The history of humanitarian efforts in times of famine and other emergencies has become a vibrant field of academic study, but there have been few attempts to delineate chronological patterns. This chapter seeks to contribute to a discussion by emphasizing societal factors (including culture, media structures, and economics) to a greater extent than research has hitherto. It illustrates its argument with three cases of famine relief in different periods, geographical locations, and political circumstances: the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, the famine in Soviet Russia in 1921–1923, and the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. Through these examples, this research takes a fresh look at humanitarian appeals, the allocation of relief, and aid accounts through the concept of moral economy. This chapter identifies three distinct phases of humanitarian action, which are termed ad-hoc humanitarianism, organized humanitarianism, and expressive humanitarianism.

The hypothesis of psychological egoism is a commonplace in disciplines like economics, psychology and biology. As an explanatory model it includes prosocial behaviour such as providing aid for distant strangers. However, philanthropic research has found mixed results regarding the effectiveness of appeals to the self-interest of donors. This article analyses the use of self-interest in appeals for humanitarian aid during the Russian famine of 1921-1923 and points out the need for the systematic inclusion of historical experience in philanthropic research. It concludes that the specific conditions surrounding the international campaign favoured the widespread use of appeals to donors' self-interest. A categorization of such appeals into four groups - national, economic, group-specific, and psychological - is proposed as an analytical tool for similar studies.

The present article presents a more detailed picture of the circumstances leading to the formation of the British Relief Association, the major humanitarian effort during the Great Irish Famine, than known hitherto. In particular, it delineates the following: (1) the crucial role of a two-man deputation from the town of Skibbereen, near the south-western coast of Ireland, consisting of protestant ministers Richard B. Townsend and Charles Caulfield, whose activities have hitherto gone unrecognised; (2) the control and manipulation of voluntary relief efforts by British government officials; and (3) the ways in which Baron Lionel Rothschild’s role was deliberately minimised, both by himself and in published records.

This article analyses the participation of individuals, networks and international organizations in transnational fundraising aimed at providing humanitarian relief aid. Focusing on fundraising campaigns organized in the Italian states in favour of Ireland in 1847, when the Great Famine scourged its population the most, the article highlights the agency of the fundraisers in setting in motion an economy of altruism that transcended groups’ boundaries and state borders. The activism and networking of a few well-established individuals in Rome were pivotal in mobilizing the lay and religious elites at a local level. In January and February 1847, the elites of the Italian capitals collected copious sums within private events and initiatives directed at their peers, while the Christian faiths present in Rome organized the first alms collections. This wave of altruism succeeded in setting humanitarian relief for Ireland as one of the goals of the global Catholic Church. In March, Pope Pius IX issued the Encyclical Praedecessores Nostros, appealing for Catholics to donate in favour of Ireland, and thereby generating much local fundraising, mainly in the Italian states and Southern Europe, until the early months of 1848. The Catholic clergy served the cause, raising money locally and taking charge of its delivery to Ireland, with partial coordination from Rome. Although implementing a transnational fundraising campaign involved obstacles of a political, logistical and financial nature, the alms collection raised in the Catholic churches aggregated many small donations over a considerable time span, providing more than double the amount raised in the lay initiatives organized by the elites of the Italian states. The article, based on unedited archival sources from the Italian, Vatican and Irish archives, shows how the charitable fundraisers overcame the obstacles imposed by state politics, international conflicts and transaction costs over the transnational circulation of ideas, initiatives and capitals.

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and accounting.

The London-based Committee for Relieving the Distressed Inhabitants of Germany, and Other Parts of the Continent is an early example of a large-scale voluntary relief programme that has gone unappreciated in the annals of humanitarianism. The present article examines the period in 1808 and 1809 when this committee redirected its relief efforts to Sweden. The case highlights many issues that beset humanitarianism today. With well-preserved recipient records, it offers insight to aspects of humanitarian encounters that have been markedly under-researched. It examines how foreign-policy interests fostered mis-conceptions about those in need and how such misconceptions resulted in corrupt distribution structures. It shows that asymmetries in the development of civil society impeded the relief effort and that the divergent interests of donors and distributors caused the forms of relief to be inadequate and agency to be lost. Moreover, it illustrates how local elites resisted advice from abroad and how the individual personalities involved shaped policy outcomes. These factors remain issues at the present time and the case of two Protestant European countries with a cultural affinity illustrates how significant they are.

The Paper analyses the voluntary action of the London-based Committee for Relieving the Distresses in Germany and Other Parts of the Continent, a set of humanitarian relief campaigns in the years 1805-1815, and its connections with the advocacy work of the anti-slavery movement and that of the British and Foreign Bible Society. While advocacy is a well-known dimension of early transnational civil society, early humanitarian relief services across borders are virtually unknown to research. This paper argues that advocacy and service were always interrelated and co-evolved as the two principal dimensions of global civil society already at the turn from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.