Cunningham History of Western Philanthropy occasional paper Nov 13

CGAP Occasional Paper

June 2013

A History of Western Philanthropy

Hugh Cunningham

Summary

Professor Hugh Cunningham’s argument that “historians of philanthropy need to think
like geologists” is explored in this Occasional Paper, offering discussion and reflection on
the strata or layers of philanthropic action, which have accumulated on top of each other
within Western philanthropy. Emphasising that philanthropy history is not simply a history
of giving, nor a history of giving by the rich, the paper suggests nine successive strata,
which, cumulatively, shape the present. Taken together, they draw attention to the ways
in which philanthropy is as much circular and repetitive as progressive and linear; that is,
that “earlier strata keep re-surfacing.” For Professor Cunningham, with the study of
philanthropy to be understood only in contexts much wider than a focus on giving might
suggest, the “danger is that the study of it becomes too inward-looking.”

June 2013 CGAP Occasional Paper The History of Western Philanthropy

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Historians increasingly write about philanthropy as a gift relationship. Alan Kidd (1996, p.
184) describes it as ‘non-commercial social transfers of wealth, material objects or nonmaterial assistance rendered in forms that are culturally meaningful and that generate
moral relationships between individuals or groups such as solidarity, dependence,
legitimacy, and reputability’. The history of philanthropy is not simply a history of giving,
far less of giving only by the rich. It involves examining both sides of the relationship,
and that brings it into close engagement with many other branches of history: class,
gender, national identity and empire, religion and missions, poor relief and welfare,
wealth and taxation, civil society, all these and others touch on philanthropy.

In the synopsis that follows I argue that historians of philanthropy need to think like
geologists. Stop the clock at any time, say 1850 in Europe, and you will find strata or
layers of philanthropic giving accumulated on top of each other. The philanthropy of the
past leaves its material record, its buildings, its legal documents, its charitable gifts, its
assumptions and practices, in layer after layer. The present adds a topsoil of the latest
projects, but the lower layers continue to exercise their influence, sometimes in the form
of outcrops from earlier ages of giving.

Excavators of the first stratum seize on Aristotle (384-322 BCE) who wrote that to give
money ‘to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, with the right aim in
view, and in the right way - that is not something anyone can do, nor is it easy’ (Aristotle,
2000, p. 35). Twenty-first-century philanthropists love to quote this: philanthropy, it
seems to say, is not easy, but to engage in it has the sanction of ancient wisdom. In fact
Aristotle was exploring how to achieve a mean between wastefulness and stinginess; for
him the truly virtuous person, in the words of Roger Crisp, ‘is unlikely to stir himself to
help the vulnerable’ (Aristotle, 2000, p. xviii).

The Greek word philanthropia originally referred to the relationship of the gods to
humans; it came to be applied to rulers who were generous to their subjects, and then to


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the wealthy more generally. It incorporated the notion of a return philanthropon from the
recipients in the form of honours heaped on the donor – it was a form of gift exchange, a
quid-pro-quo (Hands, 1968, pp. 35-7, 80). Often it referred to a relationship between
wealthy individuals, indicative of a cast of mind as much as the conferring of a gift. The
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4 century philosopher Themistius, for example, thought it ‘ridiculous … to attest to love
of mankind in a weaver or a carpenter who has a mean dwelling, and scarcely leaves his
house through weariness and lack of leisure’ (Finn, 2006, p. 215). Philanthropy was
given a new twist by early Christians, but as a term it soon disappeared from view before
re-emerging in the late eighteenth century.

The second stratum is made up of the teachings of the Bible and of the early Christian
Fathers, of their interpretation from the twelfth century onwards, and of the medieval
world of giving. At their root was a sense of justice, that the poor should be relieved by
the rich. The Christian Fathers argued that all property belonged to all men. If God was
the great philanthropist, Christians, preached Basil, should imitate ‘God’s philanthropia
by both taking pity and sharing things out and being generous with favours’ (Finn, 2006,
p. 236). In the Middle Ages, from the centres of intellectual activity in Paris, Rome and
Bologna, ideas and teachings about giving circulated throughout Europe, progressively
simplified as they descended the social scale. The stress was on the obligations of the
rich. In the words of Robert of Flamborough (d. 1224), ‘whoever does not receive guests
in his home, as God has ordained, nor give alms, if he makes no amends by bread and
water for an equivalent period, let him do penance’. Alms giving was itself a form of
penance - ‘alms extinguish sins’ according to Bartholomew of Exeter. The poor should
know, it was said in the mid-twelfth century, ‘that in alms they receive the sins of men,
and also that they can reciprocate by offering prayers in return’ (Rubin, 1987, pp. 62, 64,
83). The pressure to give was heightened by the growing belief from the later twelfth
century in purgatory as the place where most people would go - and suffer - after death.
The length of time to be spent in purgatory and the degree of suffering to be undergone
could be lessened by prayer. As J. T. Rosenthal (1972, p. 8) put it, ‘Men of property were
expected to give to the church and to the poor, during life and at death, both to justify


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their inequitable status in the social hierarchy and to buy prayers for their own souls.’
Mary of Bassingbourn, for example, gave an endowment in 1301 to an Augustinian
priory which had to maintain four regular canons to pray for Mary’s soul and for the souls
of her two husbands and her parents, but in addition she provided for an alms-house for
seven poor and infirm men and for distributions of food to 1000 poor people on three
occasions every year (Rubin, 1987, p. 249).

