Food in the era of the First World War was much more than a military necessity. The shortages of foodstuffs profoundly shaped states and societies during the conflict and beyond. Hunger in war was not a new phenomenon, but its experience during the First World War led to three main changes. First, it changed the social contract between citizens and the state. People who had suffered serial nutritional deprivation came to believe more forcefully than before that a primary responsibility of the state was to provide a bare minimum of supplies for their survival. States, too, understood that being able to provide foodstuffs for their citizens was essential for their legitimacy. Second, hunger in the era of the First World War brought a new emphasis on “nutritional sovereignty”: the idea that states must be able to produce their food supplies themselves, rather than import them. Finally, hunger in the era of the First World War was a turning point in the development of international aid. While international charitable aid had existed long before the War, the amount of aid given the number of different groups and institutions grew exponentially.

Maps were part of the zeitgeist in the era of the First World War. They were used as practical tools to understand the world, as props to support new borders, and as a means to project power. Within this context, hunger maps played a vital role in re-drawing the world. Hunger Draws the Map was widely published in the US national and local press in late 1918 and early 1919. More than just a reflection of hunger in that present moment, it was also a projection of how its creators believed the world should be. Hunger Draws the Map, and other hunger maps, influenced public policy and had huge impacts for the people and geographies they covered. Hunger maps not only suggested where hungry people were, but which people’s hunger was deserving of note, and where food aid should be sent. As objects, they created sympathy, and, like other maps of the era, were projections of power. Hunger maps were both tools that helped bring about changes in the wake of the First World War, as well as by-products of the very processes they aimed to change.

Scholars have sometimes treated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as beneficent stewards of the global good that act in opposition to the limited and selfish interests of nations. This chapter calls for approaches that treat these groups as organizations that often serve government interests; have bureaucratic structures and agendas that must be analyzed and understood; are buffeted by funding constraints that shape aspiration and action; and are driven in part by self-serving motives such as increasing their own prestige. The chapter offers practical tips for studying biographies of key figures, broader historical contexts, inter- and intraorganizational rivalries, and professionalization, among other matters.

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

Today, the volunteers of the International Brigades are remembered for their frontline fighting rather than their rearguard humanitarianism. Chapter six turns to the unitߣs work with Spanish children to show that, for many volunteers, these activities represented two sides of the same antifascist coin. The volunteers held fiestas, distributed food and even established a range of homes, canteens and daycare centres for children uprooted by the war. In the first place, these ambitious initiatives enabled the volunteers to rest assured that they were ߢsoldiers of cultureߣ engaged in a just war for the survival of a martyred community. Just as crucially, they enabled them to draw members of that same community into their own understanding of the antifascist struggle and prepare them for the egalitarian ߢNew Spainߣ which would be built in its wake. This chapter turns its attention to a social group whose historical agency is only now being properly recognised, not least by showing how the children involved in the International Brigadesߣ rearguard initiatives creatively engaged with the volunteersߣ own process of making antifascist war.

Have we left postcolonial globalization behind with the demise of the Third World, the emergence of a global network society, and a shift away from debating fair trade predominantly in relation to South-North relations? This concluding chapter reconsiders the history of humanitarianism in the light of the evolution of the fair trade movement’s repertoire and goals. It argues that even though the legacy of colonialism is still with us, the practices and perspectives of fair trade activism have recently shifted to such an extent that we are indeed entering a new phase of the history of globalization.

The introduction posits the relevance of the history of fair trade activism to the history of postcolonial globalization to highlight three striking transformations: decolonization, the rise of consumer society, and the emergence of the internet. It underlines the importance of studying ‘moderate’ movements as part of a social history of globalization. It goes on to relate the history of fair trade to earlier historiography, demonstrating how the history of third-world movements, consumer activism, and humanitarianism can be combined to better understand the history of this movement. It finally introduces the structure of the book, which takes its cue from the materiality, which was crucial to the development of the fair trade movement by centring five products: handicrafts, sugar, paper, coffee, and textiles.

During the 1950s, civic groups started to sell handicrafts as an act of solidarity with their makers. This fostered a new global outlook amongst producers and potential buyers. This chapter analyses the early history of fair trade history, which revolves around handicrafts which were sold by charitable and solidarity initiatives since the early 1950s. It thus focuses on those actors within the movement which directly import products, first from all over the world, then more pronouncedly from ‘developing’ countries. The chapter tracks the emergence of these importers to demonstrate how the fair trade movement could develop, demonstrating the importance of missionary and solidarity networks and the fluent transition from an approach related to charity to one aiming at structural change.

Why are American INGOs’ missions becoming narrower while global issues are arguably becoming more expansive and interconnected? This chapter argues that mission specialization is a response to growing population density. As many INGO sectors became denser, more concentrated, and more competitive in the early 2000s, entrepreneurs began seeking ways to distinguish their new organizations. Creating an organization with a specialized mission was one way to survive in a crowded sector and thus became a common strategy. We support this argument with an analysis of original data on American INGOs’ mission statements. A case study of humanitarian INGOs further illustrates the value of our approach.

The ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’, launched in 1968, introduced a distinctly political perspective in campaigns for fair trade, exposing the unequal structures of global trade around the disparities in the global sugar trade. The campaign was ignited by the stalling negotiations of the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development in 1964 and 1968. It thus directly responded to the impact of decolonization in international politics. Through transferring these issues to local activism, it related such international development to the everyday lives of people in Western Europe. The chapter charts the emergence of attempts to address global inequality through interventions in national, European, and international politics. It then shows how European integration in particular prompted activists to set up transnational campaigns, but also severely hampered attempts at campaigning because of the difficulty of transnational communication as well as a lack of experience in addressing transnational institutions.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

This chapter analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

Previous scholarship on the end of indenture in the British Empire has asserted that a revived and reinvigorated humanitarian movement coincided with a series of public scandals over indenture and the increasingly vehement objections of the Indian and Chinese governments. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the model of the overseer-state prompts a very different perspective on the “second abolition.” This chapter argues that the expansion of the indenture system created the blueprint for its own undoing. It did so in three primary ways. First, it tied labor relations, labor immigration, and the moral and physical well-being of the indentured workforce indelibly to state agents and institutions of governance. Second, it entangled the operation of this labor governance in disparate regions of the empire, ensuring that issues arising in one region reverberated politically and economically throughout the system. And third, its own processes of recordkeeping, adjudication, inquiry, and oversight provided a channel along which the suffering and discontent of those under its yoke could be communicated to both the public and the highest levels of government.