also the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, over the period 1800 to 1939.

Organisational differences in 19th and early 20th century public services were ‘vertical’ between different levels of government and ‘horizontal’ between the state, churches and other private associations.

Within the horizontal category, Ansell and Linvall distinguish between a ‘fusion’ approach, where public services are funded by government but provided and controlled by churches, and ‘subsidisation’, where non-government organisations are funded by government to deliver public services, using contracts or other arms-length relationships.

Inward Conquest points to common drivers of states moving into public services. Intellectually, the late 18th century Enlightenment increased interest in improving the human condition. Liberalism and socialism, two Enlightenment political philosophies that gained significant support in the 19th century, assumed that such a goal was desirable and possible. Nationalists wanted institutions that could shape minds and behaviour.

The rise of public services and the growth of industrial capitalism were closely linked. Industrialisation created new needs, as people moved to larger towns and cities, away from family, church and village support. Social controls were less effective in anonymous urban areas than small rural communities, creating problems of crime and disorder. The technological and organisational advances that drove industrial capitalism also gave states new capacity to deliver public services.

While providing this background, Inward Conquest is primarily about the varying ways states delivered public services. The perceived need for them was shared across countries.

Inward Conquest’s discussion of when churches maintained their service delivery role is particularly interesting. One reason was practical. It was easier for states to use existing institutions than create parallel entirely public services. Another reason was political. Ansell and Linvall’s comparative analysis shows that church-run services were most commonly subsidised in religiously divided societies. Subsidisation was a way of managing religious conflicts.

Churches were most concerned with education, which was mainly primary education in the 1800-1939 period. Public assistance for religious schools let churches keep their influence on social and spiritual development while also making education available to more children. Other church-provided services, like vaccinations or care for the mentally ill, were amicably transferred to the state. The churches filled gaps in these services if needed, but did not see them as core business.

Australia is a partial exception to the pattern on schooling. It is a religiously diverse society that stopped subsidising church schools in the late 19th century. Inward Conquest suggests that this decision reflected the need to deliver universal school education in a large, sparsely populated country. That is part of the story. Scaling up to implement free compulsory primary education in the 1870s was beyond what church schools could deliver, and funds that previously went to church schools could be put towards expanding government schools. But there was also an anti-Catholic element to this decision. Free government schools were intended to attract students from poor Catholic families away from Catholic schools. This caused decades of Catholic resentment, which a dual public/subsidised private school system could have avoided.

Because the Catholics and other religious denomination retained their own schools, fee-paying schools remained more common in Australia than in ‘fusion’ systems that fully subsidised church schools. Combined over the last 50 years with reintroduced subsidies for private schools, the 19th century no subsidy policy led to Australia having an unusually large proportion of students in at least semi-independent schools.

Although Inward Conquest countries frequently provided public assistance for private schools, police forces were fully public from the time they emerged in the mid-19th century. States rarely shared police powers of coercion, which in liberal or democratic societies also needed public control and accountability. For police forces, countries differed on their level of centralisation rather than the public-private dimension.

Ansell and Lindvall distinguish between state-military police such as the French gendarmerie, state-civilian police like the FBI, and civilian-municipal police. Gendarmeries were usually established by authoritarian governments, or by liberal countries in their colonies. In the 19th century English liberals were suspicious of gendarmerie power and English conservatives opposed centralisation. British police forces were established on a decentralised regional basis, a structure that persists in the 21st century.

Prison as punishment is a 19th century innovation. In medieval Europe the penalties for breaking the law were public shaming, exile, physical punishments, or execution. Prisons were meant to be a more humane and improving form of punishment; on these counts they became the least successful public service discussed in Inward Conquest.

While privately owned prisons have a long history, central rather than local provision of prisons was common. Building large prisons generated economies of scale. These could be achieved because prisoners went where they were sent. Smaller-scale local provision was needed for other services.

The most consistently local service discussed in Inward Conquest is the public library. Only authoritarian regimes centralised libraries. Governments funded private libraries, but public libraries attracted private philanthropy, making them a case of ‘subsidies in reverse’.

Inward Conquest examines three health-related services: midwifery, mental asylums and vaccination.

Trained midwives were common in Europe by 1800, with Sweden the first country to turn midwifery into a public service, in 1819. In the English-speaking countries midwives had less training, and doctors claimed responsibility for assisting with childbirth. But even where midwives were trained and publicly funded their numbers declined in the 20th century. As childbirth moved from homes to hospitals, midwives assisted with more births each week and fewer were needed.

Care for the mentally ill has taken many institutional forms. Public mental hospitals were among the earliest public services, established in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But most countries subsidised private asylums as well. Some also funded care in private homes, creating parallels with support for orphans and others who cannot care for themselves.

One reason for using the private sector to manage the mentally ill was capacity, with substantial growth in asylum populations from the mid-19th century. By the 1930s, more than 0.3 per cent of the population in each country studied was in an asylum.

While asylum populations grew, rates of detention in jail generally declined from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. I am unclear whether these trends are related, if asylums became more suitable locations for some lawbreakers. But between jails and asylums, locking people up was a major function of the growing state.

Vaccination was another early public service, starting in the early 19th century with smallpox vaccines. Most countries studied by Inward Conquest offered vaccination programs by the mid-19th century, and 70 per cent had compulsory vaccinations by the 1880s.

Vaccination programs tended to be decentralised, with local and regional governments and private organisations all involved. In the early years teachers and priests as well as medical staff gave vaccines. Routine vaccination was a quick and simple task that could be given to people with other responsibilities.

The politics of organising vaccine delivery were low on the church/state, national/local and public/private disputes of other services. But compulsion was often resisted; recent controversies over COVID vaccinations are nothing new. Inward Conquest reports late 19th and early 20th century anti-vaccination riots in Canada, the US and Brazil. In 1898 English legislation responded to anti-vaccination concerns and introduced conscientious objection, the first legal use of that term. Vaccination in the only service examined where Ansell and Lindvall found examples of prizes and awards being used as well as subsidies, reflecting its status as the public service where too little demand was a bigger problem than too much.

Compulsory vaccination ranks low in the claims modern states make on their citizens but inspires unusually strong resistance. Ansell and Lindvall’s analsyis of who resists vaccines does not produce strong consistent patterns across countries and time, other than general anti-establishment sentiment. Opposition to COVID vaccines is 80 years after the period discussed in Inward Conquest, but that still seems to be true. The body is an inward conquest that requires more trust than some minority groups have in state institutions.