Rebel populism

This book makes the case for an inclusive form of socialist feminism that will benefit both individuals and societies, and that puts multiply disadvantaged women at its heart. It argues that developing a feminist vocabulary is a key part of feminist politics, and it demystifies some key terms, including patriarchy and intersectionality. The book’s longest chapter engages with fierce disputes between some feminists and some trans women, and suggests possible compromises and ways forward. It argues throughout that the analysis of gender cannot be isolated from that of class or race, that patriarchy is inexorably entangled with capitalism, and that the needs of most women will not be met in an economy based on the pursuit of profit. In making these arguments, it explains why capitalism is not meeting human needs and it highlights the flaws in the ideologies that sustain it; it also shows how the assumptions of neoliberalism are incompatible with anything other than a narrow, elitist form of feminism that has little relevance for most women. Throughout, the book asserts the social, economic and human importance of the unpaid caring and domestic work that has been traditionally done by women, and the need to redistribute this and value it properly. It concludes that the combination of some policy trends, the increased presence of feminists in positions of influence and a rise in all kinds of grassroots activism give grounds for optimism about a future that could be both more feminist and more socialist.

Accounts of development and humanitarianism, including its critiques, have long been preoccupied with its institutional forms, driven by governments and international organisations. Such emphasis often attributes significance to the large-scale. The book argues that engaging with the informal and local manifestations of aid disrupts this assumption. It draws on ethnographic research with practitioners in Cambodia, who run their privately funded aid projects. They include Cambodians and foreigners, from Asia and the Global North, who undertake these projects of their own initiative. The book demonstrates how they make their own scales, offering radically different understandings of what actions are significant, and who counts. Such a perspective queries core humanitarian beliefs, and theories of social change more generally. It suggests that everyday practitioners operate with multiple, interlinking scales of their own making. Rather than being dismissed as ‘small scale’, they demonstrate how they render people and causes meaningful, regardless of numbers or size. They question the role of distance for aid, and reveal a nuanced interplay of proximity and distance to those in need. Such unsettling of the valorisation of the large-scale extends to social relations. The ‘distant stranger’ as the archetypal object of humanitarianism is replaced by a desire to get to know others through the act of assistance, often through idioms of kinship. Critically nuancing the trope of the ‘white saviour’, everyday aid is characterised by multiple affinity ties between actors from the Global North and South, which direct and motivate development and humanitarian action.

Nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant missionary groups commonly assumed that they were the most apt providers of education to non-Europeans in British colonies. Christian schooling was deemed imperative for modernising societies to withstand secularising forces. This significant study examines this assumption by drawing on key moments in the development of missionary education from the 1830s to the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is the first to survey the changing ideologies behind establishing mission schools across the spectrum of the British Empire. It examines the Negro Education Grant in the West Indies, the Aborigines Select Committee (British Settlements), missionary conferences in 1860 and 1910 as well as drawing on local voices and contexts from Southern Africa, British India and Sri Lanka to demonstrate the changing expectations for, engagement with and ideologies circulating around mission schools resulting from government policies and local responses. By the turn of the twentieth century, many colonial governments had encroached upon missionary schooling to such an extent that the symbiosis that had allowed missionary groups autonomy at the beginning of the century had morphed into an entanglement that secularised mission schools. The spread of ‘Western modernity’ through mission schools in British colonies affected local cultures and societies. It also threatened Christian religious moral authority, leading missionary societies by the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 to question the ambivalent legacy of missionary schooling, and to fear for the morality and religious sensibilities of their pupils, and indeed for morality within Britain and the Empire.