International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2017

Beyond and against capitalism: abolitionism and the moral dimension of humanitarian practice

(Abstract)

Peter Stamatov

How do we understand the origins of modern humanitarianism and were these origins structurally determined by modern capitalism? This article focuses on a critical juncture in the formation of modern humanitarianism, the late eighteenth century movement for the abolition of the British slave trade and examines critically an established historiographic tradition that privileges economic structures as the ultimate determinant of the movement’s rise. Placed in its historical context, early abolitionism reveals complex causal connections and interdependencies between the economic and the moral spheres that are impossible to derive from the logic of capitalism. This causal complexity questions a general assumption that humanitarianism is an epiphenomenal manifestation of the putatively deeper structural forces of the economy and requires renewed analytical attention to empirical forms of humanitarian practice in their proper causal context and to humanitarianism’s casual influences on other societal fields.