This article provides an introductory overview of themes raised in this special edition of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. We suggest that, while recent work such as Michael Barnett's Empire of Humanity has begun to explore the history of western humanitarianism, academic researchers can do more to address the intricate framework of relations between humanitarianism and empire, and that the history of humanitarianism can usefully be viewed as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging trans-imperial, international and transnational approaches. We set the papers in this collection within the wider historiography of nineteenth and twentieth century humanitarianism, and outline how the humanitarian 'impulse' intersected with debates around anti-slavery, colonial administration and the protection of indigenous peoples. We also outline the ways in which twentieth-century international 'networks of concern' engaged with, and built upon, the discourses of imperial humanitarianism. Finally, we briefly consider the benefits of a 'transnational' approach in sketching the history of empire and humanitarianism.

Through an examination of the material and imaginative geographies of colonial philanthropy in parts of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century, this paper advocates a more nuanced conception of the heterogeneity of colonial discourse. At the same time, it elaborates a networked conceptualization of empire. Particular attention is paid to the moralities of closeness, distance and connection, the spatial politics of knowledge, and the spatial and temporal translation of the trope of ‘slavery’ within philanthropic discourse. The paper raises colonial philanthropy as an object of inquiry that has relevance for contemporary globalized humanitarianism as well as for cross-cultural tension within former imperial sites.

How to write about the many, diverse places that constituted the British Empire in the same text; how to conceive of both the differences and the connections between Britain and its various colonies? These have been perennial problems for imperial historians. This article begins by examining the concept of 'core' and 'periphery', and the various ways that it has been employed within the tradition of British imperial history. It then turns to concepts such as networks, webs and circuits, which are characteristic of the 'new' imperial history. It suggests that these newer concepts are useful in allowing the social and cultural, as well as the economic, histories of Britain and its colonies to be conceived as more fluidly and reciprocally interrelated. The article concludes by suggesting that these spatial concepts could usefully be taken further, through an explicit recognition of the multiple trajectories that define any space and place.From the beginnings of British imperial history writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the differences between spaces and places, particularly 'metropolitan' or 'core' ones, and 'colonial' or 'peripheral' ones, have been absolutely fundamental to our imagination of the British Empire. And yet these spatial concepts have rarely been examined explicitly. Rather, the spatial imagination of imperial historians has generally been an implicit, taken-for-granted one. This article begins by reviewing a genre of 'traditional' imperial history that is often criticized by postcolonial scholars for being top-down, focused solely on economic and political issues, and not only masculinist but also ignorant of the significance of gender in its approaches. Seldom, however, has that tradition been interrogated specifically for its spatial imagination. At the risk of re-centring a tradition that many postcolonial scholars of empire have been seeking to displace, this article begins by performing such an interrogation. It does so, however, as a stepping stone to newer ways of conceptualizing the British Empire's spatialitiesways that postcolonial scholars themselves have developed.For over thirty years, between the 1950s and 1980s, the most influential model for understanding Britain's nineteenth-century imperial expansion was that of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher. Robinson and Gallagher argued that the kind of overseas influence favoured by the mid-Victorian

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How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

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Within the context of contemporary discussion over geography and developmental ethics, this paper examines part of the genealogy of a modern British sense of responsibility for the plight of distant strangers. The frame of reference for this sense, known as humanitarianism, was first cast overseas through debates over the slave trade in the late 18th century, and its remit was further extended as a result of the contested processes of colonial settlement in the 1820s and 1830s. This geographically expansive discourse is analysed through a study of two exemplary statements of humane intervention: the Aborigines Committee (1835–37), and the military Court of Enquiry into the death of the African Xhosa King Hintsa (1836). Each demonstrated a new-found concern for the fate of colonised individuals. They established that the sufferings of distant others were inextricably connected to the everyday privileges enjoyed by Britons. However, they also formulated prescriptive principles targeted not only at the relief of suffering, but at the moral and material improvement of distant subjects—principles which continue to inform more recent debates over global ethics.

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