SPEAKER_00 0:12

Yes, actually the flood is podcast. It's really game. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis. And this week we've got a treat for any of you who are interested in history or particularly in the roots of transnational or kind of global philanthropy. So our guest this week is Dr. Annalisa Hansen-Schrout. And I sat down with Annalisa a little while ago to talk about a great new book of hers that she's had published recently. It's called Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy, which I read not once but twice, because I enjoyed it so much, but also because there's a lot of detail in there to get to grips with. Annalisa is an Irish historian, obviously, as the book would suggest, but she's currently also assistant professor in the programme in digital and computational studies at Bates College, and is also affiliated with the Department of History and the Programme of American Studies there as well. So when I sat down with Annalisa recently to talk about the book, we had a great wide-ranging conversation. Dug into a lot of the detail in the book. I think there's a lot in this conversation for those of you listening. So we talked a bit about kind of what brought the book about, why she'd written it, and then we dived into the question of what the global response to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-19th century actually was. What it was about the famine, if anything, that was sort of unique that had driven that response, or whether it just was kind of a particular moment in time that had brought all of that thing about, and whether what the factors were that kind of um played into that. We talked about the sort of central thesis of the book, which is maybe that um part of it, understanding the response to the Great Irish Famine philanthropically, is understanding that actually it was possible for multiple different groups to imbue it with their own meaning and thereby kind of use their giving as a tool to say different things or to kind of different political ends, um, which is a really sort of fascinating idea. And I talked to Annalisa a bit about you know why that why she thinks that is the case with the Great Irish Famine and also how applicable that idea is to other examples of transnational philanthropy, both in the past and today. Um we talked a bit about the importance of distance and and the the um what role that plays in determining different groups' responses to something like the Irish famine, talked about things like whether advances in communication and transport uh at the time in the 19th century were a kind of key part of making the response uh possible in the way that it was. Um we talked also about the the different responses in different places. So we talked about the response in Ireland itself and kind of how that response played into the fierce debates about Irish um identity and national identity that were uh around at the time, and also about some of the debates about the the roles and responsibilities of landlords. Um we talked a bit about the response in uh mainland Great Britain, particularly in England, and the extent to which that was seen as part of a debate about the responsibilities of uh empire and and colonialisation, and how much it was seen as a debate about the rights and the wrongs of free trade, and whether the the calls for poor relief in Ireland uh at the time were framed in terms of the the need to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, which is obviously kind of a key theme in Victorian philanthropy, so seeing how how that played out. We then kind of moved across the Atlantic to talk a bit about um the response in the US, which is an absolutely fascinating part of the book. Um so looking at the response um among sort of uh white Americans, uh in York particularly, um, and kind of how that played into some of the political issues that were there at the time. And then probably two of the most fascinating chapters, I think, of the book, because they will probably surprise a lot of people, is a chapter on the response um to the Irish famine, um, both from American slave owners and some of the ethical challenges that that brought up around tainted donations and the acceptance of gifts and how slave owners used some of that philanthropy essentially to kind of um you know burnish their own reputations or for PR purposes, but also some examples of giving by groups of enslaved people and and what that says about you know the nature of the Irish famine and whether it was something that kind of uniquely drew an empathetic response, or whether we should view uh that giving as more of a sort of political act on the part of those groups. And similarly, um some really fascinating stuff about um a reasonably sort of well-known story, or one certainly that I came across a few years ago, and is where I first came uh across Annalisa's work, uh, about the way in which um people from the Cherokee and Choctaw nations responded to the Irish famine and sent donations over to aid the Irish in their time of need, and again what it was that that drew that, whether there was a kind of sense of solidarity because of some of the suffering those communities themselves had been through, or whether it was again partly symbolic and what that symbolism was supposed to be. Um so without further ado, let's go into the conversation. There's a lot in it, as I said, and it's an absolutely fascinating one. So I hope you all enjoy it. Uh, and I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Annalisa Hansen Shrout. Hi there, Annalisa. Hi. Well, it's great to have you on the podcast. Um, really looking forward to talking to you. Um, and we're here to talk about your book that came out um relatively recently, I think towards the back end of last year, although I think it was out um uh this year over here in the UK. And the book's called Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy, which I've read a couple of times now actually. And I thought it was absolutely fascinating. So I'm really looking forward to talking to you about it. Um, but maybe the best place to start is just for you to say a bit um for people listening about what the book's about, what the kind of key ideas in it are, and how it came about.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm uh very excited to be talking about this with an audience of people who work in philanthropy. I think a lot of historians hopefully will read this book as historians, but um my hope is that it's of interest to people who are working in the sector. So I'm just so thrilled to be here. So this book began when I was reading actually one of the canonical histories of the Irish famine, which was sort of conventionally, we think about it as extending from 1845 to 1855. A mil out of a population of 8.5 million people in Ireland, one million people died of starvation or disease, and two million people emigrated. So it was this tremendous demographic event. And actually, the population of Ireland today still hasn't recovered the levels it was before the famine. So I was reading a history of the famine, and I came across this reference, um, sort of in just one or two sentences, to the fact that Cherokees and Choctaws in the United States had sent money to Ireland during the famine. And as a 19th century historian, I thought, well, that's really odd because the famine is about a decade after the Trail of Tears, uh, which is the sort of shorthand for the United States violent Indian removal policy, where um thousands and thousands of people who had lived in the American Southeast for generations were forced off of their lands and forced west, west of the Mississippi into