Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (review)

Readers of this journal are undoubtedly aware of the considerable attention given to international human rights by the academy in recent years. Scholarship on the contemporary and historical dimensions of human rights continues to proliferate, as have university human rights centers and programs of studies. These are welcome developments, certainly, not only for the prevalence of human rights discourses and practices in the current international milieu, but for the appealing avenues that human rights offers for exploring the past. For all of this academic interest in human rights, however, it is remarkable how little attention, by comparison, has been paid to a “cousin” of human rights. Humanitarianism has played arguably a similarly important role in contemporary global society as human rights, and perhaps an even richer part in the longer history of the modern world.

Michael Barnett’s Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism represents a major attempt at correcting this imbalance, and largely succeeds. A book of ambitious scope, sophisticated analysis, extensive research, and elegant presentation, it is simultaneously a sweeping account of the evolution of Western-based humanitarian aid initiatives over the past two centuries and a clarion call for others to continue the project that this study begins. A political scientist, Barnett’s work will appeal to a wide audience of social scientists in his and related fields, to those in my discipline of history, to humanitarian aid practitioners, and to policymakers. Its clear prose, clean structure, and broad sweep will help it find a way onto the syllabi of important courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Those familiar with the 2008 volume that Barnett co-edited with Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question: Power, Ethics, Politics, will find the third and final section of Empire of Humanity to be a welcome extension of that earlier endeavor’s examination of contemporary humanitarianism. But the sustained chronological scope of Empire of Humanity takes this newer title considerably beyond its predecessor. The two-century history of humanitarianism explored in the book’s first two sections offers much more than the type of historical background to recent phenomena sometimes found in social science monographs that give a mere nod to the past. In the best traditions of the Political Development schools of political science, Barnett approaches the past on its own terms rather than simply mining it for echoes of the present. The result is something more than, as Barnett too modestly claims, “one of the first accounts of modern humanitarianism.”¹ It is the first broadly researched and historically nuanced study of humanitarianism that connects its modern, Western origins in the age of trans-Atlantic abolitionism with the post-Cold War era, and much in between. “[R]eading humanitarianism from its origins,” Barnett compellingly asserts, “gives a very different perspective on its present, and reading its present gives a very different perspective on its past.”²

Marshalling evidence from existing literature, interviews with contemporary humanitarian aid personnel, organizational archives, and published primary sources, Barnett offers a framework—not a theory, he insists—for understanding the past and present dimensions of humanitarianism that is at once synchronic and diachronic. As for the former, Barnett argues that the history of humanitarianism must be understood as having operated over time in an ever-changing global environment shaped by geopolitics (“destruction”), capitalism (“production”), and ethics (“compassion”). He contemplates multiple sets of ever-present tensions that have consistently produced the defining “zigs and zags” of humanitarianism over the past two centuries. These include claims that: humanitarianism simultaneously aspires to improve society while also being a product of that society’s prejudices; different versions of humanitarianism compete with one another—most prominently, emergency-based versus longer term, root-cause, “alchemical” approaches; humanitarian claims to universally applicable ethics are necessarily circumscribed by the imaginative limitations of particular times, places, and perspectives; humanitarianism requires the paradox of “emancipation and domination” (or “paternalism”); and humanitarian acts tend to be simultaneously self-less and self-serving, spuriously claiming a sacrosanct...