Humanitarian imperialism: the politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880-1940. By Amalia Ribi Forclaz

Abstract

It is very good to have a solid monographic overview of anti-slavery advocacy and politics in their later and least well-known period. Focusing on the time between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War, Amalia Ribi Forclaz's research has the truly international scope of covering several European contexts. She deftly delineates the complex landscape of interactions between several types of actors around the issue of slavery: the oldest and strongest anti-slavery ‘establishment’ in London; newer national anti-slavery organizations in Italy, Switzerland and France; national governments of European states and Ethiopia, and international bodies like the League of Nations or the Vatican. The book is organized chronologically around two main narrative arches. The focus of the first two chapters is the revival of anti-slavery activism around the turn of the century and the inclusion of slavery as a topic in the work of the newly founded League of Nations. Here, the main strength is a hitherto missing synthetic discussion of the new wave of late nineteenth-century Catholic anti-slavery in its international context. Three chapters weave together another narrative, that of the complex international politics around the issue of Ethiopian slavery. The question is first adopted and advocated by British abolitionists and then co-opted—with the willing cooperation of the Italian anti-slavery movement—by Mussolini's regime for its imperialist designs in Africa. Although Italy's allegedly humanitarian invasion provoked international opposition, a complex constellation of factors, including Italian intrigues to sway international public opinion and British anti-slavery's complicity with Mussolini, led—indirectly—to the disintegration of the anti-slavery project. Between these two narratives, somewhat uneasily sits a chapter on the limited revival of British anti-slavery around the centenary of the abolition of colonial slavery in 1933. The final pages, on the other hand, open up a larger vista, as they shed light on the eclipse of the long-term anti-slavery project with its eighteenth-century origins as, in the post-Second World War context, the ‘master frame’ of slavery is superseded by the new hegemony of the ‘human rights’ concept.