A recently published book deals with many of the issues mentioned in the query: Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis and Steven Pressman (Eds.), *The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee*, Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 2005. Part One of the book is about the history of guaranteed income proposals; it has four chapters which might be of interest: Ch. 2: Fred Block and Margaret Sommers, "In the shadow of Speenhamland: social policy and the old poor law" (13-54) Ch. 3: John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers: "Inheritance and equal shares: early American views" (55-76) Ch. 4: Robert Harris: "The guranteed income movement of the 1960s and 1970s" (77-94) Ch. 5: Robert A. Levine, Harold Watts, Robinson Hollister, Walter Williams, Alice O'Connor and Karl Widerquist: "A retrospective on the negative income tax experiments: looking back at the most innovative field studies in social policy" (95-106). A more general overview of the history of "basic income" and "basic capital" proposals can be found in John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers (Eds.), *The Origins of Universal Grants. An Anthology of Historical Writings on Basic Capital and Basic Income*, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 - sorry for this self-publicity. An interesting discussion on basic income was published by the *Boston Review*, Vol. 25(5), October/November 2000 (http://bostonreview.net/BR25.5/contents.html). More information can also be found on the websites of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network (www.basicincome.org), and of USBIG, the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (www.usbig.net). Guido Erreygers