If there was an obligation to give, it was also increasingly argued that it should be done
with discrimination. The Summa elegantius (c. 1169), asserted that ‘In almsgiving there
should be distinction between people. You had better give to your own than to strangers,
to the sick rather than to the healthy, to ashamed rather than aggressive beggars, to the
have-not rather than to him that has, and amongst the needy, first to the just and then to
the unjust. That is ordered charity’. The distinction between the deserving and the
undeserving poor, with a long and unfinished history ahead of it, was in place. From the
thirteenth century onwards there was particular merit, it was felt, in giving to the shamefaced poor, those who had fallen into poverty from previous comfort. The donor’s
motives, however, as much as the worthiness of the recipient, gave merit to an act of
giving (Rubin, 1987, pp. 70-3, 86-8).

The experience of Italian cities helps to capture the scale and reach of late medieval
charity. It was ‘chiefly intended for the respectable, the innocent, and the holy’. Hospital
building had taken off in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – by 1383 there were
twenty-one in Genoa alone, some housing and caring for the elderly, others foundling
hospitals for abandoned babies. Confraternities, perhaps best seen as mutual aid selfhelp organisations, began to proliferate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By 1521
Venice had at least 120 small confraternities and five large ones. In the middle years of
the fifteenth century cities began to build great hospitals, partly to bring some coherence
and order to a charitable world where there were too many institutions with overlapping
missions. They also began to develop the micro-credit schemes known as Monti di
Pietà, making small loans to the worthy poor (Pullan, 1988).


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The third stratum originated in the later Middle Ages and was dominant until the late
nineteenth century. The socio-economic fact underlying it was the existence of poverty
among a substantial proportion of the population. Finding that about one-third of the
population of mid-eighteenth-century Florence applied for public poor relief, a
percentage similar to that in England, Peter Laslett (1988, p. 164) concluded that
‘Everything points to the existence within European traditional societies of a sizeable
block of the population looking to the collectivity to get by’. In famines or epidemics, onethird of the population might rise to half (Pullan, 1988, p. 178). Some of this poverty was
of a kind known to the Middle Ages, the poverty of the elderly, of widows, of the sick, of
children. But on top of this there was poverty among men of working age. In face of the
endemic problem of poverty, the belief that the poor were closer to Christ than the rich
was less frequently voiced. On the contrary it was their idleness, their fecklessness, their
immorality which impressed itself. Extensive poor relief strategies were adopted, and
charity became inextricably bound up with them.

In the administration of poor relief the distinction, so fundamental to modern thinking,
between private donations and state funding, made little sense. ‘The mixed economy of
welfare’, the phrase widely used by historians to describe both the source of funding and
the agency of control in poor relief measures, draws attention to the blurring of
boundaries. In England ‘Many private gifts and bequests were administered directly by
local officials’ (McIntosh, 1988, p. 212). The innovation in England at the beginning of the
seventeenth century of taxing people to pay for poor relief was sometimes described as
charity; the Poor Law and the Charitable Uses Act both, and not coincidentally, date from
1601. In Italy the words for poor relief and charity were used interchangeably (Cavallo,
1998, p. 110). The Société Philanthropique de Bruxelles (1828) was founded by private
initiative, subsidised by local government and had the mayor of Brussels as its president
(Dekker, 1998, pp. 133-4). No one could say where the private ended and the public
began.


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Poor relief could be granted for a variety of reasons, some of them far from obviously
philanthropic. Marco van Leeuwen (1994) has argued that there was a ‘logic of charity’.
On the part of elites – and the same might also be said of the bourgeoisie – poor relief
could help to regulate the labour market, to stabilise the social order, to avert turmoil, to
reduce the risk of infection, to civilise the poor, to affirm their own status, to forward a
career and a web of patronage, and to promote one’s own salvation. Sandra Cavallo
(1991) has stressed, with special reference to Turin, that giving was often a way of
deepening the ties of family and of patronage, and thereby of exercising power. There
was nothing new in this. In fifteenth-century Florence ‘charity and patronage became
almost indistinguishable’ (Henderson, 1994, p. 424). It was no accident that there was
increasing emphasis on confining eligibility for charity to those born in a particular city. In
the rituals that accompanied giving there was a high quotient of symbolic action that
reinforced a particular notion of social order. There was also in giving much rivalry
between institutions, social actors and power blocs. Need, in any kind of objective
measurement, did not determine the level or direction of charity. On the other side of the
equation, the poor had a range of survival strategies, including pawning, migration,
begging, prostitution, crime, revolt, formation of mutual societies and accepting poor
relief. Turning to charity was by no means the first avenue they explored, nor did it ever
enjoy exclusive preference.

Charity, then, was a site where power was exercised and negotiated, the poor the
weaker party but not without some bargaining strength. The poor knew that they needed
to adopt special forms of words and body language if they wanted help. Letters had to
be written for entry to alms-houses, a letter-writer perhaps employed to undertake the
task. Joan Young, applying for admission to the alms-house at Bruton in Somerset,
described herself as ‘a very indigent disconsolate widow full of years and necessities
almost blind and impotent unable to get a penny towards her subsistence widowed with
nothing but misery and sadness [who] unless supported by the hand of charity will
necessarily perish’. It ticked the right boxes, moving and at the same time mildly


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threatening to those who might be tempted not to lift the hand of charity (Hindle, 2004, p.
160).

