Luke Kelly

Christianity and Humanitarianism in the Doukhobor Campaign, 1895–1902

Abstract This article examines the campaign undertaken by British Quakers in the 1890s to defend the Doukhobor sect of Russian Christians. The notion of humanitarian sympathy is too often applied as if it were a constant. Quakers are seen by many as exemplars of humanitarian action. By contrast this article argues that the concern that led to defend the Doukhobors came from very specific images of Christian suffering, and that the campaign to defend the sect was shaped by religious, not humanitarian, aims and methods and the particular history and repertoire of Quaker campaigning. It contributes to the history of humanitarianism by showing how humanitarian campaigning derives from the social and cultural history of various actors, and how humanitarian activity is coloured, at all levels, by its social and ideological positioning.

Humanitarian Sympathy and National Liberation

This chapter focuses on politically driven suffering. In 1890s, a pressure group, the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), was formed in order to publicise tsarist atrocities and support the Russian opposition in Britain. They published a monthly journal, Free Russia, arranged protests and lantern shows, and defended exiles in British courts. This chapter analyses the reasons for the framing of this political issue as a humanitarian one, the techniques used to present it as such in the media, and its effect in political culture. It argues that, as with religious humanitarianism, the sympathy shown to Russian political exiles was built on social and historical identification.

British Humanitarian Activity and Russia, c. 1890–1923

The introductory chapter locates the book within the historiography on humanitarianism. It outlines the main arguments, and the methods and sources used.

Speaking Up for Religious Freedom in Russia: Jewish and Christian Humanitarianism

Religion featured prominently in analyses of civilisation and social change. Religion was also the driver of a long-standing form of transnational solidarity, as Protestants, Jews, and Catholics made efforts to defend their co-religionists in foreign lands.This chapter analyses attempts to defend religious groups in Russia, in order to shed light on the drivers of humanitarian action. Focus is put the Doukhobor campaign of 1895–1902 and reporting of Russia’s dissenters, alongside efforts to help Russia’s oppressed Jewry. The chapter shows the importance of religious genealogies of humanitarianism. It is argued that religious tolerance and belief was a central way of understanding Russia and its flaws, and that humanitarian work became increasingly important to religious groups in the face of secularisation.

Humanitarian Traditions and Russia’s Problems

In the late 1880s, contacts between Russian exiles, liberal politicians, radicals and journalists began to form a pressure group for Russian reform. At around the same time, religious groups such as Quakers showed renewed interest in Russian dissenters, while the Russian famine attracted considerable attention from British donors. Humanitarian movements had emerged in response to the slave trade, Greek nationalism and aboriginal rights since the eighteenth century, but there was no continuous, coherent ‘humanitarian’ movement. This chapter thus looks at the factors that facilitated humanitarian interest in Russia to make broader conclusions about the role of humanitarianism, the connections between local interests and faraway causes, and the longevity of these movements.

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism, anarchism, and the Canadian state

ABSTRACT For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.

Rethinking Child Welfare and Emigration Institutions, 1870-1914

Abstract This article challenges the entrenched image of child emigration as a failure in child welfare. By moving the analytical focus away from large, and at times corrupt, institutions, our analysis focuses on the emigration and rescue work undertaken by charities in Liverpool and Manchester. We argue that the image of the uncaring and emotionally distant institution does not reflect the ideology and practice of these societies. It shows we need to focus on the different institutional, religious and regional approaches to child emigration in order to understand fully ideas about institutional childhood and contemporary conceptions of child welfare.

British humanitarianism and the Russian famine, 1891–2

In 1891, southern Russia experienced a famine which affected 30–40 million people in an area the size of France, killing 650,000 in the highest estimates. The response of the Russian government was widely criticized by both opponents within Russia and observers abroad. This article analyses the response of the British liberal press and the Quaker relief fund, considering how the famine and its causes were presented with respect to the tsarist governments culpability and ideas of Russian backwardness. It goes on to show how the framing of Quaker relief work highlighted these ideas of Russian underdevelopment and mismanagement, and advanced a liberal internationalist position within Britain. It is argued that we cannot explain the appeal of humanitarianism purely by its aesthetics of suffering and sympathy, but must also look to a wider range of social and political values held by its protagonists.

Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present

Didier Fassin, translated by Rachel Gomme, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011, 336 pp., £18.95, ISBN 9780520271173 Humanitarianism occupies an uncertain place between ethics, politics a...