Volume 12, Issue 2 - Editors' Forum: Empires of Charity. Guest-edited by Julia McClure

This forum examines the role of charity in empire formations from a diachronic and transregional perspective. It focuses upon the beliefs, discourses, and practices of charity that developed within Christianity and the roles they played in the West’s imperial projects, from the first global empires that emerged from the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century to projects of philanthro-imperialism in modern China. This forum exposes the complex religious, economic, political, and cultural roles that charity has played in imperial projects and increases our consciousness of the ways it continues to shape global politics. It shines light on the way in which governing bodies, institutions, and individuals have instrumentalized charity to achieve a range of strategic functions whilst shaping the narrative and image of their power. Viewing empire through the lens of charity also provides the opportunity to bring not only the rich but also the poor into focus and to explore the ways they have been active subjects negotiating for a range of material and immaterial resources in imperial contexts.

This article investigates the institutionalization and the practices of charity that sustained imperial rule in the early modern Spanish Empire. The article proposes that the polycentric Spanish Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries faced a fundamental challenge in terms of justifying the extension of power beyond its original territory of legitimization through custom and (invented) history. This challenge was dealt with through recourse to an ideology of good governance in corporate society. It institutionalized differences across race/caste, urban/rural, professional, gender and other categories in collectives that held part of a layered and fragmented sovereignty. But unlike its modern successor empires and nation states, it did not have to rely systematically on the essentialization of difference. Thus, good governance could legitimize the extension of hegemony beyond the original territory of political legitimization and charity played a central role in this. A material caritative complex sui generis linked the moral economy of charity, which legitimized local elites, with their own financing needs and those of the imperial polity via the financial acumen of religious and charitable institutions.

In the sixteenth century Spain developed Europe’s first global empire, an empire underpinned by the beliefs and structures of Catholicism, and driven by pursuits of God and of gold. The Casa de Contratación became the commercial and administrative hub of the Spanish Empire, a position which made it an important node in the network of the charitable spiritual economy. This article will show that charity was an important part of the daily business of the Casa de Contratación and that this charity was important to the fabric of the Spanish Empire in three ways. Firstly, charity is a mechanism for maintaining social order and the crown used the Casa de Contratación to give a benevolent face to empire and prevent unrest. Secondly, the bonds of charity were at the foundation of Christian communities, and by administering long-range charity the Casa de Contratación helped to maintain these communities across the empire, forming the new global Catholic communities of the Spanish Empire. Thirdly, the Casa de Contratación provided a legal framework for people within the empire to claim that they were poor and access resources by requesting different types of charity.

In the 16th century the Portuguese monarchy established its key charity institution: the Misericórdias. Created to perform the fourteen Works of Mercy, these laic brotherhoods were financially sustained by testamentary legacies and proved to be a very successful mechanism of providing assistance – spiritual and material; becoming the midway between the wills of givers (privileged men and women that looked for spiritual redemption and forgiveness of their souls) and the poor and sick. As the Misericórdias started to spread within the Empire, soon they became a well-functioning network that connected a truly global charity system. They played a role in empire formation as they started to perform as banks, transferring funds, assuming debts and conceding credit. This article analyzes the roles that Misericórdias played, not only in establishing charity but also in establishing the Portuguese’s global empire.

This article examines the policy of penal transportation to the colonies which underpinned the first British Empire in the Atlantic. It argues that the transportation and indenture of the criminal poor came to be justified by empire’s architects as a charitable reprieve from a life course of decaying indigence and idleness. “Charity” of this nature serviced the needs of the British imperial state and its elites, particularly the need for the malleable biopower of indentured labor, but also the demand for increasingly rigorous carceral control. Transportation also created a clear distinction between the poor so reprieved and those still deserving of traditional relief at home. The article names these justifying discourses of judicial punishment-as-charity as “welfare colonialism.” We might view this regime as an early forerunner of the terrible paternalisms of “philanthrocapitalism,” and its operation as fundamental to the first British “Empire of Charity.”

This article compares two Protestant schools for elite indigenous girls in the Dutch East Indies. While both schools were financially supported by the colonial government, they emerged from Christian organizations and were partly dependent on voluntary gifts from the Netherlands and the colony. The article proposes to look at such philanthropic initiatives as integral parts of a larger colonial civilizing mission which was not limited to the colonial state. On the contrary, discourses about the implementation of “civilized” gender roles within indigenous families through girls’ education first emerged among philanthropists, and eventually influenced state-driven educational policies for girls. It is argued that philanthropical initiatives for girls’ education such as the two schools presented here are best understood as attempts to gain control over, and ultimately reform, the domestic lives of the indigenous population in the Dutch East Indies

This article posits that philanthropy, most often identified with wealthy white American businessmen along the lines of Andrew Carnegie, has an alternative history whose central figures were black female liberators like Mary Ellen Pleasant, the “Mother of Civil Rights in California” who donated $30,000 to fund the Raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Pleasant’s story subverts standard masculinist and implicitly white accounts of American philanthropy, envisioning underground financing by black proto-feminists as a radical tool for black emancipation in the Americas.

One of the main ways in which the British Empire rewarded philanthropy among British and imperial subjects was the honours system, an elaborate, hierarchical collection of awards and orders of chivalry. In its symbolism and rhetoric this system supplied a trans-imperial, color-blind judgment of both service and rank. This article uses discourses about honours to examine the formal and informal ways in which class, culture and race factored into public and private judgments about the relative worthiness of different kinds of philanthropy. In practice, British officials and elites were often cynical about the motivations of people outside of Britain and outside of traditional social elites, while applying less rigorous standards of intention to philanthropists within traditional elites in Britain. Inconsistencies in public debates and private judgments about merit in the honours system undermined its authority in the empire/former empire.

The historiographical record of charity, both visual and written, has long been appropriated by philanthro-imperialists intent on using material aid to further their own agendas. International actors committed to bringing their own priorities and prerogatives with them overseas have ignored or intentionally erased accounts of local, particularly non-Western, humanitarian and charitable initiatives. In some contexts, local communities have also chosen to erase their own charitable history. This article uncovers one such hidden charitable tradition, that of pre-Maoist China. I discuss indigenous Chinese charitable work and its interplay with Western charitable actors and activities at the turn of the twentieth century, at the height of the New Imperialism (c. 1870–1914) to explore two little-recognized facets of the relationship between charity and imperialism: the erasure of local traditions of charity in the annals of imperialist powers and the importance of language in the preservation and validation of these traditions.