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, and of fundamental importance, there was a
decisive shift from charitable action initiated and controlled by the church to one where
laymen were the dominant force. This did not mean that Christianity ceased to be a vital
force in the world of charity, rather that charity shifted its focus from giving to religious
causes to attending to ‘the secular needs of humanity’, and that laymen were
conspicuous in its funding and organisation (Jordan, 1959, p. 17). As Cissie Fairchilds
(1976, p. 21) has expressed it, ‘the merchants of almost every major town in Western
Europe began in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to establish new
charities, which they, and not the Church, would control’. Natalie Davis (1987, pp. 51-2)
has detected ‘an international movement for welfare reform in Europe during the
decades after 1520’. Brian Pullan (1988, p. 200), while stressing continuity from the
past, has described it as a ‘new philanthropy’, the first of a number of ‘new
philanthropies’. The central text of this new approach was De Subventione Pauperum
written by the Spanish humanist, Juan Luis Vives, in 1526, addressed to the Consuls
and Senate of Bruges, and soon enjoying Europe-wide renown. Vives noted how ‘The
young children of the poor are villainously brought up, they [mothers] and their sons
lying outside the churches or wandering round begging.’ The solution to the problem was
to place these children in institutions. Sometimes existing hospitals for poor or
abandoned children were taken over and measures to improve discipline enacted,
usually with the provision of education for the brighter ones. In due course the boys
might be apprenticed, and dowries paid for the girls. This was Christian humanism in
action, instilling discipline, offering the possibility of advancement, lay-controlled, but
suffused with a religious ethos, whether Protestant or Catholic (Cunningham, 2005, pp.
116-17).

This third stratum is often associated with the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth
century. In the historiography of philanthropy the Protestant/Catholic divide was until the


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1960s the focus of attention. Thereafter social historians downplayed the divide, pointing
to similar responses between Protestants and Catholics to what was seen as an
extended economic and social crisis that pre-dated the Reformation. Recently, however,
the distinctiveness both of Protestant attitudes and actions and of Counter-Reformation
responses has been urged. Luther, it is argued, preceded Vives in proposing radical
reforms in the administration of relief. He was particularly critical of Catholic mendicant
orders and religious confraternities whose voluntary poverty displaced attention from the
real poverty of the poor. Nuremberg and other towns in Germany had poor relief reforms
in place in the early 1520s. The attempt to eliminate begging and to make a clear
distinction between the deserving and the undeserving all bear the mark of Protestant
thinking and action (Grell, 1997, pp. 45-9). Protestant thinking about the poor, moreover,
spread rapidly across national boundaries, often carried by refugees. In London the
Dutch Reformed and other churches became ‘not only a model for English Puritans, but
were widely admired by those within the Church of England who had little sympathy for
Calvinism’ (Grell & Cunningham, 1997, p. 9).

In Protestant countries the catechism made it clear that good works did not contribute to
salvation, but should be seen as a sign of thankfulness to God (Ben-Amos, 2008, pp.
246-7). Protestants were sensitive to criticism that they had dismantled Catholic forms of
charity. They responded in part by giving, in part by ceremonies of extravagant praise for
benefactors (Archer, 2002; Ben-Amos, 2008). W. K. Jordan (1959, pp. 250-1) celebrated
the levels of giving in Protestant England up to 1660 and although his figures have
subsequently been revised downwards, there is no denying the scale of giving, nor its
focus on poor relief, either directly, or indirectly by promoting education or schemes of
social rehabilitation; it amounted to at least three-quarters of all giving.

In Catholic countries that faced very similar social problems to those in countries that
had turned Protestant, the lead was taken by the Church in the aftermath of the Council
of Trent. Numerous orders of monks and nuns set about the task of promoting public
morality, of Christianizing the masses, and of distributing food to the deserving. Grell and


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Cunningham (2002, p. 3) have concluded that in the Reformation and CounterReformation ‘The Northern, Protestant, countries came to be characterised by schemes
predominantly initiated by local and central governments, while the southern, Catholic,
parts of Europe in particular witnessed a reinvigoration of confessional institutions and
the creation of new lay and clerical orders dedicated to the poor and the sick’.

Early modern charity was proud to be in the public eye. It was urban and promoted as
an adornment of any town or city. It was an inducement to the poor to migrate from the
countryside – only England, with its parish-based poor law from the beginning of the
seventeenth century, offered much help to the rural poor. Once the poor, and particularly
their children, became inmates of institutions, they became enmeshed in a philanthropic
world which was dependent for funds and reputation on public display. Funerals,
certainly in Catholic countries, became the major sites of display. In Paris the children of
the key institutions were, as Philippe Ariès (1981, pp. 165-8) put it, ‘specialists in death’.
In Castile the Colleges of the Niños de la Doctrina, which housed, clothed and fed poor
boys, taught them reading and writing, and instructed them in Christianity, also required
them to accompany funeral processions, their presence there, amongst other things, a
means of raising money (Martz, 1983).

Over the course of the roughly 350 years (1520-1870) during which charity and poor
relief were virtually coterminous, there emerged three distinctive new strata with a long
life ahead of them. The first (our fourth stratum) originated in England in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians in the early twentieth century
described what happened as ‘associated philanthropy’. Instead of there being a
multiplicity of individual one-off acts of giving, people came together to promote a cause
they believed in; they formed societies, they funded themselves through annual
subscriptions from members, the latter having the right to elect the governors of the
charity; they published annual reports. These initiatives in organisational form bore a
similarity to the contemporaneous development of financial institutions in the City of
London, especially joint-stock companies. The causes they were drawn to in the late


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seventeenth century were the establishment of charity schools, the provision of
employment in part through the building of workhouses, and the formation of Societies
for the Reformation of Manners. If from one angle they look like an outpouring of
organised Christian zeal, from another they seem primarily concerned with social
control. The same could be said for a key development of the eighteenth century, the
establishment of hospitals. A concern for health had to fight for prominence against a
range of other purposes that it was thought a hospital could serve, these neatly
encapsulated in the title of a sermon delivered in 1746: ‘Hospitals and Infirmaries
Considered as Schools of Christian Education for the Adult Poor: and as a Means
Conducive Towards a National Reformation in the Common Peoples’ (Fissell, 1991, p.
84).

