Overview

A new look at the origins of humanitarian intervention We are encouraged to empathize with the suffering of distant strangers every day, from ads for UNICEF to the outcry over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But where did this type of politics come from? Historian and practicing barrister Catherine Arnold locates the religious origins of humanitarian politics in early eighteenth-century Britain and Europe. In the late seventeenth century, British politicians argued for ""confessional intervention""—in other words, for interventions to protect Britain's fellow Protestants in continental Europe. By the 1740s, however, a cadre of high-ranking British officials was advocating instead for a new form of ""humanitarian intervention,"" using natural law–inflected language to justify its claims. Between 1690 and 1745, British officials intervened to protect not only Protestants in France, northwestern Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire, but also Jewish fugitives from Portugal, Catholic dissidents in France, and Jewish refugees in Bohemia. Arnold shows that this new type of intervention was intended to stop states from torturing, imprisoning, or expelling their subjects and was justified with humanitarian arguments. British officials contended that state persecution—that is, using state authority to punish a subject only because of her religious beliefs—violated natural law. They asserted that Britain had a duty to prevent states from violating natural law and an ethical obligation to aid sufferers of all religious faiths out of common humanity.

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9780300251432

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Reviews

“This hugely compelling book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of humanitarianism and philanthropy, international law, and refugee studies. Rather than arguing that humanitarian intervention was a nineteenth- or twentieth-century innovation, Arnold shows that its roots go back to the early eighteenth century.”—Renaud Morieux, author of The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century “Affairs of Humanity is impressively well researched and well argued. It charts the changing nature of British diplomatic interventions on behalf of oppressed groups in other European states and uncovers a shift from diplomatic efforts to aid beleaguered fellow Protestants to attempts of a more broadly humanitarian kind, designed to protect Jansenist Catholics in France and Jews in the territories of the Habsburgs. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of humanitarianism.”—Stephen Conway, University College London “A precise, nuanced, original, and very convincing account of the origins of humanitarian diplomacy.”—Benjamin J. Kaplan, author of Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment “Written in lucid style and steeped in rigorous scholarship, Arnold makes a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of British state intervention on behalf of Jews, Jansenists and other Protestant Europeans. An essential book for anyone seeking to uncover the roots of humanitarian politics.”—Charles-Edouard Levillain, Université Paris Cité “This important new book skillfully weaves party politics, religion and international public opinion together with early enlightenment philosophy, shedding new light both on the origins of humanitarian diplomacy and on the idea of human rights itself.”—Annabel Brett, University of Cambridge

Author Information

Catherine Arnold received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and is now a barrister at Matrix Chambers in London. She lives in London, UK.

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