Slim for Britain

Book titles​ are like city buses: they bunch up and arrive in packs. When historians were obsessed with identity, collective nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb made noun, process as subject – this is what we do. Think of all the book titles beginning with ‘producing’, ‘imagining’, ‘forging’ or ‘inventing’, not to mention ‘reproducing’, ‘reimagining’, ‘recasting’ and ‘reinventing’. But the ultimate gerund title word is ‘making’.

Something has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making – class struggle, state power, political economy, sheer greed – but those forces don’t feature in the title. These days, titles often reverse the causal connection: instead of promising to explain how the subject was ‘made’, they’ll show how the subject ‘made’ something – the British Empire, say, or the global order or neoliberalism or even ‘the modern world’.

If you put ‘and the making of the modern world’ into Amazon’s search bar, you find the following subjects at the beginning of a title: Genghis Khan, Africa and Africans, Sultan Selim, warfare and constitutions, slave revolts, ‘industrial revolutionaries’, drugs and the Inquisition. ‘How’ is having a moment, so if you change the formula to ‘how X made the modern world’, Freemasons, ‘six innovations’, Japan, Britain, ‘play’ and Muslims top the competition – with company-states, meritocracy and the English-speaking peoples pressing up behind. If you swap ‘shaped’ for ‘made’ the top contenders include ‘hunger for ownership’, ‘a dangerous mathematical theory’, population, Britain’s quest for food, the British navy, tea and – an interesting throwback – the barbarian invasions. Britain features centrally but you can choose the slant: Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World or Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe.

Ferguson and Sanghera really are writing about how one big thing made another, but most authors of ‘X and the making’ books are not. They’re specialists, certain of their subject’s significance, and not likely to take on the question ‘compared to what’? Was Genghis Khan or Sultan Selim more important in ‘making the modern world’? Inventions or constitutions? Slave revolts or the British navy? Tea or drugs? Maths or ‘play’? A reader scanning bookshop shelves understands that such titles are just a way of saying that a particular person, place, process or thing is more important than you thought, and you’d best buy the book to learn about it. Whether the link can bear much causal weight is another question.

The subtitle of Tehila Sasson’s The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire reflects today’s titling conventions. The subject is not in fact all non-profit organisations but rather the connection between specific British non-profits and a specific form of governing ideology and practice (neoliberalism) at a specific time (after empire), roughly from the 1950s to the 1990s. The book’s method is genealogical, not social-scientific, with both origin and outcome fixed from the start. (Note that the method allows recovery of the connecting thread but not a test of its strength in comparison to other threads.) Sasson is not concerned with the prominent non-profits that support health, education, environment, the arts and – this being Britain – various appealing animals, but rather those active in international work, pre-eminently Oxfam but also War on Want, Christian Aid, Save the Children and a few others. Sasson has interesting things to say about the way in which these charities’ international aid projects came to affect social policy within Britain, but the voluntary sector tout court is not her subject.

Once I grasped this, I learned a lot from Sasson. Her argument is, roughly, that international aid organisations – influenced by a long tradition of voluntary service, a desire to find a role after empire and a dislike of the supposed soullessness and impersonality of postwar state-led development and planning – devised programmes and campaigns that relied on and promoted entrepreneurialism, consumerism, individualism and anti-statism. Non-profits weren’t simply too weak to defend against those forces of financialisation, marketisation and privatisation that we lump together under the term ‘neoliberalism’, but embraced them. This is the sense in which they were part of the ‘making’ of neoliberalism after empire, with damaging results. As Sasson puts it most strongly in her conclusion, the non-profit sector ‘helped cement post-imperial inequalities and new divisions of labour between Third World producers and British consumers. In a period marked by deindustrialisation and a crisis of unemployment, the solidarity economy not only mirrored the landscape of global labour relations but also contributed to it.’

Sasson considers a number of canonical figures in the postwar pantheon of left-leaning ‘makers’ of the welfare state – Richard Titmuss, Michael Young and E.F. Schumacher – and argues that their international work in an era of rapid decolonisation led all three to look with a more critical eye on statism and ‘planning’. Gandhi was a major influence: his emphasis on community development and discomfort with ‘materialism’ dovetailed with ethical socialist traditions that had long sought to develop character traits and habits – altruism, solidarity – that would overcome antagonisms of class and nation. In 1955 Schumacher, while working as chief economic adviser to the National Coal Board (precisely the sort of ‘peak’ planning body we associate with the postwar order), spent three months in Burma as a UN economic consultant. He later recalled that after only a couple of weeks he ‘realised that the Burmese needed little advice from a Western economist like me’, and that in fact ‘we Western economists could learn a thing or two from the Burmese.’ What Schumacher learned became the building blocks of an alternative model of development, one that was village-level, low-technology, low-capital and human scale.

