'Labours in the Cause of Humanity in Every Part of the Globe' Transatlantic Philanthropic Collaboration and the Cosmopolitan Ideal, 1760-1815.

Abstract

Working together, citizens of the Atlantic world expanded the scale and scope of philanthropic activity. This dissertation moves beyond questions about the economic motives behind the rise of humanitarianism. Instead, through a transatlantic and trans-associational study, with particular focus on medical philanthropy, it focuses on how philanthropists built a complex charitable infrastructure and found ways to help suffering strangers near and far. This study reveals that activists recast organized beneficence through targeted changes that they collected and crafted as a result of a cosmopolitan approach to the world common in their era.

Eighteenth-century philanthropists bequeathed to their successors an accelerating pace of growth, a vastly elaborated charitable landscape, and the expectation of a worldwide reach. The developments that made possible those legacies unfolded as the Consumer Revolution burgeoned, the globe became more integrated (giving rise to a pragmatic cosmopolitanism among many people), and Americans and Britons made and unmade the empire. Rather than a major transformation, expansion of humanitarian activity rested on measured change. Through focused and incremental innovations trafficked among people around the Anglophone Atlantic, philanthropists identified more and more discrete groups as objects worthy of charitable assistance, enlarged the universe of eleemosynary institutions, and found routine ways to extend charity beyond local or particularistic boundaries.

This dissertation studies that evolution through analyses of philanthropists’ activities at both the transnational and local levels. It first examines the role of geographically mobile individuals in the introduction to urban Atlantic communities of new programs. This study then probes the pervasive impact of the Consumer Revolution on philanthropy through the international celebrity of English prison reformer John Howard. Attention then turns to activists’ efforts to find ways to aid suffering strangers, both internationally and locally. Ambitious international ventures failed, but philanthropists built on the local mastery of impartial charity in the resuscitation movement to pursue a global smallpox vaccination undertaking in the early nineteenth century. The local realm was where activists focused most of their energies, and the study next explores how activists made charities succeed locally. It ends by assessing the impact of the French Revolutionary chaos on cosmopolitanism in philanthropy.