عنوان

Calculating compassion :

Number

TLets516294

Title Proper

Calculating compassion :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Gill, R.

Title Proper by Another Author

the 'New Humanitarian' ethos in England 1870-1918

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

The University of Manchester

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2005

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

The University of Manchester

Text preceding or following the note

2005

Text of Note

This thesis investigates the emergence of the field of humanitarian intervention in war.From negative connotations of 'excessive sentimentalism' in the late eighteenth / earlynineteenth centuries, this thesis charts the rise of more positive notions of rational andhumane gift giving in the 1870-1918 period. To investigate this shift, it focuses on thestrategies of representation relief workers used to signify their benevolent, but strictlycalculated, intentions.Inspired by Bourdieu's 'correspondence analysis', it also maps the affiliations betweenrival relief organisations and wider journalistic, academic and political networks. Inparticular, it traces the transformation of initially ad hoc and independent relief practicesinto increasingly institutionalised, quasi-official humanitarian agencies. These areassessed in correspondence with the rise of an initially dissenting, but latterly moremainstream, politics of sentiment. In doing so, it considers the multi-faceted relationshipbetween humanitarianism and the state in this period and the changing concept of 'moral'citizenship in the context of an expanding electorate and unprecedented transformations inthe nature of warfare. This concept of citizenship apparently offered a form of belongingto those on the margins of political participation free from clientage; however, theemerging definition of 'moral' citizenship was far from inclusive. The boundaries to thispolitics of sentiment form a key theme of this thesis.This thesis is organised into two parts. The first traces the development of the field ofhumanitarian intervention in foreign wars of the late nineteenth century, and the alternativerelief practices adopted by Quaker, liberal interventionist and quasi-military agencies. Thefollowing part examines how Britain's experience of modem war in the early twentiethcentury brought to the fore inherent dilemmas within these alternative philosophies ofhumanitarian intervention. It shows how, during times when the links between the stateand ostensibly impartial relief agencies assumed an official status, illusionary strategieswere deployed to obscure this relationship. These included a stress on the 'spontaneity' ofhumanitarian outcry, the feminisation of fund raising images and the maintenance of a'screen' of voluntarism.In order to counter the emphasis on institutional history in the historiography ofhumanitarianism, this thesis considers the archives of relief organisations in conjunctionwith the personal accounts and novels of relief workers and sources covering their widerjournalistic, political and academic networks

Gill, R.

The University of Manchester

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y