These new subscription charitable organisations can be seen as initiating what is now
often described as ‘the voluntary sector’. The promoters of all these efforts were
dominantly from the mercantile class, men like Thomas Coram of Foundling Hospital
fame and Jonas Hanway, the mainspring behind many later initiatives. Retiring early
from business, they devoted themselves to the public good. They received due
recognition, Coram a portrait by Hogarth, Hanway a memorial in Westminster Abbey
(Andrew, 1989). The new hospitals described themselves as ‘voluntary’. They were
carving out a role for themselves which was independent of both state and church. They
were run by unpaid volunteers; even doctors who worked in them did so without
receiving any fee, though the prestige and networking that accrued to them was often
more than adequate compensation. More important, the hospitals received no money
directly from the state, though some from Poor Law Guardians who sent patients to
them. They were, it can be argued, laying the foundations of ‘civil society’.

Civil society was also evident in Hamburg where the establishment in 1788 of the
General Poor Relief was the outcome of over twenty years of reforming effort. It
reinvigorated the campaign against begging, it looked for ways to get paupers back into
work, but above all it was marked by a recognition that, as Johann Georg Büsch put it,


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‘the common man earns too little to live on’. A growing city like Hamburg, its population
swollen by migrants whose livelihoods were dependent on the ups and downs of global
trade, required, ‘a restructuring of charity’, ‘a new type of philanthropy’, one that was
responsive to the need to get workers who fell ill back into work. Poor relief began to
extend beyond paupers. The emphasis was on providing medical relief in the home with
domiciliary visits to the poor by doctors and other volunteers, themselves inspired by
humanitarianism and a service ethic. The ideas and practices generated in Hamburg
spread to other German towns, and although the escalating expense led to much debate
on the merits of the system, domiciliary visiting of the poor remained a crucial element of
philanthropic action through the nineteenth century (Lindemann, 2002). Given powerful
backing by J.-M. de Gérando in 1820 in his Le Visiteur du Pauvre, it was ‘adopted as the
standard mould of nineteenth-century voluntary charity’ (Woolf, 1986, p. 104). Initiatives
in one town soon spread. If Hamburg provided a template for a new philanthropy in the
late eighteenth century, there were others equally prominent in the nineteenth century,
notably Glasgow under the reforming impact of Thomas Chalmers in the 1830s and
1840s and Elberfeld from the mid-century onwards. Both built on the Hamburg model,
dividing up the city into welfare districts, emphasising personal supervision of recipients
and the removal of any right to relief.

The fifth stratum becomes identifiable towards the end of the eighteenth century: it
ceases to be anachronistic to write about ‘philanthropy’. Francis Bacon in the early
seventeenth century had equated what ‘the Grecians call philanthropia with ‘goodness
… affecting of the weal of men’, but the word only became widely used with the
Enlightenment (Sulek, 2010, pp. 194-5). Like the revolution to come, it took root in
France, and it reflected a powerful strand of anti-clericalism in French society, a strong
critique of existing charities and an optimistic belief that in a well-ordered society human
beings would throw off the chains, both physical and psychical, that restricted them. The
background to it was a collapse in donations through wills to existing charities, and
increasing socio-economic pressures (Jones, 1982). The foundation of the Société
Philanthropique de Paris in 1780, though it had little impact in its first five years, was a


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landmark. In a 1787 manifesto it declared that philanthropic activity was the main duty of
a citizen (Duprat, 1993, p. 68). Hitherto charitable giving had been incited by the belief
that it was a duty incumbent on Christians. Now it became, as it remains, the mark of
true citizenship. The Société Philanthropique was not a total break with the past, far from
it. It became in the nineteenth century the repository of conservative attitudes.
Nevertheless this late eighteenth-century moment effectively marks the beginning of
‘philanthropy’ as something which might be distinguished from ‘charity’.

Philanthropy crossed the Channel from France to England in the 1780s. The first person
in England to be described as a philanthropist was John Howard who toured and
reported on prisons and similar institutions in Britain and Europe, urging reform. In 1786
he became ‘John Howard, the philanthropist’, seen as a lover of humankind, more
famous for the 42,033 miles that he calculated he had travelled than for any money he
might have given. It was in the 1780s, too, that Robert Young, long-resident in France,
returned to his native England, and was there instrumental in founding the Philanthropic
Society to reform young criminals or those in danger of becoming so. For many years it
looked as if philanthropy would be located on the left of the political spectrum. Rightwing newspapers jeered at ‘Tom Paine the Philanthropist’ (OED, ‘Philanthropist’).
‘[E]very philanthropist should be a reformer’, wrote the Unitarian George Dyer (1795, pp.
35-6), echoed by the historian G. J. Barker-Benfield (2003, p. 73) for whom ‘from the
latter eighteenth century, reform and philanthropy were nearly interchangeable’.
Mutualist societies wore the philanthropic label. The Philanthropic Society of House
Carpenters and Joiners in Newcastle in 1812, for example, was a mutual aid society,
dedicated ‘upon all just occasions to assist and support each other’. In 1818 the first
attempt to form a union of all trades unions was called ‘The Philanthropic Hercules’
(Postgate, 1923, pp. 19, 33).