what is now the state of Oklahoma. So these were people who had relatively little resources, but who still chose to send money to Ireland. And I thought that was interesting. And as I sort of dug into that question, I kept coming across references in the literature to other examples of sort of surprising people sending money to Ireland during the famine. And the explanation that seemed to be offered was: well, people read about suffering and then obviously gave money. My mother founded a nonprofit when I was in high school that helped victims of domestic violence. Um, and so talking to her about what it meant to fundraise for a group of people who are unquestionably suffering, it became really clear to me that this causal explanation of people know about suffering and therefore open their wallets really wasn't sufficient, right? It's it is really hard actually to get people to give up money, even for people uh to sort of uh who are like in their own communities, let alone distant sufferers across an ocean with whom prospective donors had no personal connection. So I really wanted to dig into why all of these uh apparently heterogeneous groups around the world thought that Ireland was uh a worthy or appropriate cause. And as I started to look into these groups, which include enslaved people and enslavers and tenant farmers in upstate New York who are sort of engaged in some real on-the-ground fracas with their landlords, right? So a number of people who don't really have a lot of resources. It became clear to me that most of these people had never participated in distant giving before, let alone international giving. And in fact, that this was a moment when sending money to people who were strangers was really uncommon. And so the book sort of developed from this case study of famine relief to sort of trying to understand why this was a moment that people around the world began to imagine that international philanthropy was possible. This is obviously before the rise of foundation philanthropy in the early 20th century. So I think this becomes sort of a moment where people begin to imagine the possibility of aiding strangers and to really think about what that means both for those strangers and for themselves. The very short uh argument of the book as a whole is that people chose Ireland as a cause as their first philanthropic, international philanthropic cause, because doing so was useful to them, uh, usually in terms of some local politics at home. So and that's not to say that these people weren't authentically interested in aiding victims of suffering, but that giving to Ireland did important work for them that other causes wouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah, and I think that that argument in itself is fascinating. I think we'll we'll keep coming back to that. Um I wanted to ask, you sort of said there, you know, there's there's a lot in the book that is kind of interesting as a specific case about the the Irish famine and the way in which people interpreted it and then responded to it. And then there's a sense in which it's kind of at a point in time where it represents a shift in philanthropy as a whole, perhaps to a kind of more globalised um view. And I'd be I'd be really interested in thinking in terms of thinking about that latter one. You know, you say there that there, in a way, one of it it wouldn't it didn't necessarily have to be the Irish famine, you know, it could have potentially been something else. But were there, do you think, sort of particular characteristics to the famine that meant that it lent itself more than maybe, you know, many of the other crises that had happened just before or after and allowed people to project on it um, you know, their own views and and kind of ideology and priorities?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Absolutely. So um uh for like a very little bit of background, the famine was caused by a fungus called the Late Blight, which basically tore through potato crops, potato fields. So farmers would report looking at their crops at like one night and they are healthy and vibrant, and then getting up the next morning and the entire field has putrefied. So it's a fast-moving fungus. That decimates is actually probably the wrong word because that suggests only 10% of the crop is lost, right? Obliterated these crops. And the potato blight impacted crops across Europe and actually into North America. But we don't talk about the famine of 1845 as a European or even Atlantic phenomenon because in Ireland, most of the people living in the countryside, Ireland was mostly rural at this time, and so most of the denizens of the countryside were poor tenant farmers who rented very small, very barren patches of land. And one of the things about potatoes is that you can grow them on very small, very barren patches of land. They produce more calories sort of per square foot in that context than any other crop. So if you are a poor farmer who is not making enough money to buy their own food, the potato is actually a really good thing to grow in order to get your family the calories they need to survive. But what that meant was when the blight came to Ireland, it ruined the livelihoods of many more people than it did in Europe or North America. And so I think that's part of it is that the potato blight was sort of uh had an outsized impact in Ireland, but also Ireland in this period was sort of a perfect storm of failures. It is it it was then sort of this quasi-colony to Britain. Um, so many of the political structures in Ireland in the 19th century were actually developed in Ireland and then exported to other parts of the British Empire. So it was this like test case for British imperial rule. But at the same time, um, Irish political representation actually sat in the parliament in Westminster. So um Irish Protestants and um very wealthy Irish Catholics could elect representatives who sat in the English Parliament. So it's kind of a colony, it's kind of not, and in neither of those frameworks is it being successfully governed. It's also this is a period when Irish nationalism is kind of on the rise, and so politicians are saying Ireland should have self-government, and those politicians are famously not really helping people who are starving to death. As I said before, most of the residents of the countryside were tenant farmers and their landlords were doing basically nothing to help them survive. And so if you wanted an example of imperialism gone wrong, Ireland provided that. If you wanted an example of uh sort of traditional um hereditary landholding practices gone wrong, Ireland provided that. If you wanted a f the to look at politicians who were more interested in serving themselves than their um constituents, Ireland provided an example of that. So it became this kind of black box into which people could project many different meanings because no matter what sort of level of governance you cared about in the 19th century, you could probably look to Ireland as like a case study of how that mode of governance had gone wrong. So I think it could have been, in some ways, any place that had those conditions. Um, but it happened that in the 1840s, Ireland sort of became this place that people could look to as examples of what bad governance at basically every level looked like. And I I think quite a lot about how famines, I mean, I've I think this is probably uh familiar to your audience, right? Fa famines tend not to be actually about there not being enough food. It tends to be about the failure of governments or elites or people in positions of power to distribute that food.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

