The Solidarity Economy with Tehila Sasson

The Solidarity Economy with Tehila Sasson

Thursday, October 10 9am PT/ 11am CT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire by Tehila Sasson. Erik Linstrum will join Tehila Sasson in conversation.

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“After India gained independence in 1947, Britain reinvented its role in the global economy through nongovernmental aid organizations. Utilizing existing imperial networks and colonial bureaucracy, the nonprofit sector sought an ethical capitalism, one that would equalize relationships between British consumers and Third World producers as the age of empire was ending. The Solidarity Economy examines the role of nonstate actors in the major transformations of the world economy in the postwar era, showing how British NGOs charted a path to neoliberalism in their pursuit of ethical markets. Between the 1950s and 1990s, nonprofits sought to establish an alternative to Keynesianism through their welfare and development programs. Encouraging the fair trade of commodities and goods through microfinance, consumer boycotts, and corporate social responsibility, these programs emphasized decentralization, privatization, and entrepreneurship. Tehila Sasson tells the stories of the activists, economists, politicians, and businessmen who reimagined the marketplace as a workshop for global reform. She reveals how their ideas, though commonly associated with conservative neoliberal policies, were part of a nonprofit-driven endeavor by the liberal left to envision markets as autonomous and humanizing spaces, facilitating ethical relationships beyond the impersonal realm of the state. Drawing on dozens of newly available repositories from nongovernmental, international, national, and business archives, The Solidarity Economy reconstructs the political economy of these markets—from handicrafts and sugar to tea and coffee—shedding critical light on the postimperial origins of neoliberalism.”

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Tehila Sasson is a historian of the British empire with a particular interest in histories of ethics, the economy, and decolonization. She’s currently an Assistant Professor at Emory University. In fall 2024 she’ll be joining the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor of Modern History and as a Fellow at Wadham College.

Sasson’s first book, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (May 2024, Princeton University Press), traces how nonprofits became a major force in the British and the global economy in the second half of the twentieth century. It follows the story of the activists, economists, politicians, and businessmen, who during the years of decolonization sought to establish an alternative to state-led development through their welfare and development programs.

Sasson has also written on the histories of consumerism, corporate social responsibility, humanitarianism, famine relief, and neoliberalism in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, and the Journal of British Studies among other places.

Erik Linstrum is a historian of modern Britain in its imperial, European, and global contexts. His research explores the politics of knowledge and the circulation of information with particular interests in science and technology, war and violence, and the long history of decolonization. His first book, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book of the year in European international history. And today we are here to hear about his most recent workAge of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire.