Why did Belgium, the most industrialized nation at the time, introduce a ban on child labour so late in the nineteenth century? It seems an obvious historical fact that industrialization and the awareness of its negative consequences led to regulations to mitigate the effects of industrialization, where child labour was often dealt with first. However, the example of Belgium contradicts this and suggests that other factors must be more important in explaining how a proposal to ban child labour could succeed. About the same time that child labour was banned in Prussia and France, an initiative to introduce a similar ban arose in Belgium, but, as Elisabeth Anderson shows in her thoroughly researched study on the introduction of legislation against child labour, it was unsuccessful because the initiator failed to forge the right alliances.
Agents of Reform offers the first large-scale comparative analysis of the emergence of child labour regulations in different countries in the nineteenth century. In all the areas studied – Prussia, France, Belgium, and Massachusetts – regulation arose at a time when workers were hardly organized and had little power to push for change. Anderson looks at this issue from the perspective of “policy entrepreneurs”, creative actor-agents who flexibly negotiated emerging political situations, and “policy fields”, a term she borrows from Bourdieusian field theory. These concepts allow her not only to show how important these “policy entrepreneurs” were in enforcing regulations, but, more importantly, to analyse under what circumstances they could be successful, thereby avoiding the trap of a “big men” history. With her comparative method, she identifies what factors were missing, preventing a policy entrepreneur from being successful in one case, while being present elsewhere.
In the example of Prussia, Anderson compares the initiatives of two policy entrepreneurs in one country, where one, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, was unsuccessful and the other, Ernst von Bodelschwingh, was successful. Altenstein was a central official with a grand idea to protect working children. He was driven by a broad agenda to create virtuous citizens, promote intellectual and moral development, and create a united German nation. He stood for a complete programme that improved the entire working environment and promoted the education of citizens. This included providing basic education to children who worked in factories, keeping workplaces clean, and looking after children's daily welfare. He was a strong supporter of the establishment of local enforcement committees, comprising representatives of employers, workers, and the state.
Bodelschwingh presented more modest proposals, focused mainly on education, which children were denied at that time, and not including any new enforcement mechanisms. According to Anderson, the difference between these approaches cannot simply be attributed to their content, as there were multiple opportunities to change that content. Rather, it has to do with the differences in their ability to forge alliances and creatively deal with political obstacles that made Bodelschwingh successful and Altenstein not. Bodelschwingh managed to forge an alliance with an influential textile manufacturer and, as a mediator between the local Rhineland authorities and central government, he was able to push through his moderate proposal to ban child labour under the age of nine.
In France and Belgium, the ability of entrepreneurs to negotiate with capitalists was even more crucial, given the strong intertwining of capital and government there, unlike Prussia, which had a more authoritarian bureaucratic organization. But Anderson argues that the difference between France and Belgium indicates that the determining factor was not just the infiltration of capitalists into the policy arena, but rather how leading policy entrepreneurs responded to these dynamics. It became clear that the Frenchman Charles Dupin excelled at forging alliances, while the Belgian criminologist Édouard Ducpétiaux was more entrenched in the intellectual arena and therefore struggled to compromise with individuals at the policy level.
Despite the convincing nature of this argument, the question that lingers is why there were no figures like Bodelschwingh or Dupin in Belgium, so that it eventually took more than fifty years for regulations on child labour to be introduced there. Was there no one in Belgium who could compensate for Ducpétiaux's shortcomings? To what extent might this not indicate that there were differences in the composition of Belgian governance and policy networks compared to their French counterparts after all?
An important contribution of Anderson's book is that it clearly shows how a ban on child labour immediately raised questions about compliance. Prohibition in Prussia and Massachusetts arguably ended in failure as evasion was widespread. However, setting up an effective inspectorate perhaps proved even more difficult than implementing the bans. Based on her comparison of three cases (Germany, Massachusetts, and Illinois), Anderson shows that an effective enforcement unit with strong powers only got off the ground where there was strong support from the labour movement and where a democratic mandate could bring about real change. Although policy entrepreneurs in Prussia and Massachusetts succeeded in incorporating supervision into law, inspectors were given only an advisory role, or powers were delegated to existing authorities, making it a cheap solution to appease the labour movement, as the example of Massachusetts shows. On the theme of labour inspection, too, comparisons within a case are at least as interesting in this book as comparisons between cases. In Illinois, for example, Florence Kelley was much better than Elizabeth Morgan at appointing women inspectors, partly because she could present herself more effectively as a professional policy expert than Morgan could.
The many comparisons make the book analytically very sophisticated and will inspire scholars to undertake similar analyses. In that respect, a more extensive reflection on the effort it took to establish inspectorates versus the initiatives to ban child labour would have been welcome. Overall, the book is a welcome plea for researchers to conceptualize the expansion of the welfare state more broadly and to pay more attention to the areas in which policy entrepreneurs operate, so that Anderson's comparative methodology can be applied to other cases and other countries.
