Violence, Moral Imperialism and Colonial Borderlands, 1770s–1820s: Some contradictions of humanitarianism

Abstract

This article argues that the genealogy of a politics of non-violence might usefully consider the promotion of moral imperialism as a precursor that in turn highlights the structural difficulties of a truly non-violent humanitarianism. In the imperial case studies examined from colonial borderlands in the British empire from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, humanitarian intervention tended to be about working out how to manage violence, or the threat of violence, most appropriately. This in turn helps explain tight linkages between early nineteenth century philanthropy and colonialism, not least the transition from abolition to interventionist arguments. On colonial frontiers states were themselves violent, or at least always potentially violent. Therefore those who saw themselves as philanthropists or as humanitarian were often forced, sometimes reluctantly but more usually with conviction, into the position that empire should be made sufficiently moral to deserve a monopoly of violence. For Indigenous groups (and individuals) this often meant that they ultimately had to choose sides and thus a particular form of violence, rather than to escape from violence altogether. At the same time, international humanitarians, notably missionaries and abolitionists, often struggled with how overtly they should work within colonial structures and were often under pressure to serve as unofficial colonial bureaucracies. It is thus helpful to trouble somewhat the implicit paradigm of triangular relationships between individual agents of violence, individual victims of violence, and humanitarians who sought to protect the victims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even though there are important ways in which this was also true. Such “moral imperialism” not infrequently placed pressure on colonized men, in particular, to choose one form of violence over another, rather than to have the luxury of eschewing violence that was more readily available to the white humanitarian.