These ideas, and the charities that promoted them, were welcomed by a population already accustomed to see voluntary work as an ethical imperative: in 1991, 76 per cent of Britons reported doing some form of work in the voluntary sector. Much of that work had nothing to do with international aid, of course, but many Britons wanted to ‘help’ overseas populations in some way that might be free from (and free them from) the taint of empire. Oxfam in particular took advantage of a new culture of affluence and of the enthusiasm of (mostly female) volunteers to open charity shops on high streets – shops that could cater to economically diverse customers while also funnelling support to Oxfam’s overseas programmes. Sasson disentangles the ways Oxfam and other charities secured exemption from sales, income and property taxes in the 1960s and 1970s: this is why charity shops still exist on high streets while local businesses go under. Non-profits, she argues, were turning themselves into ‘a third sector of the economy’, promising citizens – who could exercise ‘choice’ as consumers, not just as voters – a means of doing good through shopping.

From here it was a short step to the drive for ethical production and ‘fair trade’. Sasson locates one seed of this now worldwide movement in Oxfam’s effort to develop the global handicraft market, first by having aid workers identify handicrafts to sell in its shops and then bypassing middlemen to source goods from indigenous producers and co-operatives directly. In the late 1960s, Oxfam pioneered a venture called Helping by Selling and then founded a fair trade company known as Oxfam Bridge. Fusing Gandhian ideals of low-technology indigenous manufacturing with entrepreneurialism, Bridge helped producers use ‘traditional’ skills (even if those skills now had to be relearned) to craft goods that would appeal to metropolitan tastes; by 1990, it was working with 295 groups in 43 countries and generating £8.5 million in sales. What had begun in the 1960s as an initiative to sell handmade ornaments and dolls had become a ‘solidarity market’. Yet while Oxfam was able to train indigenous producers to respond to demand in the rich world, it had no way of ensuring decent conditions of work. ‘The reality was that many projects depended on poor working conditions, child labour and low wages.’

There were alternatives. The economists and activists who formed the Haslemere Group in 1968 urged the British government to atone for past colonial rapacity by using commodity pricing agreements to improve developing countries’ position in world markets. The problem was that obligations towards former colonies, say by upholding price agreements that favoured Caribbean sugar, came up against the protections demanded by European sugar-beet producers, and, with Britain seeking to enter the EEC, the Caribbean producers lost out. Once again emphasising voluntary rather than political solutions, non-profits concentrated on ‘lifestyle’ activism, urging Britons to reduce food waste and change eating habits to raise money for famine relief. Given the way the West’s rapacious meat consumption has displaced rural populations and driven climate change, I’m not sure that we should be entirely dismissive of such campaigns (I’m old enough to have cooked Diet for a Small Planet dishes), but some initiatives, such as the Oxfam Slimming Clubs that promised women they could fit into new fashions if they donated food, do sound distinctly odd today. For Sasson, this is again a declension narrative: what began as an effort to revise international trade agreements turned into ‘a minimal politics of aid concentrated on individual responsibility’.

Voluntarism rather than regulation also underwrote the drive in the 1980s to introduce codes of corporate practice – campaigns that, Sasson argues, ‘devised a business ethics that meant to further corporate power rather than limit it’. She draws a line from the Society for Democratic Integration in Industry (Demintry), established in 1958 to promote common ownership of industries, to efforts to build village-level enterprises, to the adoption of codes of conduct by multinational corporations facing exposés of degrading working conditions on, say, tea plantations. These were touted as humane alternatives to a ‘state-led welfarist model’, but – given that trade unions were the only effective voice for workers’ interests and that such efforts were ‘deeply rooted within a critique of trade unionism’ – far from improving conditions, the campaigns ‘ended up curtailing the power of workers in industry’.

