Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century

Edmonds, Penelope

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_2

Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century

Penelope Edmonds⁵

Chapter
First Online: 29 November 2017

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2 Citations

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

Abstract

British Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, have been described as the world’s first ‘transnational human rights movement’ because of their long involvement from the late-sixteenth century in European and trans-Atlantic international mediation and their foundational role in the anti-slavery movement. Despite this prominence, critical scholarship concerning Quakers as particular networked and highly travelled ‘global activists’ and their humanitarian and antecedent ‘human rights’ advocacy in the Australian and other antipodean colonies is a neglected sphere. This chapter examines the nine-year multi-colony tour of Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker (1832–1841) in the furtherance of their particular moral empire across Australia, Mauritius, and South Africa. Broadening historical consideration of what constitutes transnational human rights activism and the INGO or international nongovernmental transnational activist, it considers the witnessing practices of Quakers as a significant precursor of modern transnational humanitarian activism, in an era when global governance was driven by empire and its close engagement with dispossessed and colonised peoples. Taking insights from sociology, the article argues that the Quakers’ relationship with the state, similar to that of contemporary INGOs, was as ‘institutional opponents,’ both fraught and symbiotic, and reveals the ambiguities of humanitarian sentiment and the troubled moral economy of compassion as entwined vectors of humanitarian governance and imperial power.

