This chapter places Samuel Moyn's influential argument, that the post-war ascendance of human rights saw it subordinated to a humanitarian optic, into dialogue with a study of Amnesty International’s early years in Australia. Founded in 1961 by London-based lawyer and Catholic convert Peter Benenson, AI quickly found a receptive audience in Australia, with ‘sections’ emerging in cities across the nation. Through exploring two of the group’s early campaigns – that Indigenous Australians and conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War be recognised as ‘prisoners of conscience’ by the group’s London-based headquarters – I identify how two different understandings of rights coexisted within the organisation during this period. One was maximalist and humanitarian: insisting that rights inhering in the person irrespective of the state, while the other was minimalist and closer to a traditional understanding of rights as emerging from citizenship and imposing duties onto a subject. Such schisms were also tied into some of the central debates on human rights during the ‘long 1960s’: particularly the competition for supremacy between collective and individual rights at an international level. The chapter concludes by tracing Amnesty International’s Australian history through to the so-called human rights explosion of the late 1970s, revealing how its ‘human rights proceduralism’ frustrated those motivated by an older, often religiously inspired humanitarian sensibility, providing insights that shed light on the group’s neglected global history.

Historians of humanitarianism have drawn attention to the year 1833 as a watershed in humanity’s sense of itself. The Antislavery Act passed in that year and abolishing slavery in British colonies was the result of a new extension of concern and responsibility for the plight of others and the culmination of a humanitarian sensibility that stretched back to the European Enlightenment. What is often overlooked is the racial and temporal specificity of this concern, and the even greater specificity of the remedial action taken by the government to address it. Enslaved people of African descent in the Caribbean were its primary targets, though they remained apprenticed to their former owners until at least 1 August 1838. Enslaved Indians were not to be freed; Africans liberated from other nations’ slave ships remained apprenticed to other British subjects and a spectrum of coerced labour relations continued to characterise the British Empire. This chapter examines the historical geography of emancipation as a case study of the realpolitik that always accompanied humanitarian concern.

Humanitarianism and human rights, always commingled, briefly found sharper points of distinction in the two decades which immediately followed 1945. Human rights departed decisively from the palliationist mode; the compassionate crusades for the least worst that had defined campaigns for abolition, against King Leopold’s Congo, and for the war waifs and immiserated orphans of the countless conflicts that punctuated the industrial age of total war. From the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration, until the early 1970s, human rights drew itself apart from humanitarianism, constituting itself as an independent crusade based on ambitious, redemptive hope. With the inexorable and relentless disappointment of those hopes and the arrival of the NGO ‘breakthrough’, human rights would again lower its sights, and closed the twentieth century much closer to its older sibling.

Humanitarianism and violence have traditionally been understood as polarised states, one serving as a mitigating response to the other. It is only recently that scholars have begun to align the two terms to consider how state-directed humanitarian interventions can be imbricated with conditions of violence. Similarly, recent work on humanitarianism’s imperial underpinnings has drawn out the ways that its appeals to values of universal humanity have been interwoven with the cultural, political or military violence of colonial state-building. This chapter builds on these themes to consider how humanitarian orientations in British imperial policy adapted to evolving expressions of colonial violence over the course of the nineteenth century as the key period of almost unbridled global expansion. Around the British world, the nineteenth century was notable for the range of humanitarian policy initiatives that were triggered by calls to protect those left most at risk of colonial violence or exploitation. But while the long-term objective of humanitarian policy was to check abuses and misuses of colonial power, the process of generating a culture of humane rule was often directly entangled with the enlistment and justification of violence

During the Vietnam War, relief agencies and religious organisations were swamped with applications from Australians wishing to adopt refugee children from Vietnam. These appeals to government, religious and aid organisations were framed as humanitarian acts driven by compassion and empathy for children whose lives were devastated by war. Underpinning these campaigns was an understanding of humanitarianism informed by an imagined, fantasised future of happiness for such war refugee children. I argue these campaigns of inter-country and transnational adoption of war refugee children were marked by a humanitarianism which was characterised by several factors. The first was the attainment of an idealised, untainted childhood which had been destroyed by war, but which could how retrieved and reconstructed through adoption. Second, adoptees perceived themselves as saviours and heroes, saving innocent children and providing a narrative of uncomplicated happy resolution, speaking and acting for children. In so doing, they conflated individual motives with altruism and a social imaginary of an idealised family model. Finally, it is argued that the construct of the ‘war orphan’ is never an apolitical practice and a form of humanitarianism based on retrieving an idealised childhood attempts to depoliticise and neutralise the circumstances of violence and war.

