A history of humanitarianism, 1755–1989

In the name of others

Silvia Salvatici

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526120144
• eBook ISBN: 9781526120175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The book traces the history of international humanitarianism from the anti-slavery movement to the end of the cold war. It is based on an extensive survey of the international literature and is retold in an original narrative that relies on a close examination of the sources. The reconstruction of humanitarianism's long history unfolds around some crucial moments and events: the colonial expansion of European countries, the two world wars and their aftermaths, the emergence of a new postcolonial order. In terms of its contents, narrative style, interpretative approach the book is aimed at a large and diverse public including: scholars who are studying and teaching humanitarianism; students who need to learn about humanitarianism as part of their training or research; operators and volunteers who are engaged in the field; non-specialist readers who are interested in the topic because of its relevance to current events.

Part I

Archaeology of international humanitarianism

UNHAPPY mortals! Dark and mourning earth!

Affrighted gathering of human kind!

Eternal lingering of useless pain!

Come, ye philosophers, who cry, ‘All’s well,’

And contemplate this ruin of a world.

Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,

This child and mother heaped in common wreck,

These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts –

A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,

Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,

Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,

In racking torment end their stricken lives.¹

In these lines, Voltaire was describing the death and destruction brought by the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755. This dramatic episode was defined as the first modern natural disaster and is often cited as l’événement inaugural² of contemporary humanitarianism.³ The reasons for the modernity of this event can be traced back to the reaction of the Portuguese monarchy, which considered the response to the emergency to be its own responsibility. This was the first occasion on which there had been an attempt at a centralised intervention for relief and reconstruction. At the same time, there was a sort of international mobilisation to send aid to the Portuguese capital, where three-quarters of the homes had been destroyed and the victims numbered in the tens of thousands. In his Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second, Horace Walpole recalled for example the decision of the British parliament to accept the crown’s request and send the Portuguese earthquake victims and the British residents of Lisbon £100,000, partly in cash and partly in ‘provisions and utensils’.⁴ The aid sent to Portugal from other countries was an indication of the emergence of a new sensibility to others’ suffering, of which Voltaire’s lines were evidence. In the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster the French philosopher questioned himself on the human condition, on divine justice, on the presence of good and evil in the world. Voltaire was distraught at the victims’ pain and identified with those men and women ‘whom the earth devours’.

The recognition of the suffering of fellow human beings and the display of sympathy were recurring elements in the arguments of the philosophes. The Enlightenment and natural law philosophers placed an emphasis on establishing an ethos dictated by those feelings – such as pity and understanding – that every human being could not but experience, and they contributed to forging the idea of a community compassionate towards its more needy members.⁵ This idea spread through western Europe not only based on philosophical reflection but also on a varied literary production. The circulation of plays, poems and, above all, novels with dramatic plots that stressed the description of feelings and appealed to the readers’ emotional involvement contributed to spreading a new ‘culture of sensibility’, according to which human beings were naturally inclined to share in the pain of the others and to judge it to be unacceptable.⁶ The philosophical and literary works highlighted how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the rejection of suffering became part of modern culture. The idea that the pain of others was intolerable contributed to spreading the conviction that actions aimed at giving comfort and relief corresponded to a moral duty.

This duty was also advocated by the renewed religious spirit that pervaded the Christian world in the eighteenth century, pushing its believers to action. The Evangelical Great Awakening played a very important role. This involved a whole array of diverse movements that intended to ‘wake up’ from their ‘spiritual sleep’ the churches that had come out of the Reformation. It underlined the need for a living faith, appealed to the emotions and feelings of the believers, and placed religious experience at its centre. Each member of the community of the faithful was, in other words, called upon to consecrate their life to the service of God through evangelical work and behaviour that complied with the moral principles of the Bible, which imposed forms of authentic piety. These predicaments were what led the followers of the Great Awakening – which in the nineteenth century became one of the most important phenomena of Protestantism – to take an active role in the face of the recognition and emotional sharing of others’ pain.⁷

The initiatives through which the need to offer relief to, or to bring to an end, others’ sufferings was followed up had a twofold intent. On the one hand, they sought to guarantee help and assistance to the needy, who included the new poor living in the emerging industrial cities. On the other hand, they demanded reforms capable of changing the order of reality behind so much human pain: the abolition of torture, for example, or the regulation of working conditions in factories. Furthermore – and this is the most important aspect from our point of view – the questions placed at the centre of the collective actions generated by a ‘humanitarian’ impulse did not remain confined to individual national communities but went beyond their borders. Emotional engagement and range of action were extended to foreign men and women, to distant populations. The sense of responsibility towards individuals suffering in unknown, distant places came into being at the moment when western Europe (including Britain) and North America were becoming the hubs of a global network within which goods, capital and labour circulated. It was this network that charted the new, extended ‘geography of sensibility’. The most significant examples of the mobilisation that crossed national boundaries were the anti-slavery movement and the philanthropic work of missionaries all over the world, both appearing at the same time as the construction of the colonial empires.⁸

The movement that advocated the abolition of slavery came out of the recognition of the suffering of other individuals, different in their condition of slavery and their race but nevertheless part of the great human family. The slave system, accused of being inhuman and barbaric, was fought through an intense public opinion campaign and by using ‘modern’ forms of mobilisation, such as petitions or boycotts of products from the plantations. The religious movements played a crucial role in motivating and promoting the struggle against slavery. Far from their native countries, the missionaries joined the battle against the slave system with proselytism, which was, for them, their main aim, and with a combination of work in the fields of education, medical treatment and sanitary care. The intention was to respond to the moral duty to provide relief to others’ suffering not just by standing up against slavery but also by offering indigenous populations the necessary aid to get out of the material and moral misery that oppressed them. The colonial administrations themselves – whose foundations rested on the strength of arms through which the empires were built – considered they had to demonstrate at least some goodwill, and included among their objectives the improvement in the living conditions of the colonised populations and, more generally, their acquisition of the qualities which, at that time, were the sole prerogative of Western societies.