And and that's something I really want to come on to in in a minute in the context of how the famine was interpreted and responded to in our in Ireland and also sort of more broadly. Um the other thing I just wanted to ask about that kind of wider context for where this is situated historically, um, is one of the factors that we sort of bear in mind about why there was this this at that time potentially sort of unprecedented global response to do with the practicalities of the fact that there were new modes of communication and transport that meant that people could just hear about it and find out about it in ways that maybe previously wouldn't have been possible. Is is it the right moment in time for that to be important as well?

SPEAKER_01 16:02

It absolutely is. So it's it's both, I think, about changes in transportation technology. This is the era where we're moving from s uh like sail to steam. So um you can cross the Atlantic Ocean in what seems like ages to us, a matter of weeks, but that's better than months. News can travel by rail instead of by horse, so um a matter of day, like uh a single day instead of multiple days. So it was in in the 19th century framework relatively easy to get news relatively quickly. So to put that another way, prospective donors could feel that if they made a donation, that donation could be put to use while the crisis was still ongoing. So it's not about in a year this money might get to people who need it, it was in a matter of months this money might get to people who need it. I think there's also something about the rise of sort of the modern capitalist system in this period that really also contributes. Um, this is an age where you could think about investing in commodities at a distance, or even more compellingly, a sort of buying commodities without ever having seen them. And so that I think introduces this idea that you can use money not only in your locality, but in places that are far away. And this is built on networks of trust and credit. But um, people could imagine their money doing work in more than their own locality. And I think those two things also really contributed to this moment being a likely moment for the rise of this kind of um philanthropic imagination.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, it's a really interesting point though about the link between the way in which capitalism was evolving um and the the philanthropic response. Um yeah, I wanted to come back to to some of the things that you raised before, and maybe this there's so many dimensions to this that I'm going to try and sort of follow them through from the centre outwards, so you know, in a bit and slightly in the way you do in the book. So thinking first about the kind of the response in Ireland itself, I guess one of the things that you touched on there that I thought was fascinating in the book is is the way in which it raised that that kind of classic question about philanthropy, which is the extent to which you know the you're focusing on dealing with the acute needs or the kind of the symptoms of the problem as opposed to dealing with the underlying problem. How much debate was there about that in Ireland at the time and kind of who was engaged in it? Um and I guess the the other bit of that is, you know, did that differ according to how close you were to the need? In that, you know, it's it's sometimes easier to talk about underlying, you know, issues and causes and systemic change when you're not the one actually having to deal with the fact that people are starving, and otherwise you kind of have to just roll up your sleeves and get on with it.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Absolutely. Um, so one of the there there were a couple of really key moments for me in the archival research for this book, and one of them was coming across this sort of memorandum from a committee that was formed really early in the famine of sort of Dublin politicians and elites. So the there were uh Daniel O'Connell, who's probably the most famous Irish politician in this period. Um, he's associated with getting voting rights for Catholics, um, but I think notably like rich Catholics, poor Catholics, um, he was perfectly happy to throw under the bus, but also some Protestant politicians, some local landlords. So people who were interested in Ireland doing well formed this committee called the Mansion House Committee in November of 1845. So just as reports of this the crop failure are starting to come in. And they say we absolutely cannot accept charity from England. If we do that, we are basically setting ourselves up as subordinate at a time when we really think we need to be um conceptualizing the Irish nation as politically separate and independent from Britain. And I thought that was a really interesting move, because on the one hand, it really speaks to the political value of charity and philanthropy. But on the other hand, right, this is a rejecting aid at a moment when people are actually not quite yet starving to death, but when the the food supply is fast running out. And so in Dublin, throughout the famine, there is all of this debate about who should be aiding the rural Irish. Should it be landlords, should it be the British government, should it be sort of everyday middle-class Irish people? And depending on what uh the political preoccupation was of the person making the argument, they sort of picked one of those groups of people. So who was entitled to aid Ireland became this kind of litmus test for what the true Irish nation was. So if you think that the Irish nation should be comprised mostly of Catholics, you'd say, well, you know, the middle class Catholics are the people best equipped to aid Ireland. If you thought that Ireland really should continue to have this political relationship to England, you made this argument that actually like Britain had this obligation to come in. So Dublin is Ireland's a small country. Um it's smaller in square mileage than the state of New York. Um and I I don't know how helpful that is as a framework, but it's not large. But in the 19th century, Dublin was really far away from some of the worst suffering parts of Ireland, um, both sort of geographically, because you had to move at the speed of horse or rail or foot, but also just conceptually. It was a m- it the people who lived and worked in Dublin thought about themselves as closer, I think, to London than they did to parts of rural Ireland. In Ireland's second city, let's say, in Cork, which is in the southeast, there is so much less debate about what relief means. Um, and in fact, people who are asking for aid say, look, we are actually starving to death here. We don't really care who is sending us the money, but like they use the phrase actual starvation really, really frequently. So I think for people, as you say, who are closer to the sites of suffering, the famine relief is is political in that they want to make whatever argument they can to get relief there. But there's so much less preoccupation with what the relief means or who should be allowed to give. It's just you should send we we need to feed people because people are going to starve to death.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yeah, and and one of the the other bits that sort of link to that that I thought was fascinating and felt like it had particular kind of resonance with with some of the debates about philanthropy today is is not so much. The the people in in need being pragmatic about where the relief was coming from. But in the context of the debate about the role and responsibilities of landlords, people who might have used it as an opportunity to be critical of landlords actually thinking, well, pragmatically, if we go too hard on that, they might give nothing at all. So let's let's focus instead on trying to kind of encourage them to live up to their responsibility, which it feels like that's still the kind of dynamic that we often have when it comes to big money philanthropy. You know, do you kind of use the carrot or the stick?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Right. And I there was this sort of for me really interesting juxtaposition um because the responsibilities of landlords were talked about sort of broadly in reporting on the famine, but they really crystallized in two places. One of those places was Cork, and the other was sort of weirdly in um upstate New York, so the area around Albany. And that's because in that part of New York State, there were these like long-standing hereditary landlords, um, the Van Rinselierwicks, that had basically been granted land by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century and continued to hold it through the 19th century. And though they were Dutch and the landlords in Ireland were mostly of English extraction, structurally they looked really similar. So big estates, often big estates that were pretty badly leveraged. So landlords in this period owed lots of money to lots of people, and when they needed to recoup some of that money, they often pressed their tenants for it, which also feels like some parallels that we see in housing policy today. But so in upstate New York, the uh anti-landlord press, there was this like vast sort of network of people who really wanted to abolish private property in ways that feel really radical, even for today. So it was kind of interesting to see that in the past. But they they look to Ireland as sort of this consummate example of why private property should be abolished, why the landlord class should be entirely eradicated, why land should be redistributed to tenants, and they push on that really hard. In 1848, there is a sort of small and not successful rebellion in Ireland, and in the aftermath of that, the press in upstate New York basically says to their landlords, like, you know, um, we see that Ireland has had a rebellion against, amongst other people, the landlords. It would be a real pity if that happened here. Do you maybe want to change some of your policies? I mean, we wouldn't want it to happen here, but it if it did, that would be really sad, right? So they they use Ireland as kind of this example. They're always happy to invoke it. Meanwhile, in in Cork, um, as you said, the press basically says, yes, we think the landlords have failed the rural population. They are also in a position to help. And so what we need to do is to convince them to help. And so, sort of people with actually really similar political backgrounds in these two different places in Cork go on this sort of a charm campaign towards landlords. They talk about the good ones, they really like play up the ones who are not um shipping grain out of Ireland, but instead helping their tenants, really trying to convince local people that the best thing to do morally and also reputationally is to give. And so I think this is another way in which distance from the crisis sort of enabled the famine to be mobilized or weaponized for local political causes in ways that was uh both not pragmatic and also just, I think, would have felt really unseemly to people in the midst of suffering.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah, and I think I mean that brought a point about the role that proximity plays in allowing those differing interpretations, you know, the one that focuses on immediate need and the other one that is perhaps more has more of a space to use it uh to argue in political terms, again feels very relevant to you know famine response and disaster response today as well. I'm sure kind of lots of people listening will feel echoes of that in their own work. Um I j I just wanted to expand the circle that bit further. I want to come back to the US, which you mentioned there in the context of landowning, because I think there's some really fascinating stuff there. Um but just to to think about um the response to the famine in mainland Britain, and particularly sort of in in England. Obviously, I'm sitting here in Liverpool at the moment, so historically the you know Irish history is extremely resonant and still see the echoes of it kind of all around me uh every day. Um there's there's sort of two main threads that you you kind of focus on in the book. One about the way it was interpreted in the context of debates about free trade and the the corn laws, which is probably if I'm you know, for my mind, the probably the most complex part of the book because it's quite a complicated bit of history. Um but the other one is about the and you mentioned this before, the interpretation of what the famine says about Britain's responsibilities as an imperial power, and and why did it become something that people kind of looked at in that context?

