Historians have long studied the political, economic, intellectual and emotional dimensions of colonial and early-national Americans’ engagement with foreign peoples through philanthropy, but have focused less on the material culture of these exchanges. By contrast, the managers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century charities paid a great deal of attention to the things they needed to operate their institutions. They regularly discussed beds and beddings, medical supplies, books, garments and much more. Focusing on these objects tells stories both about the expansive international trade networks that helped supply charitable institutions and about the limits of managers’ power to shape the lives of their putative beneficiaries, as the managers of New York Hospital discovered. In the early 1800s, the managers, influenced by the latest European practice, imported up-to-date hygienic iron bedsteads and new bedding from Britain. The port city hospital served a heterogeneous population including many foreign immigrants, African Americans, and sojourning mariners, and its patient population lent credence to the managers’ proclaimed intention of providing ‘Charity to All’. Conflicts between doctors and nurses over the cleanliness of beds and bedding in African American wards, however, reveal the lack of control managers and doctors had over patients’ lives on a day-to-day basis.

Five Australian states and territories offered ‘exemption’ to some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at various times during the first half of the twentieth century. An exemption certificate enabled a person to be released from the ‘protection’ legislation that controlled the lives of Indigenous people in every colony, state and territory in Australia. There is little written evidence to show why policymakers thought exemption was a good idea. It was sporadically discussed when protection legislation was debated. There was no one administrator who orchestrated the idea, and no government inquiry into whether it might be a good idea or not. It was also utilised in different ways by government administrators, became popular at some times and places and not others, and was the cause of transgenerational trauma and family dislocation. But it did not come from nowhere. This chapter will argue that Australian exemption policies had century-long roots in the humanitarian impulse which made the inclusion of an ‘escape clause’ in Protection legislation inevitable. The humanitarian practice of ‘civilising’ individual Indigenous people had been around as long as colonisation. While scholars have noted that there are links between the notions of a universal human nature and pathway of progress that existed in the eighteenth century and the humanitarian-couched assimilationist policies of the twentieth century, the story of those connections is yet to be fully told. This chapter explores the origins of exemption policy, using it as a key with which to begin the process of tracing how colonial policies of protection and control were often balanced by the humanitarian urge to allow individual colonised subjects more freedom.

Native Americans had been visiting Britain since the early sixteenth century. Britons always understood them as fellow humans, though admittedly through certain dominant cultural typologies such as savagery. As Britain’s relationship with North America crumbled from the mid-eighteenth century, visiting Native Americans became increasingly problematic. The typologies employed for understanding such people shifted perceptibly during one visit in 1765. When an unscrupulous tailor from New York displayed two Mohawk men at the Sun Tavern in the Strand, no less an establishment than the House of Lords intervened to issue a general edict against the commercialisation of Native American envoys. The Lords confirmed a new way of thinking about Indigenous travellers, one that recognised them as individuals who deserved at least to be free of certain behaviours from Britons. This shift may be seen as a sign of the emergence of humanitarian discourse and simultaneously the erosion of the motif of savagery. What happened next, though, belies usual liberal understandings of what such a shift does for non-Europeans. Native American travellers to Britain now found themselves facing one of two responses: either a complete lack of interest or, ironically, an increased chance of being made into a spectacle. This chapter outlines the ways in which the ameliorative impulse ran parallel to a new comprehension of Indigenous people, one that was more ‘humane’ than what had gone before but also less engaged and thus ultimately less concerned about observing Indigenous rights.

Governor John Hutt, a man strongly influenced by British humanitarian thought, played a crucial role in the early 1840s in establishing an Aboriginal prison on Rottnest Island. For him, the ‘improvement and instruction’ of the prisoners mattered more than their punishment, and he appointed an Aboriginal Protector to keep watch. Yet during the sixty years the prison operated, it became a feared and hated place for Aboriginal people, with approximately 3,700 prisoners subjected to regimes of hard labour and harsh physical punishment, of whom 10 per cent died in custody. The island is now a place of great sadness for Nyungar and other Indigenous groups in Western Australia and modes of recognition and remembrance of this history are under continuing discussion. In this paper, I explore this history as a startling case study in the failure of humanitarian principles and policies to translate into humanitarian action on the ground. In particular, I draw out the inherent contradictions in attempting a humanitarian form of settler colonialism.

This chapter will explore how Britain’s humanitarian priorities in West Africa could be shaped by the demands of people like Crowther, the limitations of those claims on Britain’s philanthropy and how the relationship between the humanitarian promise and its reality affected West African attempts to control diseases like malaria. Ultimately, while British imperial humanitarian policy often responded to British West African subjects’ appeals to intervene in the slave trade, other humanitarian concerns, including famine and disease, were regularly not prioritised by the colonial government, despite lobbying from the same groups. This chapter will contrast British responses to West African calls for anti–slave trade intervention with measures to reduce malaria and yellow fever and promote colonial welfare. Despite the strength of anti–slave trade feeling in the halls of power, humanitarian imperialism was not matched by humanitarian governance.

In recent years, the dramatic rise of right-wing populism in different parts of the world has coincided with an unprecedented circulation of fake news and conspiracy theories, especially on new media platforms. In the lead-up to the 2019 general election in India, the Indian cyberspace was dominated by aggressive Hindu nationalists (‘Internet Hindus’) who employed similar tactics of information manipulation. This chapter discusses Internet Hindus to analyse both the peculiar affordances of social media and the communalisation of everyday life that have combined to buttress the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India.

Hinduism is increasingly produced as a civil and a nationalised religion under Hindutva, one where the territory of India and a ‘thin’ and abstracted notion of Hinduism are merged to create a new common space that can mediate between the localised communities of sects and castes. Hinduism is reconstructed as an accommodative and civil religion for all Hindus, and Hindu Manushyata (humanism) is evoked to counter Westernisation and internal ‘divisions’. The making of Hinduism as a civil religion also points to a new Hindu consciousness among the lower and marginal castes, which counters the estrangement embedded in popular Hinduism. While liberal Hindus hope to use Hinduism to counter Hindutva, Hindutva is slowly countering the ills of the Hindu religion by framing and promoting Hinduism as a national civil religion. Caste, however, is not just localised but integral to the metaphysics of Hinduism, and Hinduism as a civil religion continues to find it difficult to overcome caste.