Prelude to Genocide

Abstract

The late nineteenth century saw the height of European expansion across the globe, including the ‘scramble for Africa’. International humanitarian activism and legal initiatives arose in attempts to deal with crises that followed. In 1890 the African American reformer George Washington Williams applied the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ to the tragedy in the Congo Free State under its proprietor, the Belgian monarch Leopold II (r. 1865–1909). In 1899, the International Hague Convention of the Laws and Customs of War on Land specifically prohibited the shelling of undefended towns or cities, and contracting parties pledged that ‘individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty, must be respected’. The subsequent Hague Convention of 1907 codified the laws of war and the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’. In Britain, E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, with the support of others including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, formed the Congo Reform Association (1904–13) to address the humanitarian crisis in that African country. Its establishment was followed by the 1909 merger of the Aborigines’ Protection Society with the Anti-Slavery Society.