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Simon Szreter, Health and wealth: studies in history and policy, Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 2005, pp. ix, 506, £50.00 (hardback 1-58046-198-0).
For more than two decades, the relation between health, social change and politics has been a primary target for Simon Szreter's historical studies. The present book is mainly a collection of previously published and slightly revised articles with an added introduction and final reflections. The empirical example is Great Britain during the nineteenth and, to a lesser extent, twentieth century, but his conclusions concerning the threats of social disruption caused by rapid change are general indeed.
One article, 'Economic growth, disruption, deprivation, disease and death', published in 1997, has been widely read and quoted by historians, scholars and practitioners interested in the fate of contemporary developing societies. Later, Szreter has used "linking social capital" as a tool to understand why some societies are healthier than others. One of the articles is written together with Michael Woolcock, where this concept incorporates politics, the state and other formal and informal institutions as important and necessary means...