But this radicalism of philanthropy died away. Philanthropy began to align itself with the
dominant social and economic ideology of the time, political economy. Political
economists preached market solutions to social problems. They were above all


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concerned that wages should be determined by the market. Earning a living through
wages was fundamental both to a successful economy and to personal morality. Charity
in its old forms, political economists argued, undermined that. And political economists
were hard to ignore. In England in 1824 one writer reflected on the impact that political
economy had made:

‘To convince the public, twenty or thirty years ago, of the goodness of a charity,
it was sufficient to shew that the objects relieved were in a state of real
distress…. But now, that the circumstances are more generally known, on which
the condition of the labouring classes depends, all former reasonings on the
subject of charity … are invalidated…. The condition of the labouring classes
with regard to the necessaries and comforts of life, is evidently determined by
the rate of wages’ (Poverty in the Victorian Age, 1973: ‘Charitable Institutions’, p.
99).

Nothing did more harm, it was said in 1815, than ‘the misplaced benevolence of the
charitable and humane’ (Poverty in the Victorian Age, 1973: ‘Mendicity’, p. 121).

This was an attack on charity and on that much-heralded eighteenth-century virtue,
‘benevolence’. In the 1820s claims were made for ‘philanthropy’ as the means by which
political economy could set bounds to unlimited charity. Teaching the poor ‘the
knowledge of the laws which regulate wages’, it was said, ‘… depends in a great
measure upon the exertions of enlightened philanthropists’ (Poverty in the Victorian Age,
1973: ‘Charitable Institutions’, p. 113). Thirty years later the message was still being
drummed home: once the principles of political economy were firmly established, ‘our
kindly impulses … will cast off the lazy shape of charity, and rise into the attitude and
assume the garb of true philanthropy’ (Poverty in the Victorian Age, 1973: ‘Charity,
noxious and beneficent’, p. 88).


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Philanthropy and political economy, it seemed, were to be allies against ‘the lazy shape
of charity’. By the 1860s, however, there were mutterings about ‘a misguided and
sanguine philanthropy’, about ‘Misdirected Philanthropy’ (Poverty in the Victorian Age,
1973: ‘The Philanthropy of the Age in its Relation to Social Evils’, pp. 454-5).
Philanthropy seemed to be no better than the charity or benevolence from which it was
trying to emancipate itself.

If nagging doubts had entered some parts of the philanthropic world by mid-century,
other parts of it proclaimed confidence in what they were doing. Inheriting from the
Enlightenment a belief in the transformative power of well-run institutions, they focused
their attention on the young, and in particular on young males who seemed likely to go
astray. Criminality and its prevention lay at the heart of much early philanthropy: in
Middlemarch, set in the 1830s, it’s said of Mr Casaubon that ‘he doesn’t care much
about the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing’ (Eliot, 1965,
p. 77). It was a feature of this concern with crime and punishment that it was
international in nature. The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public
Prisons, formed in 1786, was closely linked through Benjamin Rush with people with
similar concerns in England, notably the Quaker doctor, J. C. Lettsom and John Howard.
By personal correspondence which then found its way into friendly newspapers,
reformers on one side of the Atlantic kept themselves informed of initiatives on the other.
The London Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, formed in 1816, was open
about its indebtedness to Philadelphia. The men involved in these exchanges had wide
interests, extending, for example, to opposition to slavery, and they were filled with
enthusiasm for what Rush called ‘the extension of the empire of humanity’. William Allen,
another Quaker, was a central figure in these international networks, publishing The
Philanthropist, a periodical designed to ‘stimulate to virtue and active benevolence’
(Lloyd and Burgoyne, 1998).

This tradition of sharing experience and good practice was given a Continental
European dimension with the foundation of the Rauhes Haus near Hamburg by Johann


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Hinrich Wichern in 1833. The Rauhes Haus in its turn inspired the foundation in France
in 1840 of the agrarian colony of Mettray, near Tours. Dutch, English and Belgian
philanthropists flocked to Mettray and copied it. The Englishman, Matthew Davenport
Hill, was so impressed that he wrote that ‘No Mahommedan … believes more devoutly
in the efficacy of a pilgrimage to Mecca, than I do in one to Mettray’. This ‘philanthropic
tourism’, as Jeroen Dekker (1998) has called it, was a notable feature of philanthropy in
the first half of the nineteenth century. Across Europe, though in different forms in
different countries, there was ‘a firm conviction that their nation could be transformed by
means of philanthropy’.

The degree of faith in the reforming potential of institutions is best exemplified in the
building of asylums in the United States after 1830. By 1850 in New York State there
were twenty-seven public and private institutions caring for children. In the country as a
whole the seventy-seven private orphanages of 1851 had increased to 613 by 1880,
with a further 474 founded over the ensuing twenty years. By then there was a counterblast to placing children in particular in what came to be described as ‘barracks’.
Americans coined the word ‘institutionalised’ to describe a child who was ‘mechanical
and helpless from the effect of asylum life’. What followed in response were in part
attempts to improve domestic institutions, to organise them on a smaller scale, but also
in part a new major experiment in social engineering, the emigration of children from the
environment of the city to the countryside, that countryside often on the other side of the
world. American East coast children were taken to the Mid-West, British children shipped
to Canada and later to Australia (Cunningham, 2005, pp. 148-52).

