Aiding Ireland The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy reviewed by David Sim
Published in Diplomatic History, January 2025.
Link

Abstract

Aiding Ireland is a brisk, readable book on an important subject. Anelise Hanson Shrout aims to explain “the emergence of ideas about international obligations in the face of disaster” in the 1840s (2). The disaster that she refers to is, of course, the Irish Famine, which prompted, as she puts it, “one of the first truly global humanitarian relief efforts” (3). Over eight chapters she charts how those relief efforts drew on interpretations of the famine that sometimes had very little to do with its victims and rather more to do with donors’ own immediate material and ideological concerns. Each chapter takes us a little further from Ireland. The final chapter intriguingly (and sensitively) probes donations offered by Indigenous Americans, acts which have been commemorated in Ireland in recent years. Along the way Shrout takes in debates about free trade; imperial obligation; US expansionism; transatlantic land reform; and the contest over enslavement in the US South.