The emergence of a new ‘culture of sensibility’, the abolitionist movement and missionary philanthropy are usually placed at the origins of contemporary humanitarianism, commonly understood as the organised aid intended for individual victims of war, natural disasters and disadvantaged economic circumstances in their own countries. It was an organised aid that, over time, was equipped with specific institutions, ad hoc legislation and internationally recognised operating standards. However, everything came into being in the period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the confirmation of a new spirit of participation in the suffering of others, among whom the colonies’ slaves and subjects were of major importance. Outlining a similar genealogy means a certain degree of arbitrariness, increased by a possible linguistic misunderstanding, which it is best to clarify straight away. Today, talking about ‘humanitarianism’ means referring, as we have just said, to a humanitarian regime that is made up of laws, practices and institutions. In the common understanding of the term, the dimension of the action – by now complex – to provide aid to other human beings prevailed over the feeling from which it had drawn its stimulus. But in the early decades of the nineteenth century – when we have the first recognised usages of the words ‘humanitarianism’, in English, and ‘humanitarisme’, in French – the predominant reference was to the emotions felt in the face of the suffering of fellow human beings and to the spontaneous participation in the pain of others. Not only this but in Britain ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘humanitarian’ were mainly used in a negative sense, to mean an excess of pointless sentimentalism, and this was also true of their equivalents in France.⁹ The gap between the daily acceptance of these terms and the assumed age of the origins of humanitarianism therefore invites us to greater caution, encouraging us not to place past and present on too black and white a line.

This is how we can sum up the reasons why in this introduction to Part I we do not talk about humanitarianism’s ‘age of origins’ but about its archaeology. The intention is to understand which of international humanitarianism’s premises, seen in the light of their later developments, were already present in the historic period characterised by a new ‘culture of sensibility’, by the abolitionist movement’s battles and by the activities of colonial philanthropy. The analysis of these premises is not aimed at drawing an evolutionary path destined to take us seamlessly to the present state of humanitarianism. Above all, it is an attempt to better understand the specific context in which a cultural sensibility took shape and new behaviours appeared – which, in one way or another, we are still heirs of – without forgetting that the later historical path could have taken other directions.

Another consideration is the use of the terms ‘humanitarian’ and ‘humanitarianism’ in the following pages to ensure that the reader is not led to project onto this era the meaning they have in the present. Referring to the ‘archaeological’ period, both terms will be used in the sense that refers to the feelings of human solidarity, to the moral duty of providing aid and relief from which it drew its origin.

Notes

1 Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; or an Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well’, in Toleration and Other Essays, translation and introduction by Joseph McCabe (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), p. 255.

2 I am repeating the definition suggested by Paul Ricoeur in his essay ‘Remarques d’un philosophe’, in Institut d’Histoire du Temps Present, Ecrire l’histoire du temps présent: En hommage à François Bédarida (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1992), pp. 35–41.

3 Russell R. Dynes, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: The First Modern Disaster’, in Th. E. D. Braun and J. B. Radner (eds), The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation Publications, 2005), pp. 34–46; Jean-Paul Poirier, Le tremblement de terre de Lisbonne: 1755 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005); John F. Hutchinson, ‘Disasters and the International Order: Earthquakes, Humanitarians, and the Ciraolo Project’, International History Review, 1 (2000), pp. 1–36.

4 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second (London: Henry Colburn Publisher, 1846), vol. II, pp. 77–78.

5 Norman S. Fiering, ‘Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37:2 (1976), pp. 195–218.

6 Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, ‘Mourning, Pity and the Work of Narrative in the Making of Humanity’, in R. Ashby Wilson and R. D. Brown (eds), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review, 100:2 (1995), pp. 303–334; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility’, American Historical Review, 90:2–3 (1985), pp. 339–361 and 457–566 (in two parts), later republished in Thomas Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

7 Fiering, ‘Irresistible Compassion’; M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals. Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8 The periodisation that identifies in abolitionism and colonialism the origins of international humanitarianism is widespread; for example, it is put forward by Michael Barnett in Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

9 On the importance of the etymology of the term ‘humanitarianism’, see Maurice Tournier, ‘Humanitaire est-il apolitique de naissance?’, Mots. Les languages du politique, 65 (2001), pp. 135–145.

1

Saving humanity, abolishing slavery

And further, consider with your self, if you were in the same Condition as the Blacks are … who came as Strangers to you, and were sold to you as Slaves; now, I say, if this should be the Condition of you or yours, you would think it hard Measure; yes, and very great Bondage and Cruelty.¹

George Fox said thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the English edition
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Archaeology of international humanitarianism
• Part II: Humanitarianism in wartime
• Part III: From Europe to the Third World
• Epilogue: a ‘new humanitarianism’?
• Bibliography
• Index