Deep Field by Tom Bamforth

Author:Tom Bamforth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2014-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

JOSIAH WEDGEWOOD’S 1787 medallion advocating the abolition of the slave trade is emblazoned with the famous line: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ It features an African man in chains, down on one knee, raising his hands together in supplication. This urgent appeal to humanitarian universality, ‘man and brother’, is made by the benighted poor, who in Wedgewood’s view could be liberated from the economic chains of slavery and set free by religious conversion. It illustrates a significant departure from the amoral commercial mentality that dominated the Western empires until the end of the eighteenth century and lingered well into the nineteenth.

The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was one of the great humanitarian achievements of the nineteenth century, yet it also granted ethical legitimacy to Western imperial expansion. Echoing themes in aid and development practice today, early humane societies sought to liberate Africans from oppression while staking the claim of imperial powers to govern the continent as they liberated souls.

In a contradiction that has dogged humanitarian work from the outset, the poor and those affected by conflict and disasters are often seen by aid agencies and charitable institutions as being both in need of a saviour and, to some degree, there for the taking. Disasters, in this view, can be seen as opportunities: to change behaviour, to reimagine a long-term future amid the destruction of the old, and to gain access and influence. For secular institutions, there is often an interventionist rhetoric of ‘change, development and empowerment’; for religious ones there is the desire, ultimately, to convert the people they help by promoting something called ‘human transformation’—in the language of World Vision, by ‘bearing witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God’.

Both these views, as well as the starker humanitarian commitment of the Red Cross to uphold the laws of war, owe their origins to the universalised conceptions of aid and charity that arose during the nineteenth century. While assistance and charity were by no means new—neighbourhood associations, trade and manufacturing guilds, and associations of almsgivers had existed in varying forms for hundreds of years—the great revolutions of the eighteenth century had begun to suggest the language, if not the content, of a universal political and ethical ambition. The American Declaration of Independence invoked the idea of ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which it found ‘self-evident’; this was echoed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in which rights were deemed ‘natural, unalienable and sacred’ and, more specifically, amounted to ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’. While these declarations radically paved the way for more rational and secular state structures, they were also exactly what they appeared—rights for ‘man and the citizen’, in which there was no apparent contradiction between espousing the pursuit of happiness and owing slaves or having an inalienable right to freedom from oppression while maintaining slave-run sugar plantation colonies such as Haiti; meanwhile, rights for women could wait another 150 years.

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