This belief that children thrived only in the countryside reflected another aspect of
philanthropic change in the nineteenth century. Until then it had been reasonably
assumed that the prime purpose and function of philanthropy was to shift resources from
the rich to the poor. By the middle of the nineteenth century the target of philanthropy
shifted from the poor to the town or city. Of course the poor constituted a large part of
the urban problem, but they were not the whole of it. Philanthropists began to think that


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they could best improve their societies by providing their cities with a civic infrastructure
of public parks, art galleries, museums, concert halls and libraries. It was one of the
attractions of this form of philanthropy that it escaped the censure of political
economists, another that the benefactor’s name often became attached to the donation.
It was linked, too, to another novelty of nineteenth-century philanthropy, an early
example of what we now call ‘social enterprise’, the attempt to relieve housing problems
by 5 per cent philanthropy – an investment in building new apartment blocks for the
respectable working class that would have the distinct attraction of bringing the donor a
5 per cent return. This belief in the civilising impact of cultural institutions, in his case
libraries, reached its height in the work of the Scot who emigrated and made a fortune in
the United States, Andrew Carnegie.

In 1869 the English feminist, Josephine Butler, distinguished between feminine and
masculine forms of philanthropy, the latter marked by ‘large and comprehensive
measures, organizations and systems planned by men and sanctioned by Parliament’
(Simey, 1992, p. 78). If these masculine forms dominated publicity as they do much
history, it was nevertheless the case that the distinctive feminine forms of philanthropy
had profound social and political consequences. It was not simply that women vastly
outnumbered men in charitable activity, important though that was – in 1893 it was
estimated that half a million women in England worked ‘continuously and semiprofessionally’ in philanthropy (Prochaska, pp. 224-5). Perhaps more significant in the
long term, middle-class women found in philanthropy a space where they had a degree
of autonomy and an ability to influence outcomes, creating what Kathleen McCarthy
(2003) has described as ‘parallel power structures’ to those of men. In the United States
the outcome was that welfare measures focused on the needs of women and children
rather than, as in Europe, of men.

If philanthropy at its outset was secular in outlook, this was not to last. Christians were
soon attracted to the ambition and optimism that inspired philanthropy, and brought their
own distinctive approach to the aim of regenerating society. And whereas secular


16

philanthropists focused their attention, for the most part, on home soil, evangelical
Christians had the world in their sights – and this forms the sixth stratum. There were
earlier forerunners, not least in Latin America, but it was from the late eighteenth century
onwards that what Alison Twells (2008) has termed ‘global missionary philanthropy’
came close to being a reality. The long-standing sense that relief to the poor should be
prioritised on those born and bred in the locality gave way, not without controversy, to a
belief that there was both an opportunity and a duty to bring the benefits of Christianity
and civilisation to the ‘heathen’ overseas. Which should come first, Christianity or
civilisation, was much debated, but that the two were intimately connected was not in
doubt. Missions gained a legitimacy previously lacking by adopting some of the
optimistic language of the Enlightenment and of philanthropy: the Bible, according to a
Dutch pamphlet of 1801, contained ‘the true grounds and rules of civilization’ and
knowledge of it had to be spread by Protestant Europeans, ‘the principal members of the
great household of humanity’ (van Eijnatten, 2000). In Britain, simultaneously forging an
empire, the 1790s was an important decade: the Baptist Missionary Society sent a
mission to India in 1792, the London Missionary Society set itself up in Tahiti, Tongatapu
and Marquesas in 1796 and by the end of the decade the Methodists and the Church
Missionary Society were in West Africa. The British initiative was soon taken up by
Protestants in other countries, Americans, Germans, Danes, Swedes and Norwegians.
The Roman Catholic Church, battered by the assaults on it in the French Revolution,
was slower in the field, but by the 1830s was making its mark (Neill, 1986, pp. 214, 3358). It is arguable that Christian missions form no part of philanthropy, but the counterargument, that out of funds that came primarily from the West, they were expanding
education and health as well as proselytising, is a powerful one. Missions were ‘diverting
much of [Britain’s] charity to religious causes overseas’ (Porter, 1999, p. 244). In the
twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, secular versions of global
philanthropy set themselves up alongside the missionary ones.

A seventh stratum in the history of philanthropy surfaced in the later nineteenth century,
eventually disconnecting the intimacy of the link between philanthropy and poor relief.


17

The state, it began to be argued with increasing force, was better placed than
philanthropy to resolve the social and cultural problems that beset so many lives. If
philanthropy in the nineteenth century had to pitch itself in relation to political economy,
by the twentieth century it was doing so also in relation to the state. In the nineteenth
century the mixed economy of welfare had allowed a growth of both state and
philanthropic initiatives. Neither was without criticism, what the British called ‘grandmotherly legislation’ as much as philanthropy. What was new by the end of the century
was that the state was poised to intrude into areas that had hitherto been the preserve of
philanthropy. Philanthropy, it was argued, was patchy in its coverage, condescending in
its attitudes and with insufficient resources for the scale of the problems thrown up by
urban and industrial society. Many rejected it on democratic and socialist grounds. If the
political economists who had so scared philanthropists can be seen as on the right of the
political spectrum, those who championed the role of the state were on the left. A pincer
movement was strangling philanthropy, or at least many forms of it.

