State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

Describes first year in wartime government service.

Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

Live Aid was the singular event that made humanitarianism fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, it was Comic Relief that sustained and institutionalised this new form of mass giving on a regular basis. In 1988, the comedian Lenny Henry hosted the Red Nose Day telethon which became a regular event and raised £1 billion over the next thirty years. Comic Relief symbolised a new era of humanitarian giving in a televisual age. It shifted attitudes to poverty overseas which then constrained prior government intentions to reduce aid and development spending. And it also helped change public attitudes to charity more generally. Surveys of public opinion evidenced continued high levels of support for overseas aid, and the scepticism towards charity observed at the expansion of the post-war welfare state dissipated. Respondents expressed their views no longer in terms of charity versus the state but in terms of the importance of both public and voluntary provision in the relief of poverty, at home and overseas. The popularity of humanitarianism had increased the acceptability of charity as a solution to poverty more generally.

This chapter formulates the research question and clarifies the critical methodological issues pertaining to the analysis. This is important because the book aims to bring together science and technology studies, sociological systems theory and jurisprudence The topic of the book is then introduced by giving an overview of all the chapters, making clear that a common thread runs throughout the book and that the argument addresses all of the theoretical, empirical and practical aspects of the research question posed at the beginning.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.

Describes academic and other activities, 1933–36.

The first of two chapters describing Meade’s life and work at LSE, including the work which earned him a Nobel Prize.

As with the Left, the Conservative Party also began to look to charity for the delivery of social services. Following the enormous appeal of Band Aid and Live Aid, the Government turned to the voluntary sector to make up for the cuts to the social services budgets. However, it also hoped to embrace a compliant sector. Conservative MPs regularly complained to the Charity Commissioners about the political advocacy of the humanitarians and other poverty lobbyists. From the mid-1980s, this became a concerted campaign through neoconservative organisations such as Western Goals. The most successful was the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist libertarian group which triggered an investigation into Oxfam’s advocacy on apartheid. The Charity Commissioners concluded that Oxfam had overstepped its remit and publicly rebuked it in 1991, even though the end of apartheid was in sight. It later emerged that the IFF was a front organisation for the South African military. The racist politics of the region, which shaped so much humanitarian intervention, had returned to the UK to impact the regulation of all charities’ campaigning work.