SPEAKER_01 26:47

So I'll I'll try to do the quickest pressy of the Cord Law history, because it's um, as you say, it's very complicated. So in the early 19th century, British grain producers realized that the grain that they were producing was costing them, I guess, more money to make than grain in Europe. And so it was easy, in in theory, for sort of purchasers in Britain, um in the United Kingdom at this point, right? England, Ireland, Wales, um, and Scotland to buy foreign grain. British grain producers, farmers, landlords were overrepresented in parliament at this time. So like estates that had maybe three uh a landowner and three people living on them would get one parliamentary representative, and an entire city like Liverpool had none. Um, right? So there was this like structural bias towards rural spaces and towards the these sort of agricultural producers. And so the the corn laws uh were these laws basically that were protectionists. They said uh the there would be tariffs imposed on imported grain until it reached the price of British grain, which is great if you're a British landlord or agricultural producer. It's terrible if you're a person trying to buy bread, right? Because it artificially inflates basically the price of all grain products. So corn in this period uh stands in for wheat and corn and barley, basically. Anything that is grown for grain. So in the 19th century, before the famine, um, cities like Liverpool and Manchester and Glasgow in Scotland start to really boom, right? These are mostly port cities, they're on rivers, they become these centers of industry. Lots of working class people move to them, and a lot of these working class people are pretty angry that they are not able to purchase food sort of on the fair and open market. Especially right when they're told by the people who employ them in these factories or other industrial establishments that their wages should be negotiated on the open market, right? If you're if your employer is always saying, well, I can hire somebody for cheaper, so I'm gonna pay you less, you can't buy grain for cheaper, or you can't buy bread for cheaper because that particular class is being protected, that causes a lot of frustration and consternation. So in the period before the famine, a lot of activists were beginning to agitate, particularly against these protectionist laws. And then when the famine begins to sort of ramp up, those activists, uh those working class, mostly English activists, go, aha, Ireland is providing a really great example of why these kinds of laws are dangerous, right? If the Irish could import cheap grain, instead of having to sort of artificially inflate the price of that grain, they might, there might be less starvation, right? The impact of this famine might be less. And so for this really brief moment in the like 1845, 1846, these English labourers in these English and Scottish labourers in these industrial cities sort of find common cause with the Irish. They say Ireland is part of the British community, especially working class, which is not a term they use, but what sort of we would call working class Irish laborers are the same as us, right? We are all Britons and we are all suffering under these laws. And this is surprising for, I think, I suspect people like you who live in Liverpool, because there's this really long history of anti-Irish bias in these cities. Um and I think the prevailing story about Ireland, especially in this part of Britain in the 19th century, is that people immediately begin to say, you know, the Irish are starving because they're lazy. The potato is a lazy crop. They're choosing to grow a crop that was like morally corrupt. Um so I thought it was really compelling that from a policy perspective, there was this moment when Irish or English laborers really said, actually, we're gonna benefit more by aligning ourselves with the Irish in order to agitate for the repeal of these protectionist laws. The laws are effectively repealed. And then there's this sort of like slow tail of uh sort of support for the Irish. Instead of saying in these cities, we need to help the Irish people because they have common cause with us about these corn laws, the argument shifts and says, we need to help Irish people so they stay in Ireland and don't come here and sort of appeal or like fall upon our public health system, which can't support them. So both of those, on the one hand, like are very self-serving reasons, uh, both for arguing for a policy change and then arguing for sort of a more focused government relief in Ireland. But nevertheless, they made meaningful differences to the lives of Irish people. And I'm really interested in those kinds of moments because I think there tends to be this narrative when we talk about philanthropy today that says the only kind of philanthropy that's really acceptable is philanthropy that's not self-serving, right? And so people, donors or um people who sort of are agitating for change, one of the gotchas for them is to say, oh, but this change is gonna help you too. As if I and and I just I find that to be really fascinating because every time somebody talks about that publicly, I'm like, yeah, but that's from my perspective, that has been the case for a really long time in the history of philanthropy. And I think that's okay. Um we should acknowledge it, but we should try to think about why people pick particular causes in particular moments. Um and so this was just a really interesting case study and a sort of um counterintuitive. I was not expecting to find people who were agitating for Irish relief in these cities, given their long history of anti-Irish animus. Meanwhile, in London, the even sort of farther away from Ireland, the famine really becomes this thought experiment about, well, is Ireland part of the empire? If it is, do we have this imperial obligation to help them? Or is it the case that they're part of the empire but need to like lift themselves up by their bootstraps to become appropriate imperial subjects before they're deserving of aid? And so it's it almost felt academic in sort of just trying to pinpoint exactly like what it means to be a colony or a polity within a broader empire, um, and when there is suffering in that polity, what the obligation of the empire is. So it's sort of a very different um one in in these cities, right, there's a much more sort of visceral reaction, and then in London it's a lot of sort of academics debating. Well, it's theoretically, what should happen here.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

