Beyond and against capitalism: abolitionism and the moral dimension of humanitarian practice

How do we understand the origins of modern humanitarianism and what can these origins tell us about the study of humanitarianism in general? Here I revisit a critical juncture of the formation of modern humanitarianism, the late 18th-century movement to abolish the British slave trade, through the lens of a prevailing paradigm that has explained it as deriving from the logic of capitalist development. A closer look at this early phase of abolitionism within its historical context reveals the implausibility of the economy as the most salient explanatory factor for the origin and success of the abolitionist project. Instead, this project emerged at the interstices of a complex causal entanglement between the areas of economic and moral action. I conclude by drawing out the larger implications of this historical complexity for the study of humanitarianism at large. The complex causal dynamics that produced early abolitionism urges us to be more attentive to the manifold forms of humanitarian practice and to situate them in a proper causal context instead of assuming that humanitarianism is an epiphenomenal manifestation of allegedly deeper structural forces, such as the economy. Reversing this assumption and directing attention to the casual influence of humanitarianism on other areas of social life opens up a promising field of scholarly inquiry

The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770-1840

This article examines the formative influence of the organizational field of religion on emerging modern forms of popular political mobilization in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century when a transition towards enduring campaigns of extended geographical scale occurred. The temporal ordering of mobilization activities reveals the strong presence of religious constituencies and religious organizational models in the mobilizatory sequences that first instituted a mass-produced popular politics. Two related yet analytically distinct generative effects of the religious field can be discerned. First, in both cases the transition toward modern forms of popular mobilization was driven by the religious institutionalization of organizational forms of centralized voluntarism that facilitated extensive collective action. Second, the adoption of different varieties of the same organizational forms led to important divergences. The spread in the United States of societies for moral reformation—in contrast to their non-survival in Britain—steered popular politics there towards a more moralistic framing of public issues. These findings indicate the importance of the organizational field of religion for the configuration of modern forms of popular collective action and confirm the analytical importance of religion’s organizational aspects for the study of collective action

Activist Religion, Empire, and the Emergence of Modern Long-Distance Advocacy Networks

Considering long-distance advocacy as a distinctive institution of European modernity, the article examines the genesis and history of networks engaged in political action on behalf of distant others. Ever since the beginnings of European expansion overseas in the sixteenth century, such networks have originated from a persistent pattern of radicalization of religious actors against rival networks within the context of empire. In the late eighteenth century, the very same processes led to the establishment of modern forms of long-distance advocacy, with the international movement against colonial slavery and the slave trade. Throughout, long-distance advocacy was initiated and carried out by distinctively reformist and activist religious organizations within Catholicism and Protestantism. These findings highlight the importance of religious organizations in the imperial context for the configuration of modern forms of political activism

Ideias versus redes sociais: ativismo à distância na Inglaterra do século XVIII

Quais são as fontes históricas das mobilizações em torno de questões distantes - uma característica típica da modernidade? Este artigo examina a dinâmica social que produziu os primeiros casos de campanhas sustentadas em torno de questões distantes na Grã-Bretanha do século XVIII. O surgimento dessas campanhas é muitas vezes entendido como determinado pela ascensão nesse período de novas ideologias de compaixão humanitária. Para testar o papel dessas ideologias, comparo dois conjuntos de campanhas: o impeachment de Warrant Hastings por Edmund Burke e a série de mobilizações religiosas iniciada com o movimento contra o tráfico de escravos colonial. Embora ambos os conjuntos fossem impulsionados por idiomas culturais de preocupação humanitária semelhantes, a iniciativa de Burke falhou em produzir engajamento popular e as campanhas religiosas foram capazes de mobilizar amplas audiências de apoiadores. Essa diferença surpreendente destaca a importância das redes associativas religiosas para o surgimento dos primeiros casos modernos de mobilização em torno de questões distantes.What are the historical sources for mobilizations around distant issues - one of the characteristic features of modernity? This article examines the social dynamics that led to the first sustained campaigns on distant issues in late eighteenth-century Britain. Their emergence is often understood to have been determined by the rise of new ideologies of humanitarian compassion during the period. To test the role of these ideologies, I compare two sets of campaigns: Edmund Burke's impeachment of Warrant Hastings and the series of religious mobilizations initiated with the movement against the colonial slave trade. While both campaigns were driven by similar cultural idioms of humanitarian concern, Burke's initiative failed to produce popular engagement, while the religious campaigns were able to mobilize wide groups of public supporters. This striking difference highlights the importance of religious associational networks for the emergence of the first modern instances of mobilization on distant issues

Ideias versus redes sociais: ativismo à distância na Inglaterra do século XVIII Ideas versus social networks: long-distance activism in eighteenth-century England

Quais são as fontes históricas das mobilizações em torno de questões distantes - uma característica típica da modernidade? Este artigo examina a dinâmica social que produziu os primeiros casos de campanhas sustentadas em torno de questões distantes na Grã-Bretanha do século XVIII. O surgimento dessas campanhas é muitas vezes entendido como determinado pela ascensão nesse período de novas ideologias de compaixão humanitária. Para testar o papel dessas ideologias, comparo dois conjuntos de campanhas: o impeachment de Warrant Hastings por Edmund Burke e a série de mobilizações religiosas iniciada com o movimento contra o tráfico de escravos colonial. Embora ambos os conjuntos fossem impulsionados por idiomas culturais de preocupação humanitária semelhantes, a iniciativa de Burke falhou em produzir engajamento popular e as campanhas religiosas foram capazes de mobilizar amplas audiências de apoiadores. Essa diferença surpreendente destaca a importância das redes associativas religiosas para o surgimento dos primeiros casos modernos de mobilização em torno de questões distantes.<br>What are the historical sources for mobilizations around distant issues - one of the characteristic features of modernity? This article examines the social dynamics that led to the first sustained campaigns on distant issues in late eighteenth-century Britain. Their emergence is often understood to have been determined by the rise of new ideologies of humanitarian compassion during the period. To test the role of these ideologies, I compare two sets of campaigns: Edmund Burke's impeachment of Warrant Hastings and the series of religious mobilizations initiated with the movement against the colonial slave trade. While both campaigns were driven by similar cultural idioms of humanitarian concern, Burke's initiative failed to produce popular engagement, while the religious campaigns were able to mobilize wide groups of public supporters. This striking difference highlights the importance of religious associational networks for the emergence of the first modern instances of mobilization on distant issues