The intrusion of the state deeply worried many who were closely engaged in the relief of
poverty. In retrospect, however, the emergence of a new way of coping with poverty was
as striking as the expanding role of the state. Across the western world there spread an
understanding of the circumstances that produced poverty and of a means of
diminishing it. The risks associated with stages of the life cycle, unemployment and illhealth could be calculated. Insurance could be taken out to mitigate them. Legislation
initiated compulsory insurance schemes. Who paid for the insurance differed widely, but
normally employees, employers and the state all contributed.

The outcome was that philanthropy as the solution to poverty was seen as playing a role
secondary to and separate from the state. The public/private divide which is impossible
to disentangle for most of philanthropy’s centuries now came to be thought of central
importance. Philanthropy might pioneer new approaches for the state later to adopt, it
might try to fill the gaps which the state did not cover, it might, and increasingly did, run
services on behalf of and financed by the state, but it was not and no longer aspired to


18

be the lead actor. Some people began to ask whether it had any future role. Others, like
Elizabeth Macadam in Britain (1934), talked up a ‘new philanthropy’ consisting of a
partnership between statutory and voluntary services. The history of philanthropy was
written as a prelude to the history of the welfare state, a perhaps well-meaning but
insufficient attempt to cope with social problems that were beyond its capacity.

This was largely a European discussion and diagnosis. Across the Atlantic, fuelled by
vast fortunes, a new kind of philanthropy was born, an eighth stratum. It was the age of
foundations, established, in the words of one of them ‘for the improvement of mankind’.
The Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller Sr., the John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Edward
Harkness, the Russell Sage were all founded in the early twentieth century, all aiming,
as Frederick Gates, Rockefeller Sr’s advisor put it, on giving wholesale, not retail
(Sealander, 2003, p. 221). Emancipated by their wholesale approach from having to
grapple with individual poverty, or indeed with poverty at all, they were free to aim at the
eradication of disease or the improvement of agricultural yields. There were 27
foundations in the United States by 1915, over 200 by 1930 (Zunz, 2011, p. 22). Linking
up with progressive reformers, they believed that the solution to deep-rooted problems
lay in science and research, not in giving directly to the poor. The beneficiaries of their
largesse were likely to be universities and research institutes, especially in the social
sciences.

The ninth and final stratum in the history of philanthropy emerged with the criticism of
welfare states that started in the 1970s and grew with exponential speed from the 1980s
onwards. It coincided with a marked increase in inequality and in the relative wealth of
the very rich. High taxation levels disappeared as entrepreneurs argued that they were a
disincentive to investment, risk-taking and hard work. The resulting superfluity of ready
money in the pockets of high net worth individuals gave a new confidence to
philanthropists that they had a role to play and the money with which to play it. Another
‘new philanthropy’ was born. Some of the new philanthropists’ propagandists, lauding
‘philanthrocapitalism’, saw it as capable of solving the world’s most deep-rooted


19

problems, a happy marriage of capitalism’s efficiency and entrepreneurship applied to
disease and poverty, to higher education and the arts (Bishop and Green, 2008).

The history of philanthropy has too often been written in an either/or way. Either as
something to celebrate and take inspiration from, or as a cautionary tale of man’s (and it
is almost entirely a male story) over-optimistic hopes of what could be achieved, not
unmixed with a degree of vanity and self-promotion. A geological approach helps to free
us from the either/or approach. It suggests that strata laid down centuries ago shape the
present. It’s not simply that twenty-first-century philanthropists seek inspiration and
legitimacy from the past, from Aristotle to Andrew Carnegie. More significantly,
examination of the strata draws attention to the ways in which philanthropy is as much
circular and repetitive as progressive and linear; or, to put it another way, earlier strata
keep re-surfacing. There has been change over time – otherwise there would be no
different strata to excavate – but, insofar as charity and philanthropy have been
concerned with the relief of poverty, the historical record suggests that there is only a
limited number of ways of doing this. To give three examples: first, the problem of
distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving can be traced back to the Middle
Ages and shows little sign of diminishing; second, micro-credit, so often seen as
distinctively modern, had its predecessors in the Italian Renaissance; and third, the long
history of residential institutions points up the continuing tension between containment
and reform of inmates. History can highlight these continuities and repetitions and act as
a warning signal or exemplar to present-day practitioners.

If continuity from one stratum to another is one theme of the history of philanthropy,
change must necessarily be another. These geological changes rarely stemmed from
within the philanthropic world, rather they were reflections of tectonic shifts in the wider
world –

the introduction of Christianity, the Reformation and Renaissance, the

Enlightenment, the development of the powers of the modern state, the accumulation of
vast sums of capital wealth, globalisation. Philanthropy was a bit player within these
wider developments, often fighting to be heard. ‘Philanthropy’ itself, the word, first began


20

to be used widely in the Enlightenment, its meaning constantly contested. It was, as
Casaubon remarks sceptically in Middlemarch, ‘a wide field’, its boundaries
indeterminate (Eliot, 1965). The frequent proclamations of a ‘new philanthropy’ should
be seen as attempts to commandeer a larger acreage of that ‘wide field’. At polar
opposite ends of that ‘wide field’ were Walter Besant in 1898 claiming that ‘The note of
the new philanthropy is personal service; not money’, and The Times, a century later in
1999, welcoming ‘signs of a new philanthropy’ with examples of donors on both sides of
the Atlantic: ‘Philanthropy’, it announced, ‘fundamentally depends on the creation of
wealth, wealth creation on enterprise, and enterprise on small government’ (Besant,
1898, p. 4; The Times, 8 March 1999). Both Besant and The Times would have been
aware of historical precedents and support for their positions, Besant seeing the
settlement workers of the later nineteenth century as a reincarnation of Franciscan friars,
an outcrop from a lower strata surfacing again.

