sort of broadly defined legal assistance to the poor has existed since the Middle Ages, legal aid gained new importance and was refashioned in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Many countries reorganised what we would now recognise to be legal aid, and in other countries some form of legal assistance to the poor was first formally organised.
The rise of legal aid was a response to new social, economic, and politiÂcal conditions and to forms of modernity.
It was marked, among other things, by the growth of industrialisation, capitalism, the rise of liberalism, and the creation of sovereign states. Moreover, a shift from status to conÂtract created arms-length relationships such as that between tenants and landlords, workers and employers, domestic help and homeowners, and lenders and creditors. Likewise, wage labour, and in some places, vast waves of immigration, led to the growth of a poor and working class who confronted harsh living conditions and low and even unliveable wages. Elites and the growing middle class feared political instability, commuÂnism, socialism, and anarchy.It was this environment, along with the growth of a legal professional class and new concepts of benevolence, philanthropy, and reform, that gave rise to modern forms of organised legal aid. But to say this is to say very little. As we will see in this book, the very definition of what constiÂtuted legal aid significantly differed between countries and changed over time. In part, this reflects how lawyers, the state, and others defined legal aid and how specific legal structures, practices, customs, and norms of various states and even localities differed or coalesced. Likewise, to say that legal aid existed in some form or fashion does not tell us who might be eligible for legal aid or who was providing such aid. Nor does it speak to the matters in which one might receive such aid or what was imagined or constructed to be a legal problem. Moreover, while some of our authors are writing using a thick historiography which itself may have created and reified certain narratives and even mythologies, others are first writing such national histories of legal aid relying almost entirely on long-buried archival sources. It is fair to say, as reflected in the chapters of this book, that the substantive development of legal aid as well as the writing of the history of legal aid is an uneven development both in countries and between countries. Further, almost without exception, archival sources privilege the voices of the architects of legal aid, especially lawyers, or those who provided legal aid. This makes understanding the experience of people who used legal aid a more difficult feat.