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The untold story of the role of humanitarian NGOs in building the neoliberal order after empireAfter India gained independence in 1947, Britain reinvented its role in the global economy through nongovernmental aid organizations. Utilizing existing imperial networks and colonial bureaucracy, the nonprofit sector sought an ethical capitalism, one that would equalize relationships between British consumers and Third World producers as the age of empire was ending. The Solidarity Economy examines the role of nonstate actors in the major transformations of the world economy in the postwar era, showing how British NGOs charted a path to neoliberalism in their pursuit of ethical markets.Between the 1950s and 1990s, nonprofits sought to establish an alternative to Keynesianism through their welfare and development programs. Encouraging the fair trade of commodities and goods through microfinance, consumer boycotts, and corporate social responsibility, these programs emphasized decentralization, privatization, and entrepreneurship. Tehila Sasson tells the stories of the activists, economists, politicians, and businessmen who reimagined the marketplace as a workshop for global reform. She reveals how their ideas, though commonly associated with conservative neoliberal policies, were part of a nonprofit-driven endeavor by the liberal left to envision markets as autonomous and humanizing spaces, facilitating ethical relationships beyond the impersonal realm of the state.Drawing on dozens of newly available repositories from nongovernmental, international, national, and business archives, The Solidarity Economy reconstructs the political economy of these markets-from handicrafts and sugar to tea and coffee-shedding critical light on the postimperial origins of neoliberalism

This study examines how a new humanitarian community emerged in the late 1960sand why it came to act in the name of "humanity." To realize the nature of thistransformation, the study focuses on Britain and its relationship to more global forms ofhumanitarianism. In post-imperial Britain a new set of actors beyond the British statecame to adopt humanitarian ethics. In a series of case studies, the study examines howhumanitarianism mobilized a range of new historical actors who came to replace theimperial state, beginning with non-governmental activists and former military experts andexpanding to include multinational corporations and ordinary people.Initially, post-imperial aid relied on imperial infrastructure and knowledge. In the1960s, organizations such as Oxfam used former Imperial experts to manage anddistribute global relief in places like Nigeria. Older imperial institutions like the Britishmilitary became major respondents to disasters in the Sahel and South Asia. But the postimperial landscape also included new, more business-minded actors. In the mid-1970,multinational corporations and private businesses began developing their own solutionsto humanitarian suffering through agribusiness projects. Through charity shops, rockconcerts, and boycotts, ordinary people, consumers, and youth groups joined suchmultinationals in acting for the cause of humanity. By the 1980s, humanitarianorganizations operated as a profitable business, generating substantial revenues that weremobilized to care for, rescue, and intervene in response to natural and man-madedisasters such as famines, civil wars, and earthquakes.Drawing on extensive archival work in Britain, the United States, and Switzerland,this study shows that British humanitarianism was shaped by both the legacies of the endof empire and the tensions brought by new forces of globalization in the 1970s. The endof empires created the globalization of markets and goods as well as the rise ofnongovernmental and commercial actors. In a period of economic globalization and massconsumption, I argue, a new humanitarian culture came to commodify aid. As such, Iargue, British humanitarianism became part of the new, increasingly market-driven,political economy of the 1970s. In doing so, Britons were integrated into affective andeconomic communities of aid, as well as the project of global governance.

In many ways, the European welfare state constituted a response to the new forms of social fracture and economic turbulence that were born out of industrialization—challenges that were particularly acute for groups whose integration into society seemed the most tenuous. Covering a range of national cases, this volume explores the relationship of weak social ties to poverty and how ideas about this relationship informed welfare policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on three representative populations—neglected children, the homeless, and the unemployed—it provides a rich, comparative consideration of the shifting perceptions, representations, and lived experiences of social vulnerability in modern Europe