And and you mentioned interesting, you used the word deserving there, and that's something I wanted to ask about, because a lot so much of the con the wider context around sort of charity and philanthropy in this period, and certainly going on later into the 19th century, i is an absolute kind of obsession with the idea that you need to distinguish effectively between the deserving poor or those who are kind of deserving of charity and those who aren't. Was that something that came into the conversation about Ireland when people in mainland Britain were sort of acknowledging that perhaps they had a responsibility for some reason or another? Were they still trying to maintain that in delivering that relief it was important to make sure that the mechanisms were ones that could distinguish between people who were quote unquote deserving and those who weren't?

SPEAKER_01 33:34

Yeah, um, so the British relief efforts were by all accounts both like too little and too late in actually making meaningful change in Ireland, but some of those were most of those relief efforts took place through the poor law, um, which was this uh sort of medieval law that had been consistently updated, but was based on the idea that each person is associated with their own particular parish, um, and you need to receive relief in that parish. Interestingly, at least for me, um New Jersey, where I'm from, had a sort of version of this that persisted from when New Jersey had been an English colony. So the notion that you can only receive relief in the place of your birth. Um, and that law was recently overturned because it's actually in no way practical today. But it's sort of interesting to see how these things persist. And so you had to receive relief in your in the the place that you are from. And in Ireland, there was a thing called the workhouse test. And basically what that said was we're gonna make you you can enter a workhouse where you will labor in pretty backbreaking conditions in exchange for the bare minimum of calories needed to survive. And the workhouses were designed to be so miserable and so awful to be in that you would only enter if you were in the most, like the utmost need. So if you were gonna die on the roadside, you might go into the workhouse, but if there were any other options, you wouldn't. And this this was designed to prevent people from uh quote unquote taking advantage of the poor house and the workhouse system. So there absolutely was this idea that Irish people might be abusing the system of not even mostly not free, mostly just reduced priced food, um, or might be unfairly choosing not to labor when in fact they could, in ways that, frankly, in the United States feel really similar to debates around welfare and supplemental nutrition programs. Uh, this notion that people have to be absolutely abject before they can receive aid, and that there's this fear that somehow people are just like vastly gaming the system and in fact choosing to live in starvation and poverty so that they can get the bare minimum from a government. So I think there I I'm all there are always all of these moments where I'm like, oh, things have not changed that much.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

I I often think this when looking at the sort of histories of views about poverty in the Victorian era, you sort of think, oh, that's awful, and then your next thought is, oh, I wish I felt that we'd come further from that point, but you still see so many reflections of it now. Um I'm I'm aware that that I'm in danger of taking you for too long. There's this I barely even got onto the main bit we wanted to ask you about. So I'm gonna I wanted to shift on before I want to to spend a bit of time focusing particularly on the the three chapters where you look at well, firstly the role of um slavery and sort of slave owners and enslaved peoples, and then the what you mentioned earlier about the uh Chockshaw and Cherokee Nations. But just before we do that, I wanted to ask in terms of that wider context around how this was all sort of presented and debated in the US, do you think this was kind of an important moment in the development of America's sense of itself as an imperial power or a kind of a country that had international responsibilities? And also in the context of philanthropy, I know various people have kind of identified what they call sort of American philanthropic exceptionalism and this idea that it, you know, it is the global philanthropy powerhouse. Do you think there was a kind of sense that it it was a point where it started to shape itself around that idea as well?

