Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Growing up in nineteenth-century Ireland: a cultural history of middle-class childhood and gender: by Mary Hatfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019,304 pp., £60.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-19-884342-9

This book is a study of compassion as a global project from Biafra to Live Aid. Kevin O'Sullivan explains how and why NGOs became the primary conduits of popular concern for the global poor between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s and shows how this shaped the West's relationship with the post-colonial world. Drawing on case studies from Britain, Canada and Ireland, as well as archival material from governments and international organisations, he sheds new light on how the legacies of empire were re-packaged and re-purposed for the post-colonial era, and how a liberal definition of benevolence, rooted in charity, justice, development and rights became the dominant expression of solidarity with the Third World. In doing so, the book provides a unique insight into the social, cultural and ideological foundations of global civil society. It reveals why this period provided such fertile ground for the emergence of NGOs and offers a fresh interpretation of how individuals in the West encountered the outside world.

The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid

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Selected list of writings on Irish Economic and Social History published in 2021

Charity or Justice

We are currently witnessing the emergence of global humanitarianism as a fully fledged historical field. Eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists, nineteenth-century imperial missionaries, twentieth-century aid workers, and twenty-first-century activists inhabit the pages of more and more published books and articles. Global humanitarianism denotes a sphere of action as well as an object of study. Questions as to where or what the global is persist. The books under review all operate within the sphere of Western influence: North America, the British empire, or former colonies. They also have similar protagonists. They are largely populated with practitioners of humanitarianism, rather than the objects of their beneficence. This raises some questions. Where does global humanitarianism take place and who does it encompass? Is global humanitarianism inherently enmeshed with Western expansionism and unequal power dynamics?

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Towards a history of global humanitarianism

The campaign for women’s access to higher education in Ireland in the late-nineteenth century was understated, characterised by committees, middle class concerns and wrangling over legislation. The...

Bored bluestockings and frivolous flirts: dynamics of gender and the experiences of the first female students of Queen’s College Cork, 1879–1910

Approaching international law through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this chapter investigates forms of exclusion from international law. Moving beyond a romantic understanding of international law, we build on the intricate power relations in Jane Austen’s work, which show how deeply linked the question of agency is to assumptions about the subjectivities of speakers and the wider plot. This illustrates why it matters how the story of international law is told, who appears as the main characters and how their agency is cast. Pride and Prejudice thus serves as a lens for us to reflect on exclusions in international law and to recover the story of international law beyond a romanticised drawing room imagery.

Aoife O’Leary McNeice

Papers

Towards a history of global humanitarianism

Bored bluestockings and frivolous flirts: dynamics of gender and the experiences of the first female students of Queen’s College Cork, 1879–1910

Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen and the (In)ability to Speak International Law