The second chapter tells the story of how particular kinds of social policies such as workmen’s compensation and social insurance for workplace accidents came to be seen as appropriate for specific national contexts. It was through these early discussions that Germany came to be seen as the hallmark of ‘state socialism’, while contemporaries associated Britain with a laissez-faire approach to social policy and Italy with social legislation that sought to create a fragile kind of social peace across the peninsula. An outcome of these discussions was the introduction in Britain of a workmen's compensation law in 1897 and accident insurance laws in Germany and Italy in 1884 and 1898.