SPEAKER_01 36:50

I do. Um, and and I also think for when I think about the idea of um American philanthropic exceptionalism, I think about specifically like its sort of citizens who are or like uh individuals or family corporations uh who are donating rather than the government acting in this charitable capacity. And so in the sort of once it became clear that there was this crisis in Ireland, actually the US Congress debated whether or not they would send aid, and they ultimately decided that it was not constitutional to send aid overseas, but they were happy to give two ships to private uh sort of groups who could use those ships to move money and food, which feels to me very much sort of a part of the way that philanthropy operates in the United States today and sort of part of a trajectory through institutional philanthropy in the early 20th century, like the notion of private public partnerships. But around those debates about whether Congress should send money, you also saw, especially in in New York City, which was um in many ways sort of the political heart of the United States at this time, all of these debates about should it be constitutional? Some people said that it should, and mostly they were saying that so that they could get Irish votes, right? Because the other story here is that this is the beginning of really widespread migration of a particular group of Irish people. There were there was an Irish diaspora in the United States before the famine. They were mostly Protestant, they were mostly merchants. So you see this shift in the mid-19th century towards like mostly poor and mostly Catholic people who could become naturalized relatively quickly. And so I again in this sort of self-serving way, you see New York City politicians supporting particular relief policies because it's going to garner them votes. But the they also sort of talk about how the largesse of individual politicians speaks to the party, that specifically the Democratic Party's commitment to the Irish and how these individual donations should also mean that Irish people should vote for them. So I think from the very early stages when people in the United States are testing out these various models, should it be congressional aid, should it be individual aid supported by Congress? It was never separated from what this would mean for like really intimate local politics on the ground about like who was in power in New York State and in the United States. Famine relief also was linked to this ongoing war that the United States was prosecuting with Mexico, and became sort of this useful foil for people who were anti-war to say, wouldn't it be better for us to spend money to aid the starving than to sort of have this ongoing, frustrating con uh imperial conflict? Or to put it another way, wouldn't it be better for our flavor of imperialism to be sort of benevolent imperialism than military imperialism? The war continued.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I sort of suspected as much. But um no, that's really I mean, it's really fascinating. And yeah, as I say, uh the the other area of the book that I I mean I found really fascinating again in the context of sort of modern debates, particularly about the uh sources of wealth and what that says about the legitimacy of of giving money away or trying to do good in the world and and the challenges that presents for the organisations kind of in receipt of the money sometimes, is the the couple of chapters on you know that based around slavery. Um and and first of all, I wanted to ask about the role of of white slave owners. So you cover some of some of this in the book. Um and maybe if you could say a bit about kind of why it was that the Irish famine and the response to it proved to be so useful for slave owners in terms of sort of a locus for their philanthropy. And then on the flip side, kind of what was the debate, if any, among the organizations that were offered these donations about whether or not to accept them?

SPEAKER_01 40:29

Yeah, so this was the enslavers in the United States produce lots of documents. Um there there are no black newspapers in the US South in this period, right? So there are lots of white newspapers, uh, and I think almost all of them are in support of slavery. And then there's just personal papers, um, because people who are elite tend to leave more records than people who are not elite. So there's lots of evidence about why people who own and hold other people in bondage got involved in Irish famine relief. And there's these two really interesting rhetorical moves. The first is the fact that Irish people are starving to death proves that American slavery isn't so bad, because at least enslaved people are fed. And so really early on, enslavers start pointing out how Ireland is so much worse off than enslaved people in the United States are. And then they say, um, and we are supremely moral because we uh enslavers are sending our money to Ireland to help with this objectively suffering group of people. This was particularly valuable for enslavers in this period because abolitionists had actually done a really great job of waging a PR campaign that said basically slavery is immoral and inhumane, and people who engage in slavery are immoral and inhumane. And so people who supported slavery really latched onto this idea of famine philanthropy as like a counter-argument to that. How can we be inhumane if we're sending money to suffering strangers? And then they make this other really interesting move, which is to say not only does the situation in Ireland prove that enslaved people in the United States are relatively well off, actually it's enslavers who are like the Irish. Because just like the Irish are being oppressed basically by the British government, um, unable to buy food, um, so too are enslavers being oppressed by the US federal government, which is not allowing us to expand slavery into new territories. Except that actually Irish people are better off because they can leave. Um, and enslavers can't take slavery into the ever westward expanding United States, which is, on the face of it, like such a bonker. I mean, it's incredible, yeah. Um enslavers are not starving to death, right? They own their own land. But it it sort of showed me how politically malleable the famine became as it moved, as news of it moved ever farther away from Ireland. And the, for me, like the most exciting archival moment, the big smoking gun, was actually finding a letter from a Quaker named Richard Allen. So Quakers were responsible for much of the collection of funds in the United States for Ireland and actually for distributing food in Ireland, so they were the major conduit. And Richard Allen is a Dublin Quaker who says we absolutely cannot accept money from enslavers. Um we have done such a good job of explaining to the world that slavery is evil, and if we take this money, we are basically giving them our stamp of approval. And he writes this like beautiful, like four-page article and he circulates it to fellow members of the Society of Friends at a period when they're getting lots of donations, especially from South Carolina. And he says that it would the donations are bloodstained, and he like it's just it's a really beautifully written letter. Ultimately, the Society of Friends says, yeah, um, but they're offering us like quite a lot of money and people are starving to death. So they end up accepting all of these donations. But that was a a real moment for me when people in and actually in their actual own words in the past were saying, this is not just about eating people, this is also about the political value of this kind of philanthropy. And actually, Frederick Douglass, another famous abolitionist, so Quaker's famously abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, another famous abolitionist, at every opportunity. He was touring Ireland during the famine, would say, things are very terrible here. Very sympathetic. Obviously, something needs to be done. However, you all are free, and that makes a difference. So he was, I think, really aware of the danger of this argument that the famine proved that slavery was not so bad.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

And and that I guess that link with with Douglas there and his whole campaign again against sort of bloodstained money brings us around to the the other the flip side of this, which is you identify in the book some examples of where enslaved people actually came together and gave money. But I guess that the bridging, which is really fascinating, I want to dig into that. But the the other fascinating thing for for me, I guess, was particularly in the way that Douglas spoke about the Irish famine. As you say, he kind of expressed sympathy, but it was limited to some extent by the fact that he said, you know, he was aware that the suffering that he'd seen amongst his own community was comparable, if not worse. And so, you know, actually that that idea that enslaved people would somehow feel empathy with the plight of the Irish thousands of miles away, actually, in many ways seems ludicrous, because you know, kind of why would they not look around them and think, well, yes, that does sound terrible, but we've got our own problems here. So I guess I guess my first question is where they did decide to look outside of their own community and sort of beyond some of the traditions of mutual aid and solidarity within the community that they were in. Why did why did they choose to do that and to sort of send this money to these distant communities so far away?

