In the 1980s the curious pairing of Margaret Thatcher and Jean Baudrillard confidently declared the death of the social. My paper will ask what is this thing ‘the social’ whose apparent demise could be celebrated by both neo-liberals and postmodernists and why is it that social theorists and cultural historians have been so reluctant to critically interrogate and historicise the category of the social. I will suggest that a history of the social is critical to any consideration of our present states of welfare for we cannot consider the politics of welfare or its forms of statecraft without first historicizing the social they addressed and tried to secure. My account of this history will draw upon my current work on the problem of hunger in modern imperial Britain. It will address the changing ways in which the social was figured as an epistemological domain, an object of government and welfare, and the material forms and practices through which it became naturalized. It will explore the transnational dimensions of this seemingly very metropolitan story and ask whether Thatcher and Baudrillard’s proclamation of its death suggests that we moderns never learnt to trust the experts, governmentalities and material forms used to maintain and secure the social.