ABSTRACT
Major philanthropists and philanthropic foundations are increasingly engaging in world-making at a global scale. The Gates Foundation, for example, has committed to “fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world.” Characteristic of world-making global philanthropy and its proponents is a postnational framework where national contexts, governments, histories, and territories do not really matter; and technocratic market-driven solutions are preferred over all others. This chapter looks at the construction and early years of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the country’s first transcontinental railway, and its foundational role in linking elite Canadian philanthropy and white settler colonial nation-building. It discusses the role of Birlas’ philanthropy, one of India’s leading business houses, from the first half of the twentieth century, in the making of upper-caste Hindu nationhood. The chapter illustrates the following: the extensive role of philanthropy and philanthropic foundations in nation-building; and their malleability in working in different contexts with broadly the same exclusionary politics as a result.
