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Friday 14 April 2023 14.00 - 16.00
U-11 WOR03 Philanthropy and Field Work in the Age of Revolutions (circa 1780s-1830)
Västra Hamngatan 25 AK2 133
Network: Global History Chair: Holger Weiss
Organizers: Matilde Cazzola, Megan Maruschke Discussants: -
Jacopo Bonasera : Andrew Bell’s Experiment in Philanthropic Education
In 1789, the East India Company opened a Male Orphan Asylum at Egmore, Madras, for the orphaned, illegitimate, and deserted sons of European officers. Its regulation was entrusted to Andrew Bell, who accepted the task without asking for any remuneration. This event marked the birth of the ‘Tuition System’ of ... (Show more)
In 1789, the East India Company opened a Male Orphan Asylum at Egmore, Madras, for the orphaned, illegitimate, and deserted sons of European officers. Its regulation was entrusted to Andrew Bell, who accepted the task without asking for any remuneration. This event marked the birth of the ‘Tuition System’ of education, which will eventually become so successful to find applications in other Indian cities, in Great Britain, Ireland, and the Americas. Outlining the main principles of his philanthropic enterprise, Bell drafted a conspicuous number of Reports about his ‘experiment’. It leveraged the artificial production of hierarchies among the pupils (ranked in classes and, within them, different ‘stations’ according to their school merit and moral accountability) to foster an educational environment suited for the promotion of individual industry and competition. In discussing how to better adapt this system to heterogeneous social and political contexts, Bell and his colleagues argued that principles always had to live up to ‘facts’, i.e. the specific social conditions of poor and criminal people requiring peculiar solutions. In so doing, they put fieldwork at the core of their activity as social reformers, and contributed to shaping philanthropism as a practical-experimental pursuit aimed to find a common ground between existing circumstances and universal aims. Their vocabulary of experiments, facts, and provable truths is consistent with the broader process of birth of the social sciences in the early-nineteenth century Anglophone world, which represented the intellectual framework within which Bell elaborated his theoretical and practical contribution. The education of the poor was promoted as a way to secure social order and prevent individual misconduct. Thus, Bell’s works are indicative of both the relation between the birth of the science of society and the goal to preserve its structure, and the role played by philanthropism in both pursuits. (Show less)

Matilde Cazzola : The Philanthropic Origins of Social Science in Britain (Late 18th - Early 19th Centuries)
The birth of social science in modern Britain appears to be intimately intertwined with the history of the philanthropic movement. Not only did the earliest, self-conscious uses of the term ‘social science’ in the English language occurred within the context of charitable associations at a date as early as 1790, ... (Show more)
The birth of social science in modern Britain appears to be intimately intertwined with the history of the philanthropic movement. Not only did the earliest, self-conscious uses of the term ‘social science’ in the English language occurred within the context of charitable associations at a date as early as 1790, but also key social scientific practices (social explorations and home visiting, surveys and reports, interviews and censuses, inspection and surveillance) were first systematically promoted and implemented by philanthropic societies for the relief of the poor and paupers and the reform of juvenile delinquents. More particularly, this presentation focuses on two case studies: the Philanthropic Society and the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, both established in London in 1788 and 1796, respectively. Robert Young, the founder of the Philanthropic Society’s ‘Reform’ (a reformatory for the children of the vagrant and criminal poor), remarkably conceptualized philanthropy as a science of social order, aimed to extract information from society and improve the ‘art’ of governing it; for their part, the associates of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor developed and promoted a philanthropic method of careful field research and meticulous monitoring of the conditions of the poor, which represented an important legacy for organized charity through the 19th century. When the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (abridged as the Social Science Association) was founded in 1857, it was therefore no accident that its committee included several exponents of the philanthropic movement. (Show less)

Miriam Franchina : A French Catholic Undercurrent of Abolitionism Between Senegal And Haiti? Abbé Giudicelli’s Critique of the Slave Trade in the 1820s
As the plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna signed a condemnation of the slave trade, the Catholic Church shone for its absence. The Roman curia was more concerned with rebuilding its very structure after the revolutionary turmoil and cautious to align with the abolitionist cause, by then firmly in the ... (Show more)
As the plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna signed a condemnation of the slave trade, the Catholic Church shone for its absence. The Roman curia was more concerned with rebuilding its very structure after the revolutionary turmoil and cautious to align with the abolitionist cause, by then firmly in the hands of Protestant intellectuals – in Great Britain as well as in France. Yet, this paper hopes to reconstruct how some of its clergymen on the ground raised their voices against the slave trade and urged both the curia and their national governments to take concrete actions over vague statements of intentions. This was the case of Jean-Vincent Giudicelli, who was in charge of the Catholic mission to the French outpost of Saint-Louis and Gorée in Senegal from 1816 to 1818. Giudicelli joined forces with the French botanist Joseph Morenas to denounce the continuing slave trade from the Senegalese coast to the Caribbean, which had grown instead of waning despite France having lost its most important colony of Saint-Domingue (1804). While French missionaries had hitherto seen enslavement as an opportunity to spread the faith, Giudicelli launched a new approach: Catholic missioning was to support the spread of civilization, which was for him only possible among free populations. France’s renewed colonial interest in the African continent certainly envisaged the promotion of Catholicism as an instrument of expansion but was not yet ready to rule out the lucrative slave trade. Giudicelli directed his critique both to Paris – where his printed Observations and a Response to the Ministry of the Navy explicitly backed Morenas’ petitions to Parliament – and to the Roman curia – where he sent handwritten reports from Senegal. While other French missionaries had gathered observations from African territories to serve France’s colonizing enterprises, Giudicelli appears to have been the first to outright intervene politically against his government’s policies. This paper focuses on Giudicelli’s neglected activism on and from the ground – Senegal, allegedly a colonial periphery for France – to challenge the widespread notion that abolitionism in France was confined to a handful of mostly Protestant and liberal intellectuals based in Paris. Furthermore, it seeks to reconstruct how transnational networks linked Giudicelli’s attempts to the diplomatic efforts undertaken by Haiti (formerly French Saint-Domingue) to obtain official recognition from Rome as a Catholic nation. Giudicelli’s prospected cooperation with Haitian president Boyer sheds light on intriguing – if eventually failed – entanglements between the undercurrents of abolitionism within the Catholic Church and Haiti, the first nation to have effectively and officially abolished all forms of slave trade and slavery within its territory. Rome condemned the slave trade only in 1839 and recognized Haiti even later, in 1860. In the 1820s, however, after failing to curb the slave trade in Senegal, Giudicelli sought to take the post-revolutionary rebuilding of the Church across the Atlantic, in the first post-colonial nation led by Afro-descendants. (Show less)

Megan Maruschke : Ethnic Benevolent Societies in Philadelphia during the Age of Refugees, 1790s-1820s
Between the 1790s and 1820s, tens of thousands of French émigrés, Saint-Domingue refugees – including French planters, free people of color, and (formerly) enslaved people –, Irish migrants and refugees fleeing the 1798 rebellion, and exiles from (former) Spanish American territories settled or moved through the city. Along with these ... (Show more)
Between the 1790s and 1820s, tens of thousands of French émigrés, Saint-Domingue refugees – including French planters, free people of color, and (formerly) enslaved people –, Irish migrants and refugees fleeing the 1798 rebellion, and exiles from (former) Spanish American territories settled or moved through the city. Along with these movements, free blacks and enslaved people inside the US flocked to the city of brotherly love, with its comparatively liberal emancipation policy and reputation for charity. While city institutions such as the prison or alms houses dealt with the most desperate cases, ethnic benevolent societies, including societies dedicated to supporting free black people or the (formerly) enslaved, sought to play an integrative role, intervening, and supporting their own to prevent destitution. Relying on the observations of benevolent societies that members recorded during their visits with those in need, this paper examines the categories and distinctions philanthropists and city officials made in determining who should receive support and from which society they should be supported, i.e. referrals among the various philanthropic organizations. Furthermore, the paper asks about the role these new arrivals themselves played in determining the categories of aid. That is, the paper examines the role of philanthropic field work – at the ports or in the prisons – that helped shape the categories of belonging and negotiations among ethnic benevolent societies, other philanthropic societies that were not ethnically based, and city institutions or authorities. (Show less)



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