Excerpt from Aid to Ireland: Report of the General Relief Committee of the City of New York, Organized February 10th, 1847 IN presenting to their constituents and the public an account of their proceedings from the date of their appointment in February, 1847, to the lst February, 1848, various reasons have combined to induce the Committee to make their re port more complete and voluminous than might at first sight have seemed either necessary or proper. Originally appointed by the inhabitants of the City of New York, with full discretionary power to devise efficient measures for the relief of the starving poor of Ireland, to collect and transmit funds and provisions, and to do such other acts as they might from time to time think expedient, they were soon invested with similar authority by thousands of benevolent individuals, and various associated bodies, (throughout the length and breadth of our land, ) until at last from being the representatives of a single City, they became the almoners as will appear from the contributions they now acknowledge, of large numbers of their fellow countrymen in the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and finance. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.