Overview

War, Law and Humanity tells the story of the transatlantic campaign to either mitigate the destructive forces of the battlefield, or prevent wars from being waged altogether, in the decades prior to the disastrous summer of 1914. Starting with the Crimean War of the 1850s, James Crossland traces this campaign to control warfare from the scandalous barracks of Scutari to the shambolic hospitals of the American Civil War, from the bloody sieges of Paris and Erzurum to the combative conference halls of Geneva and The Hague, uncovering the intertwined histories of a generation of humanitarians, surgeons, pacifists and utopians who were shocked into action by the barbarism and depravities of war. By examining the fascinating personal accounts of these figures, Crossland illuminates the complex motivations and influential actions of those committed to the campaign to control war, demonstrating how their labours built the foundation for the ideas – enshrined in our own times as international norms – that soldiers need caring for, weapons need restricting and wars need rules.

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9781350145757

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Reviews

Readers will find no uncritical homage to the peacemakers in this resolutely objective account of political changes during a turbulent half-century of conflict and suffering ... James Crossland's patient examination of the decades before World War I is an essential guide to understanding how these fundamental changes in the law of warfare after World War II came to be. * Michigan War Studies Review * A fascinating work for those interested in the nineteenth century, in the development of political thought, in international relations, military history, and a number of other sub-disciplines ... An important introduction to the subject. * European History Quarterly * Crossland's searching autopsy of humanitarian action, inspiration, and deed, persuasively demonstrates that there was no monolithic humanitarian sensibility in the long nineteenth century-instead the variegated impulses that inspired ostensibly and implicitly humanitarian interventions of all types were motivated by a wide and divergent realm of imperatives. A fascinating read. * Branden Little, Associate Professor of History, Weber State University, USA * Since Geoffrey Best's Humanity in Warfare (1980), I have never read such a fine work on the attempts to regulate or outcast war. Starting hopefully in the midst of the 19th century and ending horribly in August 1914, War, Law and Humanity tells the tale of military (medical) men, legal and medical humanitarians as well as outright pacifists, debating ideals and realism, quarrelling between each other and among themselves, while several wars set the scene. It is as fascinating as it is important. * Leo van Bergen, Lecturer in Military-medical History, Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, The Netherlands *

Author Information

James Crossland is Senior Lecturer in International History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He is the author of Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939-1945 (2014), the first study of Britain’s humanitarian policy during the Second World War. He has published widely on the history of wartime humanitarianism, international law and the Red Cross movement.

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