Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession: Britain’s empire through the lens of Liberia

Laidlaw, Zoë

doi:10.1353/cch.2012.0005

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

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“…According to Agier (2011) forms of the de-humanisation enacted by humanitarian practices are intertwined with the erasure of the political subjectivity of those who receive aid. Hence, the power of humanitarian work is strongly entangled and aligned with border control authorities and European states: more often than not, humanitarian interventions produce paternalistic (patriarchal) hierarchies that are the result of long-lasting colonial power relationships and racist ideologies (Laidlaw 2012;Lester and Dussart 2014): protection comes with dependency and domination, and control to access to resources and services, e.g. in a refugee camp, serves as strong political tools to exercise authority over migrants and discipline their bodies.…”

Section: The Humanitarian Industrial Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Care without Control: The Humanitarian Industrial Complex and the Criminalisation of Solidarity

Dadusc

Mudu

2020

Geopolitics

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In this paper we discuss the criminalisation of migrant solidarity, intended as practices of resistance to the current regulation and management of borders in Europe. We argue that the target of criminalisation is not simply humanitarian assistance: rather, we propose a differentiation between autonomous solidarity and humanitarianism, arguing that while the first is criminalised, the latter is often complicit in the harms and violence of borders.Drawing on critical humanitarian studies, we argue that autonomous migrant solidarity distinguishes itself from what we address as the 'Humanitarian Industrial Complex' in its active refusal to the legal obligations to control and report undocumented migrants to the authorities; its resistance to the racialised hierarchies entailed by humanitarian aid; as well as in its contestation of the commodification of migrant lives. Rather than 'filling the gaps' of the state or ameliorating borders and their violence, autonomous practices of migrant solidarity seek to 'create cracks' in the smooth operation of border regimes. It is because of their intrinsic character of opposition to both the militarisation of borders and to humanitarian technologies of government, we argue, that autonomous practices of migrant's solidarity are accused of 'facilitating illegal migration' and become the target of state repression.

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Section: The Humanitarian Industrial Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Care without Control: The Humanitarian Industrial Complex and the Criminalisation of Solidarity

Dadusc

Mudu

2020

Geopolitics

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British Humanitarianism, Indigenous Rights, and Imperial Crises: Assessing the Membership Base of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, 1840–73

Reid

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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A confluence of societal changes, particularly hardening racial attitudes following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, resulted in widescale disillusionment with imperial humanitarian projects in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As this article demonstrates, however, the membership and income of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) increased at precisely the moments when this disillusionment was at its sharpest. This article combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the nature of the Society's mid-century membership base, demonstrating that, rather than a monolithic decline, a humanitarian polarization took place in response to imperial crises that led some (largely Tories) to disillusionment and others (largely Whigs) to entrenchment. Furthermore, by attending to discursive trends within speeches at APS annual meetings as well as in private correspondence between members and the secretary of the Society, I explore how APS members explained the connection between their own lives and the treatment of distant Indigenous peoples in the colonies. Finding that British Indigenous rights activism was only seldomly expressed in terms of Indigenous peoples themselves, I show that support for the APS was most commonly related to concerns for friends and family living in the colonies, along with disquiet about the impact of colonial injustices on international competition. This enabled Indigenous rights activists to continue their efforts in the face of disillusionment with the capabilities of racialized “others.”

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“Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery

Laidlaw¹

2012

J.R. Asiat. Soc. G.B. Irel.

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This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire.

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Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession: Britain’s empire through the lens of Liberia

Cited by 5 publications

References 25 publications

Care without Control: The Humanitarian Industrial Complex and the Criminalisation of Solidarity

Care without Control: The Humanitarian Industrial Complex and the Criminalisation of Solidarity

British Humanitarianism, Indigenous Rights, and Imperial Crises: Assessing the Membership Base of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, 1840–73

“Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery

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