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Yeah, so this is the the chapter on enslaved donors is probably was my favorite one to write and think about for all of the reasons that you talk about, right? It's just extraordinary. And so I think there is a temptation for this story to be either one about uh exceptionalism, right? These people were so exceptionally noble that of course when they learned about distant suffering, they gave. But I think for a number of reasons, that actually is a story that underserves these donors. They chose Ireland in a period when they could have sent money to starving people in the United States, to other white people elsewhere, uh, even to like a local charity, right? And this is a period where I know there's quite a lot of discourse about were the Irish really considered white, but I think broadly uh they were it was easier for white Americans to imagine themselves being like the Irish than it was for them to imagine themselves being like enslaved black people. So I had two examples. One is this congregation in Richmond called the First African Baptist Church, which had never before sent money outside of the church. Um their records talk about all of some mutual aid work, uh, about sort of funds to help sufferers who are congregants, but this was the first time they sent money outside of the church. And the second group was a group of enslaved people in Alabama whose enslavers asked them, would they give up one meal a day to aid the starving Irish? And they say no. Um they which is uh not an unrisky thing to do, right? The slavery was an incredibly violent and capricious system. And actually, Morgan Smith, this enslaver, was considered unreasonably violent even by the standards of his own time. Um so he was like other enslavers thought that he was too brutal. So they said no to him. They said, We're not gonna give up one meal a day, but we will give $50 and send that to Ireland. So I think in both of these cases, a narrative empathy certainly plays into it, right? Um, a desire to help people who are suffering. But I think actually what was going on in both of these donations was kind of uh turning this model of white charity on its head. So this model that I talked about where enslavers said, we are exceptionally humane because we sent money to Ireland. And these groups of enslaved, um, and in the case of Richmond, both enslaved and free people, were saying, okay, for you, giving money is a symbol of humanity and morality. So what does it mean when we give money? Um and so I think it was really a way to try to intervene or capitalize on these conventions of white charity at a time when there were not a lot of modes of resistance open to enslaved people. Yeah, it's those are it, those those are the hardest stories to tell because the archives for these people are really limited. But um I don't think it makes sense to think about this as sort of claiming solidarity with the Irish because especially of these narratives that were sort of circulating, saying that that Ireland's famine was sort of evidence of the benevolence of slavery. Like I I don't think that enslaved people would have given and sort of support of that narrative. I think that their donations were doing something else.

SPEAKER_00 48:14

One thing I was thinking when I read it, because I thought it was absolutely fascinating. I guess you identify well, there's there's two elements of potential risk, it struck me. What one of them you did you certainly identify, which is the fact that enslaved people weren't even supposed to often own money, and and if they were demonstrating that they had some level of economic freedom, that simple act of identifying that and putting their heads above the parapet was dangerous. The other one, I guess, was if the the the aim of these these groups of enslaved people was to use those notions of white charity to sort of claim their own humanity in some sense and sort of turn this back on itself, was there any danger associated with that that they would almost sort of undermine their arguments about how bad slavery was? Would there be any sense in which white people or slave owners would say, well, it can't be that bad if you've you're in a position to help other people or to view them with with pity or charity? Was that anything that would came up?

SPEAKER_01 49:09

Absolutely. And in fact, in in the case of the enslaved people in Alabama, the local press made exactly that argument. Slavery can't be bad because these enslaved people sent money to Ireland. I think in their case their case is really sort of interesting and and really, really difficult to dig into. But I I think several things about it. One is their enslaver was pretty roundly critiqued in his own neighborhood. So I wonder about what it would have meant to consent to giving up one meal a day. Like, is that in perpetuity? Was this so I think their donation might also have been about saying, like, no, we're not gonna say that we're not gonna eat. Um, we can't, we actually can't do that. We cannot afford that calorically. So for us, the money actually buys both food and some autonomy. And I think resisting him entirely would also have been really dangerous because he was known to sort of repeatedly torture the enslaved people who he held in bondage. In Richmond, I would have expected, I think, the white press to talk about how the donation from the Richmond congregation was evidence of how slavery wasn't so bad, but the white press says nothing at all about the Richmond donation. Um so it's just it's it's not commented upon at all. And I think that's also really interesting. I think it suggests uh kind of discomfort with it. Um, this is lots of sort of reading silences and what historians call reading against the grain. But I thought it was more important to tell the stories of these donors who are mostly not talked about very much when we talk about famine philanthropy, um, even if I couldn't tell them as uh in as much detail as I can tell the stories of enslavers who really wanted everyone to know what they thought about everything.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

And and I think that, you know, even if we can't ever quite know truly what the motives of these groups were, I think the the point you make in sort of adding the complexity of the I think it's easier to distance to read it as a sort of simple, heartwarming story of empathy, you know, and solidarity across a a large distance, but does that just reflect our own sort of desire to to see that story? And and that definitely brings me on to the the other thing I wanted to ask you about was um the the example of the Cherokee and Choctaw Nation and their gift, which is which is where I mean, in a way is where I first found out about your work because I read the paper that you did, um A Voice of Benevolence from the Western Wilderness, kind of specifically about this a couple of years ago, and thought that was absolutely fascinating. And at that time, I think I I kind of read it as that. I was like, oh wow, I love this story, it's very heartwarming and it's all about sort of empathy. And in a way, in this in this book, you you kind of again bring some nuance into it that maybe makes it seem a little bit more complicated. Um, and again, should we understand that gift from from those Cherokee and Choctaw nations less as a kind of you know heartwarming story of people feeling, you know, empathy for people very distant from themselves, and more about what they wanted to say with that donation about their own situation in the US at the time?

