Abstract
Britain has been the starting place and home of many of the largest and most active humanitarian pressure groups and international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). From the campaign against slavery in the 18th century, through the Anti-Corn Law League and the efforts to revive the Olympic Games in the 19th century1 to the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s, Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) in the Second World War, Amnesty International and dozens of other organisations subsequently, British culture spawns NGOs. Today, Oxfam and its kind offer aid to countries suffering from famine or civil war and try to encourage economic development, others try to prevent mistreatment of political prisoners, female circumcision, torture, damage to the environment and cruelty to animals. Benevolent as their intentions are intended to be, they involve interference in other cultures; Japanese resent being encouraged not to kill sharks and whales, Koreans not to eat dogs, Chinese not to use ivory as an aphrodisiac, Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, dislike being criticised for mutilating thieves and for their treatment of women, dictatorial governments everywhere object to being pressed to treat their citizens with more consideration. Very often the targets of such campaigns suspect ulterior motives and point to the deficiencies in the British or Western record.
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Notes
Steven Stalinsky, ‘Darfur and the Middle East media: The anatomy of another conspiracy’, Middle East Media Research Institute, 15 February 2008.
T. E. Hulme, Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1931), edited by Herbert Read, pp. 50–51.
Quoted in E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (London, Macmillan, 1942), p.107.
For the importance of communication in civil action, see Todd Sandler, Collective Action: Theory and Applications (New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. xiii.
Seymour Drescher, ‘Public opinion and the destruction of British colonial slavery’ in James Walvin (ed.), Slavery and British Society 1776–1846 (London, Macmillan, 1982).
See also Joel Quirk, ‘The anti-slavery project: Linking the historical and the contemporary’, Human Rights Quarterly, 28 (2006), p. 582.
For the importance of the numbers backing a pressure group, see Graeme C. Moodie and Gerald Studdert-Kennedy, Opinions, Publics and Pressure Groups (London, Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 67.
Successive governments had, however, to rely on the army to deal with large-scale disturbances and to fight groups of smugglers, see, for example, Allan Jobson, Suffolk Remembered (London, Robert Hale, 1969).
Marika Sherwood, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since1807 (Tauris, London, 2007), p. 10.
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006), p. 55 ff.
Sir Regional Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London, Frank Cass, 1964).
See also William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism (London, Tauris, 2006), p. 979; Sherwood, After Abolition, p. 2.
John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1906).
Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London, Constable, 1970), p. 297.
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (London, Longmans, 1959), p. 316.
For antagonism towards German and US trade before the First World War, see Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 88.
For the 1930s, see Naoto Kagotani, ‘Japan’s commercial penetration into British India’, in Philip Towle and Nobuko Margaret Kosuge (eds), Britain and Japan in the Twentieth Century: One Hundred Years of Trade and Prejudice (London, I B Tauris, 2007).
A. W. Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1878), Volume V11, Chapter 11.
Ellen Hart, Man Born to Live: Life and Work of Henry Dunant Founder of the Red Cross (London, Victor Gollanz, 1953), p. 79.
James Avery Joyce, Red Cross International and the Strategy of Peace (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1959).
Peter Morris (ed.), First Aid to the Battlefront: Life and Letters of Sir Vincent Kennett-Barrington (Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 6.
Grigor McClelland, Embers of War: Letters from a Quaker Relief Worker in War-torn Germany (London, Tauris, 1997), p. 1.
Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971);
Sally Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control (Hull, University of Hull Press, 1996).
Henry R. Winkler, The League of Nations Movement in Great Britain 1914–1919 (Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 51.
Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, p. 1076. See also Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion Quarterly, 1940, Volume 4, p. 400.
This summary of the League’s history is based on Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 1915–1965 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1965).
S. Morrison, I Renounce War: The Story of the Peace Pledge Union (London, Sheppard Press, 1962), p. 11.
Christopher Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), p. 16.
Nevertheless, the war did persuade some to become Quaker pacifists, see Kathleen Lonsdale, Is Peace Possible? (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1957).
Richard Taylor and Colin Pritchard, The Protest Makers: The British Nuclear Disarmament Movement of 1958–1965, Twenty Years on (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1980), p. 55.
James Cameron, Point of Departure: Experiment in Autobiography (London, Grafton, 1986), p. 188.
Statement on Defence 1956, CMD 9691 (London, HMSO, 1956). Reference Section, Introduction, paras 7, 102 and 119. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (London, Constable, 1960), p. 420.
Compare the relative freedom described in Ursula von Kardoff, Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin 1942–1945 (London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965)
and Lali Horstmann, Nothing for Tears (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 43
with Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the 1930s (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971)
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (London, Collins-Harvill-Fontana, 1974).
Aleksander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York, Norton, 2006), p. 530.
Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France 1914–1918 (London, Tauris, 2001), p. 64.
Henry Morgenthau, I Was Sent to Athens (New York, Doubleday, 1929).
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993), Chapter 3.
Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values (London, Victor Gollancz, 1946).
Lieutenant Colonel W. Byford-Jones, Berlin Twilight (London, Hutchinson, 1947), p. 145.
Maggie Black, A Cause for our Times: Oxfam the First Fifty Years (Oxford, Oxfam and Oxford University Press, 1992).
Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge, Polity, 2007), p. 220.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (London, Free Press, 2007), pp. 310–312.
Drescher in J. Walvin, Slavery and British Society 1776–1846 (London, Macmillan, 1982), p. 30.
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© 2009 Philip Towle
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Towle, P. (2009). Civil Society. In: Going to War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234314_4
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