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Notes

1.
Penelope Edmonds, ‘Collecting Looerryminer’s “Testimony”: Aboriginal Women, Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands,’ Australian Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014, pp. 13–33. On the Black War, see Lyndall Ryan , Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.
2.
James Backhouse , Letter book, Friends House Library (hereafter FHL), 30 October 1832, p. 81.
3.
James Backhouse , Letter book, FHL, 30 October 1832, p. 81.
4.
James Backhouse , A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1843, pp. 99–100.
5.
Edmonds, ‘Collecting Looerryminer’s “Testimony,”’ pp. 13–33.
6.
Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Anti-slavery, 1658–1761, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
7.
Penelope Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern”: Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1830s–1840s,’ Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, Special Issue on Humanitarianism , vol. 40, no. 5, 2012, pp. 769–788.
8.
David Lewis, ‘Nongovernmental Organizations, Definition and History, in International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler, eds., Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 2010, pp. 1056–1062.
9.
Thomas Davies , NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 3–4.
10.
See Dorothy Q. Thomas, ‘Holding Governments Accountable by Public Pressing,’ in Joanna Kerr, ed., Ours by Right: Women’s Right as Human Rights, London: Zed Books, 1993, p. 83; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink , Activists Beyond Borders, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 15.
11.
Didier Fassin , Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012, p. 3.
12.
Ibid.
13.
Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow , ‘Transnational Processes and Social Activism: An Introduction’, in Transnational Protest and Global Activism, ed. Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, p. 3.
14.
See, for example, Sean Scalmer’s discussion of this presentism in Sean Scalmer , ‘Mediated Nonviolence as a Global Force: An Historical Perspective,’ in Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy, eds., Mediation and Protest Movements, Bristol, UK and Wilmington, NC: Intellect, 2013, pp. 115–132.
15.
della Porta and Tarrow, ‘Transnational Processes and Social Activism.’
16.
On the new imperialism and questions of the nation, see, for example, Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the Nation,’ in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–26.
17.
Sidney Tarrow , Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, Chap. 11 and p. 182. See also Keck and Sikkink , Activists beyond Borders, p. 40; Huw T. David , ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century: Transatlantic Activism and the Anti-slavery Movement ,’ Global Networks, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007, p. 368.
18.
Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, p. 6.
19.
Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 76. Also see Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, p. 43; Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,’ Parts I and II, American Historical Review, vol. 90, April 1985, p. 90, and June 1985, pp. 547–566.
20.
See for example, C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830, London and New York: Longman, 1989; Catherine Hall , Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1860, Oxford : Polity, 2002.
21.
Samuel Moyn , The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 316.
22.
Davies, NGOs, p. 21.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Huw T. David , ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century,’ p. 370.
26.
Sanjeev Khagram , James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink , eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002; Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders; David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century.’
27.
David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century’; C.H. Mike Yarrow, Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
28.
Lester and Dussart , Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 5.
29.
Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘Between Van Diemen’s Land and the Cape Colony,’ in Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to George Augustus Robinson’s Friendly Mission, Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2012, available [online]: http://books.publishing.monash.edu/apps/bookworm/view/Reading+Robinson%3A+Companion+Essays+to+George+Robinson%E2%80%99s+Friendly+Mission/176/OEBPS/c05.htm [Access Date 18 February 2015].
30.
On the ‘discursive explosion of the abolition debate,’ see Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, Britain and Its Colonies, 1760–1838, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004, p. 1.
31.
Anna Johnston , The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture and Power in Colonial New South Wales , Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2011, p. 52.
32.
Ibid., p. 55.
33.
Mary Bartram Trott , ‘Backhouse , James (1794–1869),’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra: Australian National University, 1966, available [online]: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/backhouse-james-1728/text1899 [Access Date 7 February 2012].
34.
United Kingdom , House of Commons, Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), London: Published for the Society by William Ball, 1837; United Kingdom, House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation; Together with a Letter from the Archbishop of Dublin on the Same Subject, and Notes by Sir W. Molesworth, London: Henry Hooper, 1838.
35.
See James Backhouse , Extracts from the Letters of James Backhouse: When Engaged in a Religious Visit on the Island of the Mauritius, accompanied by George Washington Walker, Sixth Part, London: Harvey and Darnton, 1839; Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies; James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to Mauritius and South Africa , London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1844.
36.
Trott, ‘Backhouse, James (1794–1869).’
37.
Sarah Backhouse, Memoir of James Backhouse, by His Sister, York: F.B. Kitto, 1870, p. 41.
38.
Ibid.; Mary Bartram Trott , ‘Walker, George Washington (1800–1859),’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra: Australian National University, 1966, accessed 7 February 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/walker-george-washington-2764.
39.
Trott, ‘Walker, George Washington (1800–1859).’
40.
Backhouse , Memoir of James Backhouse, p. 47.
41.
Thomas Timpson, Memoirs of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, second edition, London: Aylott and Jones, 1847.
42.
Backhouse, Memoir of James Backhouse, p. 47.
43.
Zoë Laidlaw , Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
44.
James Backhouse , ‘A Letter to Thomas Fowell Buxton on the Emigration of Free Females to Van Diemen’s Land’ and ‘A Letter to Elizabeth Fry on the Emigration of Free Females to Van Diemen’s Land,’ FHL, Letter book 1831–1834, Ms. vol. 1, p. S48.
45.
