The British Empire, International Government, and Human Rights

Abstract

This essay examines recent publications in several historical fields to articulate the relationships between the British Empire, international government, and human rights from British conceptions of imperial world order in the late nineteenth century to the end of empire in the Cold War.In the past several years, historians have given considerable attention to relationships between the British Empire, international government, and human rights. Studies of Great Britain's role in the League of Nations have built upon a longstanding body of scholarship, while studies of the multifaceted relationships between Britain and the United Nations (U.N.) and the evolving, international system of human rights have broken new, if limited, ground. 1 In a review of the field of human rights history in 2004, Kenneth Cmiel called for wider recognition that the meaning of human rights is multivalent and historically contingent. 2 Recent historical studies have paid heed, contributing to an effort across fields to examine human rights as visions not only seen, but contested. 3 In so doing, historians have begun to bridge a gap between the historiographies of international government and human rights before the Second World War. This essay spans additional divides. It draws connections between several as yet separate bodies of historical scholarship on the British Empire, international government, and human rights from British conceptions of imperial world order in the Victorian era to the end of empire in the Cold War.In the late nineteenth century, members of Britain's intellectual elite and political class imagined forms of a new world order centered on the imperial federation of Britain and its white settler colonies. As Duncan Bell explains, this project of structural reform was a reaction to the social friction of industrial capitalism and the extension of democracy in the United Kingdom through the 1867 and 1884 reform acts. Imperial federation was also conceived as a strategic response to the growing economic and geopolitical competition offered by Germany, the United States, and Russia. More than an economic or political initiative, imperial federation was regarded as an expression of common culture or Anglo-Saxonism, or both. It was something moral and metaphysical, the epitome of universal principles of civilization realized through the genius of the British nation. 4 By Britain's civilized standards, the vast majority of the imperial subjects in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific were deemed "backward" and therefore undeserving of the same status as the white brethren of Greater Britain.In contrast to imperial federalists, liberal internationalists were mainly concerned with facilitating co-operation between European states in this volatile era. They attempted to foster, in varying degrees, both institutional solutions and a transcendent moral conscience for humanity. They promoted free trade as a means to forge universal bonds of mutual benefit and trust, and they worked to avert war through multilateral agre...

Anti‐slavery, refugee relief, and the missionary origins of humanitarian photography ca. 1900–1960

“…This questioning of humanitarianism in the present has prompted scholars to revisit the narratives of humanitarianism in the past, to engage in a search for origins and ways lost (Barnett, ; Cabanes, ; Fehrenbach & Rodogno, ; Lester & Dussart, ; Shaw, ; Stamatov, ; Watenpaugh, ). They have begun to bridge a historiographical gap between the old and new humanitarianisms by examining the relationships between empire, international government, humanitarianism, and human rights (Daughton, ; Forclaz, ; Grant, ; Grant, ; Laqua & Alston, ; Martinez, ; Mazower, ; O'Sullivan, Hilton, & Fiori, ; Paulmann, ; Rodogno, ; Quirk, ; Tusan, ; Tusan, ; Tusan, ; Weitz, ).…”