This sensible book examines philanthropic networks and cultures in various European and North American cities. Thomas Adam demonstrates the interdependence of seemingly contradictory trends: the intercultural transfer of reform ideas and the use of philanthropy for local prestige and status. Innovative programmes for cultural institutions and social services could circulate vigorously without undermining local establishments because for much of the nineteenth century, the ‘agents of intercultural transfer’ (p. 5) were civic-minded gentlemen such as George Ticknor, whose Boston Public Library drew loosely upon German examples, or privileged women, epitomized by Duchess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, Queen Victoria's daughter, who translated and publicized Octavia Hill's housing ideas. By the late 1800s, when professionals and academics took initiative from elite amateurs in international reform discourse, local philanthropic cultures had coalesced in Leipzig, Boston, New York and Toronto – the cities examined most carefully – that set the frame in which reform professionals operated.

The book's first half traces cross-national influence in museums, libraries and urban housing. Americans such as Ticknor misunderstood restrictive institutions such as Dresden's Royal Saxon Library as public and accessible. Almost inadvertently, Americans democratized German models, adding free lending to libraries and popular education to museums. Germans who later wrote enthusiastically about the Boston Public Library or the Metropolitan Museum of Art did not perceive these institutions’ distant German roots. Likewise, North American travellers readily absorbed British and German efforts to use philanthropic housing to inculcate self-reliance and bourgeois behaviour, but Anglo-Americans did not comprehend potentially useful German experiments with co-operative housing linked to credit unions. Indeed, English-speakers misunderstood much about German civil society, chronically overestimating the state's role in cultural institutions and social services.

The book's second half compares relatively competitive philanthropic cultures in New York and Leipzig with more unified elites in Boston and Toronto. New York's Metropolitan Museum welcomed the public to its municipal-financed building, but its foundation remained a patrician bastion. Newly wealthy financiers and industrialists backed the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park. Such competition filled New York with orchestras, hospitals and other institutions. In Leipzig, a similar split between merchants and industrialists also promoted competitive institution-building. By contrast, Boston's Brahmins retained an impressive hold on cultural and philanthropic activity, opening participation to select Jews but almost never to despised Irish Catholics. In a newer city with less accumulated wealth, Toronto philanthropies could not afford to be selective, but Toronto's Protestant establishment was strikingly anti-Semitic. In all four cities, wealthy women were prominent philanthropists but often as an extension of husbands’ or families’ activities and rarely with an explicit interest in women's political rights.

By tracing transatlantic exchange in cultural philanthropy and social reform to an amateur, private phase in the mid-nineteenth century, Adam challenges the prevailing transnational interpretation of social reform identified with Daniel Rodgers and Axel Schäfer, who emphasize late nineteenth-century professionals, social scientists and journalists receptive to social democratic and progressive ideas. Through the use of comparative methodology, Adam thus uncovers circumstances and particularisms that the transnational approach alone might have missed.