During the 1970s, newly independent states had borrowed money for development, only to find themselves in serious financial straits as primary product prices fell, currencies lost value, and the IMF imposed increasingly draconian reforms – reforms that, Julius Nyerere and Michael Manley charged at the South-North Conference held in Arusha in 1980, were undermining the sovereignty the new states had ostensibly just won. This was the year sub-Saharan debt reached $84 billion; by 1995 the figure was $220 billion (and the total Third World debt $2 trillion). Sasson ends her book with a smart, characteristically pessimistic account of the way non-profits – Oxfam, the World Development Movement and especially War on Want – responded to the debt crisis. I vividly remember the harrowing ad that aid organisations ran in cinemas in the mid-1980s. As a voiceover repeated one sentence – ‘in the last twelve months Africa has paid out over four times as much in debt repayments as it has received in emergency aid’ – a host of barefoot and stricken African mothers dropped their dead children into what appears to be a mass grave, only for the camera to pull back to reveal it as a giant and repellent piggy bank. ‘Bury the debt, not the dead’ was the message that followed on screen.

One might wince to see Africans (especially women) portrayed again entirely as suffering victims, but such campaigns were effective: by 2001, $110 billion of debt had been cancelled. (Sasson’s source for this figure is a 2010 dissertation and it needs more discussion.) Sasson stresses, though, that debt cancellation was granted on condition of promising to abide by IMF and World Bank strictures. It was not ‘structural reform’. Rather, ‘like many of the programmes to make capitalism ethical that emerged starting in the 1960s, it embraced much of the existing structural framework of the global economy and in some cases even strengthened it.’

The kind of ‘development’ that non-profits and global financial bodies could agree on conformed both to Schumacher’s ‘small is beautiful’ ideals and to the imperative to train people in the kind of ‘market thinking’ necessary in a neoliberal world. The microfinance movement, especially as practised by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, was much praised for its use of tiny loans, mostly to women, to support entrepreneurial efforts that might lift them out of poverty for good. It was this model, Sasson shows, that was reimported back to the US and Britain in the New Democrat/New Labour years, in the form of urban credit programmes serving mostly inner city, immigrant, African American or Latina women seeking to start small ventures. What Sasson thinks of it, though, is captured in the title of the conclusion to her final chapter: ‘Credit Where Solidarity Is Due’.

Iclosed​ her book feeling appreciation but also frustration. Some marvellous research, especially in the Oxfam archives, underpins it. Sasson explains some things that have puzzled me for years, not least why 11,000 charity shops survive in the UK. Her attention to the elective affinity between the voluntary sector’s long reliance on individual service and the entrepreneurial culture of neoliberalism, and to the way this fed efforts to foster indigenous production, is illuminating. But affinity is not causation, and it isn’t clear just how much significance one can accord to the work of these charities in ‘making’ neoliberalism, or even in making some of the specific reforms discussed. That $110 billion in debt relief is clearly significant, but how important were British non-profits in its negotiation? Fair trade has become a behemoth, but how important was Oxfam Bridge – in comparison to Dutch co-operatives or American hipster coffeemakers – in carving out its market share? There’s the £8.5 million generated by Bridge by 1990, but as the UK population was 57 million at the time, and GDP per capita £14,000, the figure amounts to about 15p per Briton per year – not nothing, but perhaps not the best evidence for Oxfam’s crucial role as the handmaiden of global capitalism.

Sasson is aware of this problem. She admits that charity trading wasn’t developed by aid organisations alone and that campaigns for fair trade, debt relief and corporate accountability were all global movements, but in her desire to make strong claims she allows a kind of elision between international charities and ‘non-profits’ and between Britain and the ‘global’. She then charges those non-profits with foreclosing social-democratic alternatives (they ‘elbowed aside the state agencies and trade unions that had previously represented workers and consumers in the economy’), but except for the Haslemere Group the feasibility (or even existence) of those alternatives isn’t spelled out.