SPEAKER_01 51:53

I think it can be both. So I think um for the Cherokees and the Choctaws, the Trail of Tears was about as demographic demographically devastating as the famine was. I think one uh every family lost at least one person in the course of the Trail of Tears. Um it's just shockingly devastating. Which I think on the one hand means that they were really uniquely positioned to look at what was happening in Ireland and say, we know what this looks like. Like we know and even if you then begin to sort of pull out and think about Irish immigration to the United States, right? Most of the time that wasn't people consented to leave, but they had no other option. Um so it it felt forced and it was written about in kind of this forced way. So I think Cherokees and Choctaws were amongst all of these donors, some of the best positioned to look to Ireland and say, oh, this this feels really resonant to us. But also the fact that in the United States there was a pretty broad consensus that the problem with Ireland was British mismanagement and particularly British imperial mismanagement. I think that Cherokees and Choctaws also found political value in sending money to Ireland because it allowed them to say, sort of make this analogy, right? Just as the Irish are to the British government, so are we to the US federal government. And one of the reasons that I I think, I mean, I know that they were picking Ireland and not other causes, is that um John Ross, who was the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, was himself part Scottish. And in fact, a lot of Cherokees in this period had Scottish ancestry because of like 18th century migration period migration patterns. And John Ross actually makes this address to the Cherokee Nation that says, we are sending money to Ireland, and that's great. But um, should we send money to Scotland? Many of us are Scottish. Um and uh so that for me is evidence that there was sort of a particular decision to align themselves philanthropically with Ireland in this period and not with other equally suffering populations, right? The Scottish Highlands were probably second to Ireland in the devastation caused by the potato blade. So I think I wouldn't, they weren't using language of anti-colonialism or of sort of resistance to imperialism, but I I think that's sort of at the heart of a lot of what was going on in the Cherokee and Choctaw donations. Additionally, I think they were doing some similar work to what enslaved people were doing, um, which is that white missionaries in this period were really excited about these two donations from Indian territory because white missionaries were like, aha, we have inculcated white Christian values in these in these Cherokees. They now know what charity is. Um, and actually the Cherokee and the Choctaw press jump on that narrative really quickly and say, no, this is about a sense of indigenous charity and morality that is separate from white missionaries, that is separate from the kind of acculturation attempts by the US federal government. This speaks to an innate morality in us that we do not get from you. And it's it's really nice to sort of see the that justification for giving so clearly articulated in press, because it means that I can quote it.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

Yeah, it's absolutely um fascinating. I'm I'm aware that I'm in danger of just keeping you fast along because I find this so interesting. So I just wanted to take the opportunity to ask one kind of um final, kind of broader question, which is obviously, you know, the work that you've done in the book and more broadly is an example of trying to kind of take a hiss historical perspective on philanthropy, but also, you know, in this conversation we've been trying to sort of relate it at points to what's going on in philanthropy now. So, what's your take on the kind of the value that historical perspective can bring to practitioners or people who aren't necessarily coming to it just for the history? Um, you know, how how would you kind of make that that argument to somebody who said, Oh, this is interesting, but I'm, you know, I still remain to be convinced about how it relates to my day job?

SPEAKER_01 55:25

I think that for for me, um, the notion, the like the big takeaway from the book is that philanthropy has always been about politics and identity, and that it's not a bad thing that it's about politics and identity. So I'm uh located in the United States, um, and we as a society have apparently decided that government is not going to provide enough to help all of the needy people in our country, let alone in the world. And so we've sort of decided that private and institutional philanthropy are the ways to address suffering. Given that there is more suffering than there are dollars, um, I think prospective donors are always going to be looking for connections or resonances between themselves and suffering populations. And that that doesn't undermine the validity or the authenticity of their desire to help, but I think does reflect, as you say, like a pragmatism, right? How is this donation either going to make me feel better or is it going to help me make an argument locally? Is it going to help me to sort of leverage some politics overseas into some politics that I'm interested in at home? And so I'm hoping that just recognizing that this is not a new thing, um, and in fact has been baked into international philanthropy, I think, from basically the the the earliest stages of it going mainstream will be interesting to people who work in philanthropy today, but also will maybe um undercut this argument that there are more and less moral kinds of giving.

SPEAKER_00 56:46

Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating point. Um, and I think there's a huge amount, you know, in the book that people can take from it. And as ever with history, I think there's some of it's just interesting in its own right, but then also, you know, you can read all kinds of kind of echoes and resonances into it. Um just remains to say thanks ever so much, Annalisa, for coming on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can get hold of the book and other things that I know you've written about this. Um and yeah, wish you all the best of the future.

SPEAKER_01 57:16

Thank you so much. This is so delightful.

SPEAKER_00 57:27

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Annalisa for coming on the podcast. Um, hope you'll agree. It was an absolutely fascinating conversation. Uh, I thoroughly recommend that if you were you know interested or intrigued by that and you'd like to get hold of a copy of the book, that you rush out and do that because it's a really great read, uh, and there's lots more in it that we didn't manage to cover in the conversation. So I'll put links in the show notes to places that you can find that and places where you can find some of the other things that Annalisa has written. Um I'll also put links in the show notes to places where you can find some things that I've written that might be relevant as well. Uh, obviously, if you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, you can always check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. You can get all the back issues of this podcast. Uh, you can get lots of articles, guides to kind of key topics in philanthropy, timelines on the history of philanthropy, and all sorts of updates on things that I'm out there um doing and talking about. Uh if you want to follow me on social media, best place these days is LinkedIn, so just look me up there. Um I'm kind of using that to a reasonable amount, so it's a good place to find me and interact with me. If you like the podcast, um do uh go out of your way to leave us a nice review wherever it is that you get your podcasts, you know, like, uh follow the podcast, tell other people to follow it. If you've got a friend or colleague that you think might be interested, do uh let them know about the podcast because I think word of mouth recommendations really help, and the more the merrier. Other than that, uh it just remains to say uh that I will see you next time. Bye.