In 1989, Matthew Hilton recounts in his new book, Charity After Empire, the director of Save the Children thanked Live Aid, Band Aid, and Comic Relief for tripling the annual income over the course of the 1980s. By 2023, British charitable giving reached a record of 13.9 billion pounds. For Hilton, Britain’s relationship to overseas charity is distinctive for two reasons: because of the legal constraints on charities and because of the colonial legacy.

Hilton explores the history of the charity sector’s overseas involvement from the end of empire through the 1990s, tracing the emergence of the sector’s non-political approach and its evolution alongside the politics of decolonization and the rise of neoliberalism in Britain. Hilton demonstrates, through a collection of character-driven chapters, the ways that charities and the people who supported them on both left and right endorsed an approach to postcolonial politics that was driven by pity.

Africa was the site for postcolonial charity’s evolution into big business, marking the postcolonial period’s geographical relationship to the world as separate from the Indian Sub-Continent dominated colonial period. In the “official mind” of the NGO sector, it was Africa, not India, that dictated the changing needs of the charity sector. And while Kenya and Nigeria were both important to the rise of the British charity sector, it was in Southern Africa that NGOs found their clearest—and messiest—relationship with the politics of decolonization.

Part I, “Growth,” explores the new models of charity that succeeded empire in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter one engages with the idea of the techno-missionary, exploring the cases of the Neaves working for Save the Children in Nigeria and the Clutton-Brocks working as missionaries for St Faith’s in (then) Southern Rhodesia. Referred to as “practical Christianity” by the actors themselves, the idea of techno-missionary endeavor was a “blend of faith and expertise” (p. 51). Hilton argues that “charity was the means by which mission adapted to the various forces of decolonization” (p. 60).

Part II, “Delivery,” moves into the late 1960s and 1970s and the question of whether charities were actually delivering on their promises. As Hilton clearly summarizes, “no consensus ever exited on what success for a charity meant” and, importantly, “the opposite was also the case” (p. 164). The Clutton-Brocks returned, this time in Bechuanaland, at the Bamangwato Development Association, a model “integrated village economy,” and later the Cold Comfort Farm Society (p. 174). The Clutton-Brocks had high hopes for cooperative rural development, but were also motivated by political opposition to white settler rule across Southern Africa. In the process, they learned “how difficult it was to intertwine development with politics” (p. 195).

Throughout, Hilton positions Oxfam and Save the Children as representing, respectively, the progressive, left-leaning approach to charity, and the conservative, aristocratic. In Part III, “Containment,” Hilton explores the ways that the progressive discontent with dependency on the World Bank and the UN, and frustration with the politics of decolonization in Southern Africa, pushed Oxfam to rethink its relationship with national governments, but also with the idea of charity. Justice and solidarity became watchwords of the radicalized humanitarian charities even as they framed those shifts within the idea of economic needs and poverty rather than racial justice or human rights to conform to the Charity Commission (p. 256).

In one of the most illuminating chapters in this excellent book, Hilton examines the way that conservative engagement with charity transformed into an unlikely vehicle for the South African Defence Forces’ propaganda in the 1980s. The International Freedom Foundation and Oxfam clashed over apartheid. IFF brought a case against Oxfam in 1990 for its abuse of charitable status. Ultimately, Oxfam was censured, even as popular opinion swung in Oxfam’s favor.

Hilton raises an interesting question for future historians to answer: to what extent is the history of aid, development, and charity, a history of gender? As the Mass-Observation survey reported in 1947, informing the shift in welfare provision from the charity sector to the state within Britain, volunteers were disliked as “idle women,” “repressed spinsters,” and “fur-coated ladies of leisure” (p. 83). What does it say that charity was seen as women’s work, and that being the recipient of charity was objectionable because of the gender of who was assumed to be offering it? And how might those gendered associations factor into the ideal of holding charity apart from politics? How can charities answer big questions about economics, poverty, and development, without engaging with politics? By the close of the book, in a survey taken 60 years after the Mass-Observation, respondents concluded that charity was “a real opportunity to considerable good,” whether for a welfare state stopgap, or for “educating women in sub-Saharan Africa.” One woman noted that “I cannot give more money to the welfare state, but I can donate some food to the local foodbank.”

Hilton presents a rich story of the development of the UK’s overseas charity sector in the second half of the twentieth century. It is a story grounded in British political history and interested in the tensions between that political history and the objectives of overseas charity in the wake of decolonization. What is most fascinating about the story is the way that Hilton is able to shape the book’s argument through the characters’ experiences themselves: no longer in charge of the politics of these former colonies, they nonetheless believe it is their duty to shape the economics. Charity—with its anti-political remit—was the way.