History of Associations and Volunteering

This chapter examines the history of the topics in its title, with major emphasis on the history of associations. This Handbook is very clearly about associationalism writ large, not about associations and social welfare only (Smith 2015c). The latter issue is one key piece of the total puzzle, but we aim to cover the whole range of association types and time periods. Volunteering seems to be a characteristic of our species, with informal (unorganized) volunteering probably going back to our origins 150,000–200,000 years ago. Formal volunteering in associations can only be traced back about 10,000 years to the origins of associations in which to do such volunteering (Anderson 1971; Bradfield 1973). Volunteering in formal volunteer service programs (VSPs) as departments of other organizations is very recent historically, only going back to the mid-1800s (Smith 2015b; see Handbook Chapter 15). We know very little about the long history even of formal volunteering, since volunteering leaves few physical or written traces and was seldom mentioned by historians as a phenomenon until the past few hundred years.