Tony Ballantyne , ‘Rereading the Archives and Opening Up the Nation State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond),’ in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, Durham and London : Duke University Press, 2003, p. 113. See also David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Alan Lester , ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,’ History Workshop Journal vol. 54, 2002, pp. 24–48. Zoë Laidlaw , ‘“Aunt Anna’s Report”: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–1837,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 1–28.
46.
See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,’ Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–19; David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century’; Sean Scalmer , ‘Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of Collective Action,’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 25, no. 4, 2000, pp. 491–514. Appadurai distinguishes between globalization from above, defined by corporations, major multilateral agencies, policy experts, and national governments, and that from below, where local, grassroots actions mediate global politics. As Appadurai notes, the ‘most easily recognisable of these [grassroots] institutions are NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) concerned with mobilizing highly specific local, national, and regional groups on matters of equity, access, justice, and redistribution.’ Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization,’ p. 15.
47.
Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003.
48.
Laidlaw , ‘Aunt Anna’s Report,’ p. 6.
49.
Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler.’ See also United Kingdom , House of Commons, Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements).
50.
United Kingdom, House of Commons, Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), Preface, pp. v–vi. See also Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler.’
51.
Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Humanitarianism , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, p. 18.
52.
H. Larry Ingle , ‘Fox, George (1624–1691),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, available [online]: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10031 [Access Date 6 Feb 2012].
53.
Ibid.
54.
Hilary Hinds, ‘An Absent Presence: Quaker Narratives of Journeys to America and Barbados, 1671–81,’ Quaker Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005, p. 6.
55.
Sarah Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Ministry in the Age of Revolution’, Radical History Review, no. 99, 2007, pp. 51–79.
56.
Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 7.
57.
Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”’, p. 65.
58.
In the late 1830s Quaker Daniel Wheeler sailed in a ship purchased with Friends’ funds to the Australian colonies, New Zealand and the Pacific, to examine the ‘situation of the injured natives of the South Sea Islands,’ as well as Australian Aboriginal peoples , convicts and women. See Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern”’.
59.
See, for example, Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914, Oxford : Blackwell, 2004, pp. 139, 140.
60.
See Zoë Laidlaw , ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 40, no. 5, 2012, pp. 749–768.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid.
63.
On Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, see David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century,’ p. 379.
64.
See the ideas of political scientists such as Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, The Politics of Social Protest, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1995, p. 3. See also Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006, p. 211.
65.
Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern”’; W.N. Oats, A Question of Survival: Quakers in Australia in the Nineteenth Century, St. Lucia and London: University of Queensland Press, 1985, p. 90.
66.
James Backhouse, ‘A Letter to Thomas Fowell Buxton on the Emigration of Free Females to Van Diemen’s Land’ and ‘A Letter to Elizabeth Fry on the Emigration of Free Females to Van Diemen’s Land’, FHL, Letter book 1831–1834, Ms. vol. 1, p. S48.
67.
James Backhouse to Governor Richard Bourke , 25 April 1837, from Van Diemen’s Land , in ‘Letters to the Governor of New South Wales respecting the Aborigines’, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, Appendix P, cxxxiv. [Italics mine.].
68.
Ibid.
69.
See Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern”’.
70.
Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-slavery and Humanitarianism,’ in Andrew Porter and William Roger Louis , eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 198–221.
71.
Laidlaw , ‘Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines,’ p. 137.
72.
Ibid., pp. 148–149.
73.
Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern.”’
74.
Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, p. 19.
75.
Ibid.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Journals of George Washington Walker , 13 October 1832, p. 140, State Library New South Wales (hereafter SLNSW).
78.
Lyndall Ryan , The Aboriginal Tasmanians, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981; Lyndall Ryan, ‘Aboriginal Women and Agency in the Process of Conquest: A Review of Some Recent Work,’ Australian Feminist Studies, 1986, pp. 35–43. Patsy Cameron , Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier, Launceston: Fullers Bookshop, 2011.
79.
Edmonds, ‘Collecting Looerryminer’s “Testimony,”’ p. 29. See also George Washington Walker, ‘Journals 1831–41’, B709 1832, Oct 1832, p. 132, SLNSW.
80.
Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, p. 9.
81.
Ibid., p. 48.
82.
Edmonds, ‘Collecting Looerryminer’s “Testimony,”’ p. 29.
83.
David, ‘Transnational Advocacy in the Eighteenth Century’.
84.
Talal Asad , ‘Reflections on Violence, Law and Humanitarianism,” Critical Inquiry, available [online]: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/reflections_on_violence_law_and_humanitarianism/#_ftnref31 [Access Date July 14, 2014].
85.
Ibid.
86.
Ibid.
87.
Dipesh Chakrabarty , Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 119.
88.
Didier Fassin , Humanitarian Reason, p. 3.
89.
See Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Indigenous and Settler Relations,’ in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds., The Cambridge History of Australia: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, Melbourne : Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 342–366.
90.
Edmonds, ‘Collecting Looerryminer’s “Testimony”’; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines.

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University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia
Penelope Edmonds

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Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Stefan Berger
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Sean Scalmer

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Edmonds, P. (2018). Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century. In: Berger, S., Scalmer, S. (eds) The Transnational Activist. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66206-0_2
Published: 29 November 2017
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