Written in equal parts by specialists in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Burnard, Lester and Damousi respectively), this foundational chapter tracks the relationship between humanitarian discourse and practice on the one hand, and the rise, expansion and decline of the British Empire on the other, across three centuries. Not only does it set the scene for the case study chapters that follow, establishing the geopolitical context of Anglophone ameliorative governance and intervention across this longue durée; it is the first such targeted examination of this relationship in its own right. It seeks to take up the challenge posed by Skinner and Lester in 2012, to explore ‘the history of humanitarianism … as a fundamental component of imperial relations, a way of bridging trans-imperial, international and transnational approaches’.

The inaugural governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was instructed to ‘conciliate the affections of the natives’ in New South Wales in 1788. Phillip also forbade slavery in the colony, in what has been referred to as a humanitarian gesture. By contrast, marine lieutenant Watkin Tench observed in relation to the transportation of convicts, that advocates for humanity in the colony were few and risked being overshadowed by the ‘vile monsters who deride misery and fatten on calamity’. What, then, did it mean to be an advocate of humanity amidst the various calamities of colonisation? Who was considered ‘humane’ among the colonial officials, the recalcitrant Britons and the supposedly ‘savage’ local Indigenous peoples, and why? This chapter will consider the emergence of humanitarian ideals in the late eighteenth century and examine the ways they were evaluated, expressed and practised during the earliest period of the colonisation of New South Wales. Further, it will reflect on the ways historiography of this period has perpetuated a narrative of enlightened humanity, despite the dissonance between the rhetoric of humanitarianism and the practice of colonisation.

How did the institution of Atlantic slavery and the African slave trade come under attack in the 1780s? One major contributor to anti-slavery discourse in the early stages of abolitionism was the French-born American Quaker, Anthony Benezet. In 1762, he wrote a pathbreaking book on the history of West Africa, in which he used the writings of proslavery advocates and slave traders to construct a very different, and much more positive, portrait of Africa and African slavery than previously available. In Benezet’s rendering, Africans exemplified a whole range of Quaker virtues, none of which had been previously associated with Africans. This chapter assesses the importance of Benezet on Africa in the development of early humanitarian discourse.

During the 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of well-meaning Westerners left their homes and families to volunteer in distant corners of the globe. Aflame with optimism, they set out to save the world, but their actions were invariably intertwined with national and racial power in the overlapping contexts of decolonisation, globalisation and the Cold War. Development volunteering demanded ordinary people leave the comforts of home to spend one, two or even three years in previously unfamiliar reaches of the Third World. Why did tens of thousands of Australians, Britons and Americans respond to this call, and why were they so enthusiastic about it? This chapter explores volunteers’ multiple and often overlapping motivations, ranging from idealism, political or religious convictions and professional ambition to dissatisfaction with life at home and the desire for adventure. Based on hundreds of application forms submitted by intending volunteers, this chapter shows how individual sentiments and emotions were translated into action on the international stage. It also situates personal motivations within the broader expansion of travel and tourism, arguing that individual desires to save the world were enabled and encouraged by accelerating globalisation and the expansion of transnational capitalism during the 1950s and 1960s.

The League of Red Cross Societies was formed in May 1919 by the national Red Cross societies of the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. One of its early initiatives was the establishment of an international post-graduate public health nursing programme in association with Bedford College, London. This paper focuses on this innovative public health programme and the early Nursing Directors of the League of Red Cross Societies, Alice Fitzgerald, Katherine Olmsted and Maynard Carter, who fought to establish and consolidate the highly successful programme within the highly precarious environment of the League’s early years. It provides us with an insight into the impact of the League of Red Cross Societies on the Red Cross movement and its role as a nascent supranational organisation facilitating the exchange of knowledge and information that led to the development of nursing and public health programmes extending across Europe, the Americas and Asia. In doing so, the paper reveals the geopolitical tensions, the competing and contested agendas of other organisations including from within the Red Cross movement, and the philosophies and inherent conflicts surrounding nursing training more broadly during the interwar period. Finally, it suggests that without the League of Red Cross Societies, there would have been no international public health nursing courses in the 1920s and 1930s, and that the development of public health more broadly would have looked very different.