Humanitarian Imperialism: The politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880–1940 by Amalia Ribi Forclaz (review)

The most remarkable feature of Amalia Ribi Forclaz’s Humanitarian Imperialism is that on a multiplicity of levels it has departed from mainstream academic interrogations of the history of humanitarian movements. This scholarly feat is made possible largely through the examination of humanitarianism against the backdrop of imperialism. The author has succeeded in merging two themes that are usually antithetical and she has done so by being neither romantic nor cynical. It should be noted that there is a new and growing body of work integrating humanitarianism alongside imperialism to which Forclaz’ work belongs. Chief among these is Jean Bricmont’s 2007 publications on the themes. Bricmont, however, lacks the control of perspective that is the hallmark of Forclaz’s study. He rejects and denounces outright the Cold War politics of entities like the Kremlin and Beijing claiming that it was an attempt to exert brutal sway over the entire world.¹ Forclaz’s study is not tainted by this caustic, judgmental tone even in her examination of the unpopular Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 (139). The balanced and almost neutral perspective through which she analyses her subject is justified in her comment that both humanitarianism and imperialism wore different faces at different times and, therefore, cannot be totally glorified or totally condemned (8–9).

Forclaz’ primary objective in using the imperialistic canvas is not to dismiss European humanitarianism as hypocritical pontification but to internationalize a topic which other historians have tended to limit to the national level. Reginald Coupland (1933) and Frank Klingberg (1968), for example, have conducted research on the British humanitarian movement while much of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845) attacked slavery in the southern USA.² Forclaz’s study is far more ambitious in the sense that it encompasses anti-slavery in Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Germany (22). Forclaz has also shifted the historiography by making Africa (50) and not the Americas the center stage of her anti-slavery target. By the manner in which and the extent to which Forclaz crossed geographical and national boundaries in her study, she has produced a world history of humanitarianism. It is ironic, nevertheless, that one of the major conclusions of the text is that the European attempt to forge international cooperation in eradicating African slavery virtually failed, as manifested particularly by Italy’s antagonistic relationship with the League of Nations and its rejection of the 1924 Temporary Slavery Commission (130).

The European approach to the study of humanitarianism that Forclaz selects enables the author to employ a comparative analytic methodology. She notes, for instance, that while British anti-slavery was largely Protestant in nature, French and the Italian anti-slavery were steeped in Roman Catholicism (15, 18). On the other hand, Forclaz concedes that all three to varying degrees were driven by selfish political, national and imperialistic objectives while simultaneously sponsoring various humanitarian initiatives in their African spheres of influence (165).

The chronological markers of Forclaz’s work is also relatively new. While most other historical studies on the subject focus on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the author sets her chronological parameters in and around World War I and World War II: 1880 to 1940. By so doing, she encounters a range of humanitarian causes beyond the slavery question such as emasculation, the trade in eunuchs and cannibalism (146). The time frame of Forclaz’s study also permits the reader to gaze into the humanitarian methods and objectives which were unique to the later period and yet, in some ways, similar to the previous century. With the new technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humanitarian propaganda tools were no longer limited to speeches, petitions and publications. They were sharpened by the lantern lectures of such British humanitarians as Lady Kathleen Simon, European and African tours, cinema, pageantry and radio programmes (78). In this regard, Forclaz traces the continuities and changes in Europe’s humanitarian movements and concludes that between...