Affairs of Humanity

A new look at the origins of humanitarian intervention

We are encouraged to empathize with the suffering of distant strangers every day, from ads for UNICEF to the outcry over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But where did this type of politics come from?

Historian and practicing barrister Catherine Arnold locates the religious origins of humanitarian politics in early eighteenth-century Britain and Europe. In the late seventeenth century, British politicians argued for “confessional intervention”—in other words, for interventions to protect Britain’s fellow Protestants in continental Europe. By the 1740s, however, a cadre of high-ranking British officials was advocating instead for a new form of “humanitarian intervention,” using natural law–inflected language to justify its claims. Between 1690 and 1745, British officials intervened diplomatically to protect not only Protestants in France, northwestern Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire, but also Jewish fugitives from Portugal, Catholic dissidents in France, and Jewish refugees in Bohemia.

Arnold shows that this new type of intervention was intended to stop states from torturing, imprisoning, or expelling their subjects and was justified with humanitarian arguments. British officials contended that state persecution—that is, using state authority to punish a subject only because of her religious beliefs—violated natural law. They asserted that Britain had a duty to prevent states from violating natural law and an ethical obligation to aid sufferers of all religious faiths out of common humanity.