From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

Roots the origins of humanitarianism in the fracturing of the British empire as a result of the American Revolution.
Examines Americans' and Britons' adjustment to becoming foreigners following the Revolution.
Puts a generation of activists from the British Isles, North America, and West Indies, particularly doctors, at the center of the development of humanitarianism.

From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

Description

In the decades before the Revolution, Americans and Britons shared an imperial approach to helping those in need during times of disaster and hardship. They worked together on charitable ventures designed to strengthen the British empire, and ordinary men and women made donations for faraway members of the British community. Growing up in this world of connections, future activists from the British Isles, North America, and the West Indies developed expansive outlooks and transatlantic ties. The schism created by the Revolution fractured the community that nurtured this generation of philanthropists.

In From Empire to Humanity, Amanda Moniz tells the story of a generation of American and British activists who transformed humanitarianism as they adjusted to being foreigners. American independence put an end to their common imperial humanitarianism, but not their friendships, their far-reaching visions, or their belief that philanthropy was a tool of statecraft. In the postwar years, these philanthropists, led by doctor-activists, collaborated on the anti-drowning cause, spread new medical charities, combatted the slave trade, reformed penal practices, and experimented with relieving needy strangers. The nature of their cooperation, however, had changed. No longer members of the same polity, they adopted a universal approach to their benevolence, working together for the good of humanity, rather than empire. Making the care of suffering strangers routine, these British and American activists laid the groundwork for later generations' global undertakings.

From Empire to Humanity offers new perspectives on the history of philanthropy, as well as the Atlantic world and colonial and postcolonial history.

From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Protestantism, Empire, and Transatlantic Philanthropy, 1700-1760s
Chapter Two: Coming of Age in the Atlantic Community, 1740s-1770s
Chapter Three: The Unnatural War
Chapter Four: The Empire of Humanity
Chapter Five: Circumnavigations of Charity
Chapter Six: The Common Cause of Humanity
Chapter Seven: Ambivalent Cosmopolites
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

Author Information

Amanda B. Moniz is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and held a Cassius Marcellus Clay Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Yale University. Moniz is the recipient of the inaugural Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Prize.

From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Prize of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action

"Moniz's study is innovative; it opens a clear, usable path for further research into Enlightenment-era humanitarianism, and non-state Anglo-American relations following the Treaty of Paris of 1783."--Patrick Lacroix, Human Rights Review

"Extensively researched, meticulously documented, and elegantly phrased..."--Bela Kashyap, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"Amanda Moniz's book explores new actors on the developing global stage, and makes the new world more central to the origins of modern humanitarianism. She argues that our current concern with the plight of others, the origins of the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation, date back to the late seventeenth century, and gathered force in the wake of the American Revolution. Indeed, she makes 1776 a turning point in the chronology of humanitarianism, which will be one of the signature contributions and debating points of this book."--Jeremy Adelman, Diplomatic History

"[F]ascinating, very well researched account of 'humanitarianism' in the age of the American Revolution...Highly recommended."--CHOICE

"Moniz gives detailed and archive-grounded accounts of many cosmopolitan efforts to save humanity in a world riven with division and local interests. The morally fraught world of Oxfam, Save the Children, and, perhaps most striking, Physicians without Borders would be recognizable to the men--and the few women--who created global humanitarianism in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic."--Journal of American History

"This path-breaking study takes an original, transatlantic approach to the era of the American Revolution. Through the story of philanthropic initiatives in the First British Empire and in the new American republic, it tracks the expansion and contraction of social sympathies, humanitarian projects, and national loyalties across a changing Atlantic world. The period from the 1730s to the 1820s marked the first great age of humanitarianism in the West, and in recovering its history, Amanda Moniz reveals vividly the origins of the modern ideal of universal human rights."--Robert A. Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World

"From Empire to Humanity affords an excellent window onto the role of philanthropy in holding the British empire together and maintaining Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of the Revolution, providing fresh insights into Atlantic history."--Kathleen McCarthy, author of American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700-1865

"A distinctively activist-driven and Atlantic account of philanthropy in a revolutionary age. Amanda Moniz offers us a compelling reinterpretation of the much-touted origins of modern humanitarianism."-Sarah Knott, author of Sensibility and the American Revolution

"From Empire to Humanity is a fascinating account of humanitarianism in the Anglo-American region at its infancy. By situating humanitarianism in both a transnational and national context, and by examining humanitarianism both before and after the American Revolution, Moniz gracefully recovers its many, and at times contradictory, purposes." -Michael Barnett, author of Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism

From Empire to Humanity

The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism

Amanda B. Moniz

From Our Blog

How can history inform public policy today?

As a historian of philanthropy, I have wrestled with how to bring historical perspectives to my my own gifts of time and money. I study philanthropists in North America, the British Isles, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The distant past, you might think, and of little concern to our philanthropic practices today.

Posted on August 9, 2016

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