Editors’ Note: Anelise Hanson Shrout introduces HistPhil readers to her new book, Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (NYU Press, 2024).

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2024, a group of historians appealed to Irish Americans to agitate for humanitarian relief in Gaza, to “use their influence to avert a Famine as severe as the one faced by their ancestors.” These historians were scholars of Great Irish Famine of 1845-55, which caused one in eight people in Ireland to die of starvation or disease, and one in four to emigrate. The famine’s immediate cause was the fungus phytophora infestants which putrefied entire fields of potatoes, seemingly overnight. Although the fungus – also known as “late blight” – swept through Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, its impact on Ireland was outsized. Centuries of British policies had disadvantaged and impoverished rural Irish people – almost all of whom were Catholic. These laws denied Irish Catholics the vote, prevented them from owning property, and effectively consigned them to barren plots of land where no crop other than potatoes could be grown. This meant that when phytophora infestants arrived in Ireland, already destitute and disenfranchised tenant farmers lost their only source of food. Disease and death followed.

In response to this suffering, thousands of donors around the world collectively sent millions of dollars to Ireland. Never before had so many people contributed so much money to people who they would never meet, and whose gratitude they would never receive.

The Famine historians’ St. Patrick’s Day letter put this overwhelming need and vast international philanthropic response to contemporary use. The authors called on Irish Americans to recognize that, in much the same way that past British “injustice…had brought starvation to their families and neighbours, and passed this to their children and to later generations,” in the present “Israel is manifestly causing famine as it wages war.” These parallels, the letter writers argued, should compel Irish Americans to act to ensure that Gazans received relief, in much in the same way that people in the past had recognized British injustice and acted to mitigate Irish starvation.

As an historian of the Irish famine and of philanthropy, putting famine relief – both historical and contemporary – to political use was a familiar tactic. In fact, in my recent book, Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy, I argued that Irish famine philanthropy “went viral” in the nineteenth century because relief – both actual donations and calls for intervention – has been, and continues to be, politically potent.

The Irish famine was one of the first events to garner widespread philanthropic attention. At the time, there was little precedent for giving to distant strangers, because most people practiced charity close-by. Scholars of philanthropy have long pointed out that this kind of charity did social work. Givers, in addition to offering help, were seen by their community as benevolent, while the neediness and poverty of recipients was broadcast for everyone to see. Irish Famine relief – to strangers, rather than people close by – “went viral” despite these conventions. Emergent relief groups collected donations from far afield and transmitted them to Ireland. The British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and Scotland, for example, raised £200,000 from across the British empire – equivalent in purchasing power today to over twenty million pounds. Most of this money was sent to Ireland. The Society of Friends, which had a long history of targeted charity work in Ireland, raised £400,000 from people around the world – an amount equivalent to almost fifty million pounds today. To put these funds in context, in February of 2024 the UK government announced a £100 million famine aid package to Ethiopia. The purchasing power of Irish famine funds in the 1840s was roughly equivalent to the purchasing power of humanitarian relief campaigns today.

While the donations in aggregate were large, most individual donations were for quite small sums, and were often made by people with very little to give. These included anonymous donors, like one who contributed five cents to the General Relief Committee of the City of New York, “[i]n a note through the post,” and “a poor man” who donated one shilling to the Society of Friends, as well as donors who gave under their own names, like Mrs. Catherine M. Hawley, who donated fifty cents to the Albany Famine Relief Committee. Catherine Hawley, like many of the other donors who sent money to the Albany Relief fund, was not wealthy. She was the wife of a middling lawyer and parent of three children under the age of six. She supplemented the family income by offering piano lessons. There is also no evidence that she gave to other contemporary charitable causes. Her only connection to Ireland was that she occasionally employed Irish servants. In these respects, she was typical of Famine donors. Most of these people had no connection to Ireland and, in keeping with the charitable norms of the time, most had never engaged in distant charity before. Ultimately, I found that people like Catherine Hawley deliberately chose Ireland as their first international philanthropic project both because Irish distress was real and pressing, and (more importantly, I think) because there was political value to be found in association with the starving Irish.

The political value of famine relief was linked to the fact that in the nineteenth century Ireland was an exemplar of failed governance, though precisely who had failed whom remained a matter of debate. Many contemporaries located the source of Ireland’s troubles in its ambiguously colonial relationship to Britain. In some respects, Ireland resembled other British colonies. For example, colonial police forces across the British empire were modeled on the Royal Irish Constabulary which had been established in the early nineteenth century to “preserve the peace” in cases of (often anti-British) “disturbances.” In other respects, Ireland looked like parts of a British composite monarchy alongside England, Scotland and Wales. For example, Irish MPs were elected and served alongside British MPs in Westminster. This ambiguity meant that Ireland could be used variously as an exemplar of the dangers of colonialism, or of the risks of integrating recalcitrant subjects into a constitutional monarchy, or as a cautionary tale about what happened when Catholics sought to govern themselves—and in many other ways beside.

