Between Humanity and Misericordia: Voluntarist Relief in the British and Spanish Atlantic, 1740–1830

Abstract

This thesis asks how the popularisation of subscription funding and voluntarist relief practices altered the civic environments of British and Spanish Atlantic colonies. It first examines the mid-eighteenth-century reports of the London Marine Society and the Spanish economic and patriotic societies to describe the funding structures and sensibility discourses of metropolitan subscription societies. It then asks how specific relief institutions in Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico responded to reformisms and crises between roughly 1770 and 1810, culminating with an examination of subscription practices in early-nineteenth-century public health provision and slavery debates. This study thereby argues that in both Britain and Spain the acceleration of subscription-funded and associational relief schemes beginning in the 1750s was intertwined with the priorities of those imperial states from the outset. The repertoire of discourses and expected practices that comprised voluntarism served to simplify complex institutional relationships into an image of the ‘humanity’ or ‘disinterested benevolence’ of propertied individuals. These voluntarist relief strategies spread to colonial towns like Havana, Veracruz, and Bridgetown in the late-eighteenth century as responses to war, natural disaster, and subsistence crises, but the challenges of balancing the participation of propertied elites and colonial administrators in the operation of voluntarist schemes often led to failure. Finally, in the early-nineteenth century, metropolitan authorities in both empires took up voluntarist relief strategies to effect policy in matters of public health and the regulation of chattel slavery. These appropriations of voluntarist relief made subscription societies into channels of conflict among colonial elites, indicating the propensity of associational charity to produce or exacerbate fissures in colonial societies. Tracing Atlantic adaptations of connected voluntarist practices, rather than ‘philanthropic’ ideologies, discloses inherent flexibility in the tools of eighteenth-century charitable action, tools which were used at times to defend the rights of enslavers and stratify or curtail civic membership.