The gift relationship sets some limits to Casaubon’s ‘wide field’ and is common to all the
different strata of philanthropy. That relationship took many different forms. Giving could
be of time as well as of money or goods. It could be face-to-face as in the period when
visiting the poor was the rage; or it could be long-distance for missionary philanthropy or
its modern secular equivalents. It was at its most equal when the poor gave to the poor
for both giver and receiver knew that their roles might in future be reversed. It was widely
attested in the nineteenth century that such giving was much more significant than that
of the rich to the poor (Prochaska, 1980, pp. 42-3), and there is no reason to suppose
that the nineteenth century was exceptional. The poor, it was claimed in early twentiethcentury London, ‘breathe an atmosphere of charity. They cannot understand life without
it. And it is largely this kindness of the poor to the poor which stands between our
present civilization and revolution’ (Charity of Poor to Poor, 1908, p. 6). The ‘mass
philanthropy’, whose emergence and growth in the early twentieth century in the United
States has been analysed by Olivier Zunz, had a similar element of reciprocity: giving by
the less well-off to a fund that might provide a cure for tuberculosis or, as in the March of
Dimes in the 1930s, for polio, was in part a kind of insurance policy in case such


21

diseases struck family members (Zunz, pp. 44-75). Even when there was no obvious
payback for givers, reciprocity was always in play. Besant argued that settlement work
‘means the elevation of those who are engaged in it, and with them their own class, as
well as the elevation of those for whom they work’ (Besant, 1898, p.1). Giver and
receiver both gained.

The gift relationship was one in which power was negotiated and exercised. Receivers
might sometimes seem to be in the driving seat, or at least failing to conform to the
behaviour that givers expected. In Manchester in 1764 the Infirmary Board was
concerned that ‘these poor people’ did not always express ‘the gratitude to notify their
cure when effected, nor to return their thanks either to the Board or to the Physicians’
(Shapely, 2000, p. 59). Reporting on the ‘State of the Peasantry in the County of Kent’ in
1839 after a labourers’ revolt, an investigator found that the ‘charities of the [rich] are
regarded but as the return of a miserable fraction of the wealth they have extorted from
their own labours, and are received by them with ingratitude and sullenness’ (Reay,
1990, pp. 185-6). At a different level in Manchester in the second half of the nineteenth
century involvement in charity was a requisite for a successful parliamentary career: the
receivers had some leverage (Shapely, 2000, pp. 109-32).

The balance of power, however, undoubtedly lay with givers, and was greater the more
unequal a society. It was most blatant in the annual celebratory dinners common in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the ‘objects’ of a charity paraded around on
display as the wealthy givers tucked into their turtle soup. In less obviously overt ways
philanthropy could be both an exercise of power and an enlargement of it, philanthropy
and power reinforcing one another. For Andrew Carnegie, it has been persuasively
argued, philanthropic activity was not something separate from his business enterprises;
rather the two worked in synergy, the cultural, social and symbolic capital of his
philanthropic activities reinforcing and justifying his economic capital and his power
across a wide spectrum of activity (Harvey, Maclean, Gordon and Shaw, 2011). The


22

same could be seen in earlier strata of giving, for example among the philanthropic
power-brokers in early modern Turin (Cavallo, 1991).

Philanthropy and power, however, did not always sit easily together. Philanthropy was
sometimes engaged in political battles in pursuit of an agenda which roused deep
hostility. No government in nineteenth-century Britain, for example, could ignore the
pressures put upon it by philanthropists over slavery and cognate subjects in ways that
sometimes seemed harmful to national interests. Pleasure in the occasional discomfiture
of philanthropists could not be contained. Whig politician and historian T. B. Macaulay,
for example, though horrified by the revolt in India in 1857, could nevertheless rejoice
that it silenced ‘all the philanthropic cant of Peace Societies, and Aboriginal Protection
Societies, and Societies for the Reformation of Criminals’: so much for ‘effeminate
mawkish philanthropy’ (Hall, 2102, pp. 325-6).

Faced with such criticisms, at odds with and in conflict with power-holders,
philanthropists were tempted to retreat into a safe world of their own, an isolation that
has in turn affected how the history of philanthropy has been written. If the history traced
here has a single lesson it is that philanthropy, past and present, can be understood only
in contexts much wider than a focus on giving might suggest. The danger is that the
study of it becomes too inward-looking.


23

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About the author
Hugh Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kent. He edited
Charity, Philanthropy and Reform (1998) and in 2011 presented three BBC Radio 4
programmes on ‘How New is the New Philanthropy?’ His books include The Invention of
Childhood (2006). His chapter on the Multi-layered history of Western Philanthropy is
forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy (2014).

About CGAP
The ESRC Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy (CGAP) is the first academic
centre in the UK dedicated to research on charitable giving and philanthropy. Three main
research strands focus on individual and business giving, social redistribution and
charitable activity, and the institutions of giving. CGAP is a consortium comprising Cass
Business School, University of Edinburgh Business School, University of Kent,
University of Southampton, University of Strathclyde Business School and NCVO.
CGAP’s coordinating ‘hub’ is based at Cass Business School. CGAP is funded by the
ESRC, the Office for Civil Society, the Scottish Government and Carnegie UK Trust.
For further information on CGAP, visit www.cgap.org.uk


29

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