These multiple interpretations were made manifest in arguments about the causes of the Famine. Some commentators at the time argued that the famine was caused by the Irish people’s refusal to live up to the standards set by their more “civilized” British neighbors. For them, the famine was evidence of Ireland’s inferiority to Britain, and English Britons in particular. Others argued that the British imperial machine had failed to appropriately care for unfortunately “unevolved” colonial subjects. For these people, the famine was evidence of the need for imperial reform. Still others contended that it was Irish politicians, agitating for independence from Britain, who had failed to direct resources to their starving countrymen and women. For them, the famine was evidence of the dangers of anti-imperialism and romantic nationalism. Another group of commentators looked beyond the imperial framework, arguing that Ireland’s woes stemmed from antagonisms between the people who owned the land and those who rented and farmed it. For some of these commentators, the famine demonstrated the need for the wholesale abolition of the landlord class. Others contended it was the tenants who were at fault, who had failed to show appropriate gratitude for landlords’ seigneurial care. While people around the world disagreed about why governance of and in Ireland had failed, there was consensus that famine represented a failure of governance of some kind.

Famine fundraisers capitalized on these competing interpretations when they solicited donations and investment in Irish relief. They used different aspects of Ireland’s failures to connect the interests of prospective donors to the those of rural Irish. In Aiding Ireland, I detail eight communities who became invested in famine relief: Dublin politicians who were both geographically and experientially distant from the most egregious sites of suffering; laborers in British industrial cities who, despite pervasive anti-Irish sentiments, came to believe that aligning themselves with the Irish would help to bring about economic benefits; London commentators who used famine relief as a test-case for Ireland’s colonial status; New York City power brokers who folded the need for Irish aid into party-political agendas; “Anti-Renters” in upstate New York who sought to make common cause with Irish tenants in order to overthrow the landlord class; enslavers in the U.S. south who used the need for famine relief as part of a constellation of arguments defending slavery; enslaved and free Black people in Richmond who used their donations to Ireland to challenge the dehumanizing logic of slavery; and Cherokees and Choctaws west of the Mississippi who deployed famine relief as part of anti-colonial critiques of the United States. For each these groups, I argue, participating in Irish famine relief was politically utile.

I hope that Aiding Ireland demonstrates that the relationship between philanthropy and politics has a long historical shadow, and that even people who were motivated to give had a tendency to build imaginative bridges between themselves and recipients of aid. I think that this understanding of philanthropy opens up space to think about the politicization of philanthropy before the rise of institutions like the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. I’ll illustrate this overt politicization through the examples of the famine relief practiced by “Anti-Renters” in New York State and enslavers in the U.S. South.

The area of New York State now known as The Capitol Region was a locus of simultaneous famine fundraising and of anti-landlord agitation. The “Anti-Renters” movement was huge – it included tens of thousands of families, living on nearly two million acres of land across New York State. Anti-rent agitators believed that “monopoly of the soil by a few, and exclusion from it of the many” was a great evil of the time. They hoped for the abolition of landed elites and the redistribution of land amongst small farmers. Anti-renters used Ireland as a cautionary tale and used famine relief to build solidarity among tenants on both sides of the Atlantic. Newspapers that supported the anti-rent position argued that “there would have been no famine in Ireland … but for Land monopoly and absenteeism,” and that, if landlords had followed reformers’ suggestions that they treat their tenants better, “such wretched poverty as poor Ireland suffers—such a frightful famine as she is now passing through—would then be unknown.” These same commentators cautioned landlords in the United States that if they continued extractive practices, their countryside would soon resemble Ireland’s – beset with starvation and threats of rebellion.

