Humanitarian imperialists: empire, its abuses and its critics
In the post-colonial era, it has become axiomatic that colonialism was, of itself, incompatible with the concept of human rights. Yet the contradiction was far from self-evident to the constellation of proto-human rights organisations that coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), founded in 1837 and led by the great abolitionist Thomas Buxton, was the archetype of this synthesis between empire and the ideals of humanity. The APS sought to protect, in its own way, the rights of the indigenous against flawed imperial administration, uncontrolled settler expansion, and perceived endogenous abuses within African, Pacific and Australian customs.6 While restraining some of the graver and more flagrant crimes of imperialism, it ended up sanctioning at least as much imperial rule as it opposed. It was the moral ombudsman of empire, with all the limits that role implied. The Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1823 and a close peer of the APS, was similar in its approach. Even the handful of recognisably modern human rights organisations then in existence, principally the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (1898), typically ranged from mild ambivalence to abiding enthusiasm in their embrace of imperial rule. As late as 1930, the French Ligue was firmly embedded in the logic of imperialism; as one of its leaders asserted, the task was to tutor colonial peoples to a stage of civilisation sufficient for them to exercise their human rights. Higher education for indigenous residents in Indochina was denounced as too radical. A commitment to self-determination and independence for Asian and African peoples was so distant as to be fantastically theoretical.7In essence, the abuses of colonial governance were the dominant note of early activism, and overt challenges to the legitimacy of empire as a project were quite rare.
This was evident even among the most progressive, such as Mary Kingsley, a champion of the rights of Africans and trenchant critic of cultural imperialism, who nonetheless still operated within the prism of reforming the empire, and not dissolving it. Kingsley, whose principal years of activity were between 1893 and 1899, was perhaps the most passionate and knowledgeable European advocate of African peoples. Nonetheless she described herself as ‘a hardened, unreformed, imperial expansionist’, and perceived no contradiction in these two positions.8 Such liberal critics sought to hold empire to its highest proclaimed ideals, of spreading civilisation and progress. Empire would be the means, not the enemy, of enlarging the sphere of human welfare.9 Clearly distinct from modern, post-war human rights visions, this earlier tradition of imperial humanitarianism and paternalist welfarism did prefigure important critiques of empire and its human rights violations. Their limits were severe, but they opened up at least a small space for debating the rights of colonial peoples, and the purpose of empire.10The most striking of these humanitarian campaigns was that against the Congo Free State, where imperial humanitarianism won significant reform of the atrocious governance of King Leopold’s Congolese territory. Led by Edmund Dene Morel and Roger Casement, the campaign against Leopold’s grotesquely exploitative rule was an exemplar of many of the techniques typically associated with international human rights organisations, although conducted within the framework of empire. Casement and Morel, through their Congolese Reform Association, presented forceful advocacy for indigenous Congolese, urging respect for rights to land, labour and trade, though not self-government. Casement’s 1904 investigation of the abuses in Congo displays many of the hallmarks of a modern human rights report, and Morel actually used the term ‘human rights’ in his denunciation of the Congo Free State, a comparative rarity for the period.11 In their meticulously documented indictments of Leopold’s administration, the humanitarian reformers also delineated the boundaries of legitimate imperial government: how empires should and should not conduct themselves in relation to their subject populations.
In formal terms at least, the campaign was a success, with Leopold’s rule terminated, and replaced by that of the Belgian state in 1908.As pioneering as the Congo reform movement was, it does not provide an uncomplicated example of human rights against empire.12 The Congo Free State’s human rights abuses were perceived as a case of pathological imperialism—and the very extremity and brutality of the atrocities appeared to set it apart as the exception. It was a demonstration of empire gone wrong, rather than evidence of any systemic flaw. Congo represented the abuses of colonialism, not colonialism as an abuse. Leopold’s failure to adhere to the requirements of a proper imperial custodian necessitated reform, but certainly not decolonisation. This was the hallmark of all the humanitarian movements, including the APS, the Anti-Slavery Society and the Congo Reform Association.13 They supported causes with some overlap with modern notions of human rights, particularly animated by instances of manifest barbarism, land rights and forced labour. Yet they were much less reliable in their enthusiasm for racial equality and political rights, and not at all engaged with the prospect of national self-determination and independent sovereignty. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century humanitarians were, arguably, distant and problematic progenitors to strands of the post-Second World War human rights movement, but no anti-colonialists.