Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.

Europe was affected by a book crisis in the aftermath of the Great War. Much specialist literature had not been received in institutions across Europe since 1914 or had been destroyed during the conflict and was then rendered prohibitively expensive due to soaring exchange rates. This chapter explores the organization of book relief. The supply of literature was seen as an emergency that required humanitarian assistance to address ‘intellectual hunger’. Intellectual relief of this sort demonstrated the prominence of the belief that the spread of knowledge was essential to the reconstitution of the Republic of Letters and the ultimate stabilization of European political life. While initial responses hinged on humanitarian assistance, the ultimate resolution of the book crisis depended upon the restoration of international exchange networks – many of which had been severed by the war – and which came to fruition around the mid-1920s.

This chapter explores the reconstruction of intellectual sites in the aftermath of the war and the attempts to replace the knowledge that had been lost in warfare. It focuses on the reconstruction of the university libraries of Louvain and Belgrade and pays particular attention to not only the physical rebuilding of buildings but also the reconstruction of knowledge itself through the replacement of their collections. It also explores the reconstruction of Tokyo Imperial University in following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. While the latter took place beyond Europe, it aroused great public sympathy and became part of the wider process of symbolic rebuilding. The chapter argues that cultural reconstruction was not just about replacing or repairing heritage sites that had suffered war damage but also about providing of the tools for the production and dissemination of new knowledge and symbolically pushing back against the ‘collapse’ of civilization.

Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.

This chapter centres on Macau’s experience from the occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 until the end of the war in September 1945, when the enclave became the last foreign-ruled territory in China to remain unoccupied by Japan. It argues that collaboration through compliance was a way of avoiding occupation. In this period, the practice of neutrality in Macau reached a peak of ambiguity. It was marked by the interplay of different forces and important new players competing for political legitimacy, economic control and social influence. These included Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Wang Jingwei’s Reorganised National Government, Portuguese colonial authorities, Japanese military forces and local elites.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

The Medici family, through commercial and business ventures, attained considerable wealth and political sway in thirteenth century Florence. They also initiated the concept of patronage, providing sums of money to scientists to pursue their research; in fact, science philanthropy in the modern day resembles this Medici-esque patronage structure. Philanthropy can positively impact the research community, in part due to the flexibility of the funding structure it provides as well as the lack of political influence compared to public funding. They also have the flexibility to test new funding mechanisms that public funding bodies can later adopt, such as supporting individuals and not projects - in a way serving as a funding R&D project for future funding initiatives. However, the direction of research may also be skewed by vested interests from foundations and donors - as well as having other potentially negative downstream effects on the rate of progress. This chapter explores the complex role of philanthropy in setting the rate and direction of medical progress and provides solutions on how to improve their impact.

A movement is gathering to overthrow the intellectual incumbents of economics. Started by students, advanced by academics, and funded by philanthropists, until recently it has remained largely unnoticed by governments. Now the world’s largest emerging economies are starting to take an interest. For the sake of avoiding dangerous climate change, the revolution cannot come too soon.

Andrei D. Stepanov surveys the accumulation of “small deeds” that constitute the core of Chekhov’s altruistic biography, in three stages – Moscow, Melikhovo, and Yalta – from the medical practice and care for relatives and friends that marked Chekhov’s early career, to more ambitious efforts during the second half of his life – the ways in which he extended help to convicts and exiles, peasants, schoolchildren, students, and poverty-stricken consumptives.

Beneficence is the act of doing good, while benevolence is being willing to do good. Walmart is cited as a case where, despite its founder’s belief that businesses do sufficient good simply by fueling wealth through commerce and employment, the company is nevertheless highly involved in community projects. Corporate philanthropy may be used strategically to increase future profits, while many corporations see themselves as morally responsible for stakeholders – employees, communities, consumers, and the wider environment – without requiring a clear return on investment. Corporate intervention is discussed historically in terms of apartheid, where some companies applied pressure for social change whereas others felt firms should abide by local norms despite violating human rights. Corporate intervention in the political affairs of Central America are discussed, as well as businesses that supply biased educational materials. The final case describes the sponsorship of an artistic production that becomes politically embroiled and asks what an appropriate level of corporate involvement in the community should be.

Tells the history of white evangelical institution building in the twentieth-century United States, argues that evangelicalism should be understood from an institutional perspective rather than one centered on belief, and locates the Museum of the Bible as part of this long line of white evangelical institutions.

Examines how the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, have generated social capital through their founding and funding of the Museum of the Bible and also how they have expended this capital through book publications, political speeches, and business opportunities. Argues that the Museum of the Bible functions to authorize the Green family as Bible interpreters and demonstrates through close readings of available material that the bible they commend is entangled with capitalism, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

One consequence of the increased enumeration of disabled people and their constitution as pitiable, was the imperative to ‘save’ them from physical destitution and spiritual damnation. Co-currently, from the late eighteenth century onwards a series of intellectual and pedagogical developments meant that helping or ‘civilising’ certain disabled populations, started to be seen as possible. Philanthropists, educationalists, religious figures and, later, government officials, declared they could ‘save’ disabled people and advocated new techniques and instruments to do so. Like the racialised others of empire, disabled people were deemed incapable of helping themselves and dependent on white, non-disabled people. Taking different geographical frames, this chapter tracks these developments in thinking about the development of ‘special’ education, the development of philanthropic work and the increasing role of the state. I make several arguments. First that developments in education were linked to the wider ‘civilising project’. Secondly, that the opening of schools and institutions, whilst uneven and sporadic were based on networks of knowledge that facilitated the transcolonial exchange of information. And thirdly that the discrepant development of institutions across different colonial locations also reflected racialised forms of knowledge about the people who lived there.

This chapter examines the motivations for and practices of library formation, development and management exercised by the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second oldest museum. It contends that civic philanthropy in the form of library formation served as a core activity for SGS members throughout the first fifty years of the Society’s history, and as a key component of the society’s raison d’être. The SGS’s extensive archival and bibliographical holdings provide a means of examining the modes of acquisition, cataloguing and circulation of the three libraries under the SGS’s management in the period 1710–1755: the parish library of St Mary and St Nicolas, the library of Spalding Grammar School, and the library housed in the SGS museum. Spalding’s libraries provide a composite case study that reveals the interconnection of individual and institutional forms of philanthropy at work in eighteenth-century libraries. At the same time, the SGS emerges as a precursor of the later eighteenth-century subscription libraries and literary and philosophical societies that engaged in library formation as a means of fostering sociability, education, improvement and intellectual exchange in local communities throughout Britain.