The Albany Famine Relief Association drew on these resonances. Over the course of the famine, the Association raised over $35,000 – equivalent in purchasing power to over one million dollars today. Many donors were directly linked to the anti-rent movement and seemed to have been persuaded by the calls to act in solidarity with Irish tenants. For example, Archibald Campbell, who had petitioned for increased rights for tenants on the vast Van Rensselear estate, sent twenty-five dollars. Such donors benefited – personally and politically – from opposition to monopolistic landlords and sending money to Ireland helped to solidify connections between aggrieved tenants on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the U.S. South, famine relief was put to the very different, but equally political purpose of reputational laundering and repair for enslavers. One of the largest Famine fundraising bodies in the Southern states was the Charleston Hibernian Society, which quickly established a “General Executive Committee” to “organize the best and most speedy relief for the suffering poor of Ireland.” Henry Workman Connor, a Charleston financier, chaired that committee and immediately appointed representatives to “wait upon the citizens of their respective wards, and solicit from them such aid as is in their liberality under the circumstances.” When the Hibernian Society next met, Connor was able to report “the continued receipt of funds from all quarters” and that “the contributions from the city have been large and have been given in the true spirit of benevolence and charity.” They were expected to “exceed $15,000.” The men who gave to this fund included people of social and political prominence—serving members of the South Carolina legislature, and men who would serve in the Confederate government a decade later. Additionally, donations from enslavers were disproportionately high. Contributions from men who held people in bondage accounted for nearly seventy percent of all funds collected.

White Southern newspapers, in the habit of defending the institution of slavery, used these donations as evidence that enslavers “cannot be surpassed in hospitality and kindness to the distressed and isolated stranger anywhere in the world,” and that slavery was humane in comparison with Britain’s treatment of Ireland. The fact that donations were required, proslavery commentators argued, meant that Irish suffering was unique in its magnitude, and that the extent of that suffering revealed the benevolence of the U.S. system of enslavement by comparison. One newspaper published an article from the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Charleston arguing that if Irish nationalists “could succeed in securing the Irish as good a physical state as the negroes,” he “would be agreeably surprised.”  Another article similarly wrote that “impartial travelers tell us that the physical condition of our negroes is much better than that of the peasantry of Europe.” These kinds of claims were useful to enslavers, who at the time were cast by abolitionists as exemplars of violence and inhumanity. For many Southern commentators, participating in famine relief was part of a constellation of political tools used to defend the system of American slavery.

In fact, some abolitionists who also became involved in famine relief feared that accepting donations from enslavers would give enslavers political credence. Richard Allen, a Dublin Quaker, argued that accepting money from enslavers might “in degree justify” their “pretensions to genuine kindness and compassion” and afford philanthropic credibility to politicians who “staked their political existence on the maintenance and perpetuation of slavery.” It would, he added, “ratify their character for Christian benevolence,” which would dishonor Christianity and the Society of Friends and be “detrimental to the cause of the slave.”  Allen argued that the Society of Friends must reject donations from Charleston in particular, because doing so would undercut Quakers’ important abolitionist work.

Worries about tainted money were not limited to abolitionists. In fact, Daniel O’Connell, famous at the time for his campaign to give Catholics the right to vote and a staunch advocate for Irish self-government, argued that Ireland should not accept relief from England, because doing so would be seen as evidence of English superiority and Irish inferiority. He wrote “From England we may always expect Charity, but that is just what we should most deeply regret to see the People receive. It is to the last degree degrading—it creates an obligation and gives an excuse for the commiserations of conscious superiority. We have heard but too much, from time to time, of the last great national alms we received at English hands, not that we were ungrateful, but it was expected that our gratitude should be more loquacious. No; let the English legislature put our own resources into our hands, and we shall not ask any charity.” For O’Connell and other Irish nationalists, British charity had the potential to be a cudgel. Rather than solicit funds freighted with colonial expectations, they argued that the Irish people should be allowed to gather and direct national resources to meet “this national calamity.”

Anti-renters’ and enslavers’ use of famine philanthropy, and Allen’s and O’Connell’s concerns about what it meant to accept money from enslavers, highlight the political potency of famine relief. Aiding Ireland argues that it was precisely this political potency, and the ease with which famine relief might be connected to other political projects, that made the famine into a philanthropic cause célèbre. I do not mean to suggest that any of the people who became invested in Irish famine relief were not also motivated by an authentic desire to help Irish people. Rather, I hope to have shown that people becoming involved in aid for distant sufferers for the first time chose Ireland, because it was a useful proxy for a range of political goals and objectives.

I hope that these findings expand the genealogy of politicized international philanthropy into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Institutional philanthropy’s ability to flex soft power grows, I think, from the ways that early international philanthropists put these first forays into distant giving to political use. When I was working on this book, I was often asked whether I think that philanthropy is ever really about “true” altruism.  I’ve come to believe that this story is more interesting than a conflict between altruism and self-interest. It shows us that even people motivated to give had to learn how and in what capacity to act to aid distant strangers.

-Anelise Hanson Shrout

Anelise Hanson Shrout is an Associate Professor at Bates College, where she teaches in the History Department and the programs in American Studies and Digital and Computational Studies. Her research explores the experiences of everyday people as they navigated spaces and bureaucracies in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Her next project investigates the experiences of immigrants incarcerated in public health institutions in the nineteenth century.