Taking liberties abroad
This dissertation examines American grassroots participation in transnational humanitarian advocacy networks from the Greek Revolution of the 1820s to the First World War. By tracing the development of varied mobilizations in defense of "humanity"--from efforts to protect Ottoman Christians and Eastern European Jews, to campaigns against African slavery, to support for Russian political dissidents--it offers an historical framework for understanding the evolution of international humanitarianism and human rights politics during the long nineteenth century. Rather than cast "human rights" as a straightforwardly progressive, countervailing pressure on the practices of imperialism, however, and rather than focus simply on the statesmen and liberal intellectuals who animate most studies of this kind, the dissertation draws on the personal and organizational papers of a wide variety of reformers in order to reveal the contentious origins of pressure groups dedicated to relieving distant suffering. Abolitionists and their descendants, missionaries, émigré nationalists, African American journalists, and Jewish communal leaders all vied to define the boundaries of intervention, the nature of rights, and the meanings of humanity itself. The dissertation also places American humanitarian advocacy in a global context. Imperial rivalries, romantic nationalism, and "religious internationalism" (including missionary movements and Jewish philanthropic networks) all helped determine which regions and populations would garner attention from sympathetic observers. The treaties governing western European oversight of the Ottoman Empire and the colonization of Africa also provided an early international legal framework for those seeking to justify "humanitarian intervention" in other nations' domestic affairs. Finally, the dissertation shows how international humanitarian advocacy contributed to the rise of U.S. power in the world. Although some questioned the right of the U.S. government to weigh in on treaties it had not signed, the vaunted traditions of religious freedom, liberal immigration, and diplomatic non-intervention led many to attribute unique moral authority to humanitarian protests emanating from the United States. American state power was never without its critics, however. African American reformers, in particular, used the discourse of "humanity" to draw parallels between varied crises abroad and persistent inhumanities practiced within the borders of the United States.