This combination of over-assertion and under-specification is unfortunate, because no one who has lived in Britain would contest that Oxfam (and Save the Children, War on Want, Live Aid and the other big aid campaigns and organisations) did matter a lot: they don’t need to be credited with expediting neoliberalism and burying social democracy. As Sasson shows, at a moment of imperial reckoning, Oxfam in particular got under people’s skin, offering activism and expiation, and its strategic choices lastingly marked British retail and urban landscapes. Oxfam GB today spends just under £400 million a year, which doesn’t place it among the top ten UK charities by expenditure (in 2023, Save the Children was the only international aid charity to join the big arts and health organisations – the Arts Council, the National Trust, Cancer Research – on that list), but it is active in more than fifty countries, probably not just instructing poor people in capitalist values. Of the forty shopfronts (two betting shops, two nail salons, two hair salons, a key cutter and a smattering of kebab, pizza and Chinese eateries) in the rather down-at-heel shopping precinct wedged between a Primark and a pub near where I rent in the summer, ten are charity shops. Eight of those focus on health and disadvantage (Cancer Research, British Red Cross, Sense, Mind) and one on animals (the RSPCA) – but one, of course, is an Oxfam shop.

Sasson’s most perceptive findings have to do with Oxfam’s history. Why, then, didn’t she write a history of Oxfam? We could use such a book, for which Emily Baughan’s excellent Saving the Children (2021) could serve as a model. To begin to answer that question, I refer you to Sasson’s acknowledgments. I don’t know if Sasson intended to use this most revelatory part of most scholarly books to lay bare the way the neoliberal US academy shapes young scholars’ lives, but she has done that. As everyone involved in US graduate education knows, between the general retreat of the humanities, the casualisation of university labour and the end of mandatory retirement (no intergenerational solidarity here), the PhD job market is terrible, and perhaps especially so in ‘old world’ fields that seem less relevant and edgy as the US looks inward or pivots south and west. US-trained historians of Britain have responded by rebranding themselves as ‘international’ or ‘imperial’ historians (Sasson has done both), by emphasising their thematic expertise in history of science or public health or economics (Sasson did this too), and, if they can, by framing their studies in ways that address current scholarly preoccupations, of which neoliberalism and the legacies of imperialism are among the most insistent. Yet even those adjusting most cannily to the market, and lucky enough to enter it before the pandemic cut off opportunities for a few years, often spend time in various holding tanks, some gilded, some not, and don’t always land on their feet. With what effect on their lives and work?

Sasson thanks, excluding family, some 250 people for help in producing her book. It began life as a dissertation written at Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Laqueur and James Vernon, whose students have done so much to document the way neoliberalism shaped every aspect of British life – financial markets, town planning, culture, humanitarianism. (Sasson thanks Berkeley faculty and graduate students, and 52 ‘fellow travellers of the mind and the archives’ for support and encouragement.) She then took up a Past & Present postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research and a research affiliation at Cambridge, and thanks a host of scholars, seminar conveners and journal editors on both sides of the Atlantic for feedback during these years. She ‘really began writing this book’, though, as an assistant professor at Emory University in Atlanta – and thanks some forty to fifty Emory faculty members, students and staff for providing everything from ‘the time and resources to work on the book’ to mentorship and camaraderie. She thanks senior scholars (including Vernon) for flying in for a workshop on the manuscript and colleagues at Virginia, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Manchester and Harvard for comments on talks. She thanks the peer reviewers for Princeton University Press (among them Baughan) and the editors and indexers who saw it into print. Sasson has recently taken up a job at Oxford.

We all need conversation, and exchange and support, but these acknowledgments gave me pause. Sasson has let too many people leave their sticky fingerprints on her book; it would be better if it were less critical of ‘non-profits’ and more self-reflective about the academy and its disciplining work. Admittedly, nothing is harder than clearing your mind of the frameworks and paradigms of the moment, but it is crucial to try. We want to address issues relevant to our time, of course, but to what extent? If we can’t think our way outside it, the hive mind just speaks through us – and how then can we see the unusual, surprising, funny, unanticipated in the past?

Sasson isn’t the first scholar to find Schumacher a fascinating subject, and to contextualise him in a new way. In 1994 Meredith Veldman published Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Britain, which was, like The Solidarity Economy, a book that emerged from a PhD dissertation. As a graduate student at Northwestern, reading The Making of the English Working Class on the train into Evanston, Veldman had the odd feeling that it was somehow the same book as the one she was reading for fun, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – as in some ‘structures of feeling’ sense it was. So she used Thompson, Schumacher and the fantasy novelists to show that postwar oppositional politics and culture repurposed romantic ideals. But Veldman was writing in and for a field then confidently national; she could assume that her readers cared about British history and knew who William Morris and John Ruskin were. Sasson’s story is written for our times.