Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

Offers a 19th century history and a British imperial history to the history of human rights, which has been dismissed in the historiography.
Examines the interplay between law, resources, and moral politics.
Tracks the changing meaning of "refugee" over time and who was including/excluded in this category.
First book to connect refuge for persecuted foreigners and the abolition movement and treatment of fugitive slaves.

Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

Description

On the eve of the American Revolution, the refugee was, according to British tradition, a Protestant who sought shelter from continental persecution. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, British refuge would be celebrated internationally as being open to all persecuted foreigners. Britain had become a haven for fugitives as diverse as Karl Marx and Louis Napoleon, Simón Bolívar and Frederick Douglass. How and why did the refugee category expand? How, in a period when no law forbade foreigners entry to Britain, did the refugee emerge as a category for humanitarian and political action? Why did the plight of these particular foreigners become such a characteristically British concern?

Current understandings about the origins of refuge have focused on the period after 1914. Britannia's Embrace offers the first historical analysis of the origins of this modern humanitarian norm in the long nineteenth century. At a time when Britons were reshaping their own political culture, this charitable endeavor became constitutive of what it meant to be liberal on the global stage. Like British anti-slavery, its sister movement, campaigning on behalf of foreign refugees seemed to give purpose to the growing empire and the resources of empire gave it greater strength. By the dawn of the twentieth century, British efforts on behalf of persecuted foreigners declined precipitously, but its legacies in law and in modern humanitarian politics would be long-lasting.

In telling this story, Britannia's Embrace puts refugee relief front and center in histories of human rights and international law and of studies of Britain in the world. In so doing, it describes the dynamic relationship between law, resources, and moral storytelling that remains critical to humanitarianism today.

Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Britannia's Embrace

Part I: The Rise of Liberal Refuge
Chapter One: Catholic Émigrés and the Protestant Nation
Chapter Two: The Consolation of Refuge
Chapter Three: Telling Stories, Taking Action
Chapter Four: Taking Refuge in Empire
Chapter Five: Colonial Refuge in the Metropolitan Eye

Part II: A National Tradition or a Universal Right? Refuge and the Law
Chapter Six: Heroes, Villains, and the Parameters of Political Asylum
Chapter Seven: Probing the Limits of Imperial Humanitarianism
Chapter Eight: Hardening the Humanitarian Heart

Conclusion: Moral Politics and the Quest for a Language of Right
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

Author Information

Caroline Shaw is Assistant Professor of History at Bates College.

Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

Reviews and Awards

"[F]ascinating...Britannia's Embrace is a very good book."--Kevin O'Sullivan, Journal of Modern History

"A timely and important book....Shaw offers a significant contribution to the literature on refugees, humanitarianism, liberalism, and empire. In the wake of Brexit and the closing of borders by emerging far-right and illiberal movements across the western world, it is important not to lose sight of an earlier era in which liberal refugee policies were central to Britain's mission and interests as a great power. Britannia's Embrace deserves a wide readership."--Aidan Forth, Victorian Studies

"Caroline Shaw has written a timely and important book....Shaw offers a significant contribution to the literature on refugees, humanitarianism, liberalism, and empire....Britannia's Embrace deserves a wide readership."--Aidan Forth, Victorian Studies

"Caroline Shaw has produced an excellent, well-written history of nineteenth-century British refugee humanitarianism. Effectively and succinctly argued, its chief strength lies in the clarity with which it demonstrates the tensions between liberal British ideals and the complex realities of humanitarian crisis. Britannia's Embrace is both highly relevant to the issues of today's refugee crisis and a welcome contribution to the history of empire and humanitarianism."--Kevin Luginbill, H-Net

"A significant contribution to scholarship on the origins of humanitarianism and its more muscular twin, human rights, in Britain's long nineteenth century...Understanding the origins of refuge as a humanitarian concern is an important project that has implications well beyond the field of British studies."--American Historical Review

"Some excellent use of archival sources in the United Kingdom and elsewhere."--Jus Gentium, Journal of International Legal History

"An intelligent and original project, Britannia's Embrace will make a significant contribution to nineteenth century British history and the field of refugee studies. Questions relating to asylum and refugees have been neglected for nineteenth century British and imperial history in both the social, intellectual and political spheres and this is a most welcome addition to the literature."--Tony Kushner, University of Southampton

"Caroline Shaw demonstrates with great clarity how refugee relief in Great Britain developed from a confessional and sectarian cause in the early modern era into a liberal tenet of British governance and national identity in the modern era of empire. Situating refuge in the context of humanitarianism, Shaw draws innovative connections between distant subjects of suffering and relief, from European political refugees to slaves. This is a history with global reach and contemporary significance, as it further illuminates an important ideological source of the treaties, laws, and policies on refugees under international government."--Kevin Grant, Hamilton College

"It is not often that a book about 19th-century history is relevant to present-day events, but Shaw manages this feat...Shaw provides a good summary of the changing status of refugees in Britain during the 19th century and helps explain the development of relief policy in modern times."--CHOICE

Britannia's Embrace

Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief

Caroline Shaw

From Our Blog

The fate of foreign refugees, past and present

In 1812 Benjamin West completed his portrait of John Eardley Wilmot. The portrait was two paintings in one: it depicted its subject, Wilmot, lawyer and former Chief Justice of Common Pleas, at the foreground; in the background was a painting within a painting, a scene of American loyalists, including Native Americans, African slaves, women, and children.

Posted on December 18, 2015

Read the blog post