The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.

Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.

The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.

State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.

Introduction

Haiti, 2004; USA, 2005; Myanmar, 2008; Pakistan, 2010; Thailand, 2011; Philippines, 2013; Brazil, 2014; Caribbean, 2017; Tonga, 2018; India, 2018; Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, 2019; Australia, 2019–2020; Germany, 2021; Pakistan, 2022; Europe and the United Kingdom (UK), 2022; China, 2022; the United States (US), 2023; Libya, 2023; Kenya and Tanzania, 2024; Brazil, 2024; Poland, 2024; Bangladesh, 2024.

In recent decades, different regions of the world have experienced disasters that are increasingly attributable to the climate crisis (cf. IPCC 2021).1 These disasters, though differing in scale and geographical location, share common characteristics. In all these cases, those affected are at varying degrees of risk, both globally and in the place where the disaster occurred.2 In all of these cases, the slippery slope of vulnerability correlates closely with prior marginalization based on race, gender, class, education, and other factors (cf. Méjean et al 2024; Cappelli, Costantini, and Consoli 2021; Belkhir and Charlemaine 2007; Giroux 2006). These disasters are not only ‘non-natural’ because they occur in the context of anthropogenic climate change, but also because they overlap with politically determined preconditions (cf. Dawson 2010, 317). As the human rights activist and actor Danny Glover graphically illustrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (cited in Akuno 2006, 34),

Introduction

The climate crisis demands that we confront the economic models and modes of production that have led us to this precipice of destruction. The concept of climate justice takes into account ‘a variety of interrelated concerns – for the inequitable impact [the climate crisis] has on a range of already vulnerable communities, for participation and procedural justice, for the basic functioning and provision of needs in vulnerable communities, including ecological communities … [for] inclusion, transparency, compensation, and sustainability’ (Schlosberg and Collins 2015).

Applying a climate justice lens therefore requires us to look at the myriad impacts that extractive economic models have on the climate, the environment, and communities’ rights, safety, and wellbeing.

While much of the critique of extractive development has been (appropriately) focused on the extraction of fossil fuels, it is essential to also consider agriculture. In its current extractivist and industrial form, agriculture accounts for an estimated 22 per cent to 23 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC 2023, IPCC 2019). Industrial agriculture is also a significant contributor to the interrelated ecological crises of soil depletion, loss of biodiversity, loss of pollination, and destruction of the global water supply (Shiva 2016). Furthermore, as demonstrated in the case studies explored in this chapter, extractivist agriculture has been rooted in cycles of land grabbing and violence against local communities.

As Oxfam (2016) explains, ‘large-scale monoculture investments seek fertile land with good transport connections. In many places, this means displacing peasant, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, depriving them of their traditional livelihoods.’

Introduction

For at least two centuries, major development has integrated the island of Borneo into the international market upon which a contested socio-ecological process set forth. Evidence reveals that the increasingly global market, operating through colonial contexts, infiltrated Borneo's economy by exploiting forest products, mineral resources, and essential commodities (Phillips 2016). At issue is the suppression of ‘native’ life by controlling the population, the imposition of economic monopoly, and the exclusion of these resources. This brutal marginalization is still ongoing and marks a colonial legacy, suppressing the rights of indigenous communities.

For example, the current extractivist and modern plantation models have been shown to be racially discriminatory, as evidenced by colonial agrarian policies that have disregarded the rights of indigenous peoples and sought to assert European control over their traditional territories (McCarthy and Camb 2009). The ideas presented in this chapter are informed by my research on indigenous climate justice adaptation in Borneo. As marginalization intersects with other environmental crises occurring at the local level, this chapter focuses on how the spiritual and disenchanted perspectives of the Dayak people remain relevant to ongoing crises and injustices within the context of climate change and the global political–economic system. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has indicated that indigenous communities exhibit a minimal level of responsibility for climate change, while simultaneously experiencing the most severe consequences of its associated hazards (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs n.d.).

Introduction

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed in 1992, brings together countries in a worldwide commitment to contain global warming. With the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, this commitment is renewed and takes on an emergency character, challenging the legal field to think of strategies that establish, in the connection of national and international spaces, the duty to act to guarantee the continuity of all forms of life on the planet. The transformations required on an emergency basis to contain the advance of global warming are structural and lead to the need to rethink the entire production process. The context used in this chapter portrays Brazilian rural development in the face of the climate emergency.

In agricultural production, there is a clear contradiction between the emergence of climate change and the continued exploitation of export-oriented monocultures, known as agribusiness. The history of the word ‘agribusiness’ began in the 1940s at the Harvard Business School, with Donald K. Davis and the intention of creating a disciplinary area of studies on agriculture and business, based on liberalism and aimed at reducing the role of the state in regulation and opening up to private initiative (Pompeia 2021, 43–46). The expression appeared in the Brazilian public arena between the 1950s and 1960s (Pompeia 2021, 87). This period was marked by the debate between conservative and progressive forces about development and was interrupted by the military coup of 1964 (Pompeia 2021, 90).