Grain doles, state pharmacies and common chests: welfare long before Bismarck
Augustus, Rome's first emperor, handed out a monthly grain ration called the Cura Annonae to citizens too poor to buy food, and Trajan later widened such help. Government aid for basic needs is ancient. Song dynasty China ran free pharmacies, state orphanages and retirement homes more than nine centuries before modern welfare states appeared.
From 960 CE, the Song government supported a remarkable list of services: state hospitals, cheap loans to peasants, public clinics, stocked granaries, fire stations and libraries in big cities, and even graveyards for paupers. Ancient Greek city-states offered free medical care to the poor and to slaves. Byzantine rulers arranged food and clothing for children whose parents were too destitute to raise them, and kings in ancient India are said to have kept granaries for hard times.
Religious duty drove other systems. The seventh-century caliph Umar turned zakat, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, into a codified tax traditionally set at 2.5% of a person's assets, with funds going to the poor and heavily indebted; later caliphates collected more but often ran it inefficiently. Jewish tradition treats tzedakah as obligation rather than kindness, rooted in the biblical poor-tithe and the right of the needy to glean the corners of fields.
Reformation Europe experimented too. In 1520 Martin Luther urged an end to begging, and in 1522 Wittenberg's church order established a common chest for poor relief. Citizens of Leisnig in Saxony asked Luther for a similar plan in 1523, with casks for bread, cheese, eggs and meat alongside a money box. Francis I ordered every French parish in 1536 to register its poor, and England's Poor Relief Act 1601 made parishes responsible for payments. Under the Mughal emperor Akbar, farmers received loans and tax relief when crops failed.
Organised state welfare spread mainly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, beginning with Bismarck's Germany. Coverage remains patchy even now. An International Labour Organization report in 2014 estimated that just 27% of people worldwide had access to comprehensive social security.
Source: Welfare spending
