Beyond and against capitalism
Abolitionism and the Moral Dimension of Humanitarian Practice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5032228 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Stamatov (Associated Press, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 215-216 |
| Pages | 25-35 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Social Science Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8701 • E-ISSN: 1468-2451 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/issj.12069 |
| OpenAlex | W2343986580 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 41 |
How do we understand the origins of modern humanitarianism and what can these origins tell us about the study of humanitarianism in general? Here I revisit a critical juncture of the formation of modern humanitarianism, the late 18th-century movement to abolish the British slave trade, through the lens of a prevailing paradigm that has explained it as deriving from the logic of capitalist development. A closer look at this early phase of abolitionism within its historical context reveals the implausibility of the economy as the most salient explanatory factor for the origin and success of the abolitionist project. Instead, this project emerged at the interstices of a complex causal entanglement between the areas of economic and moral action. I conclude by drawing out the larger implications of this historical complexity for the study of humanitarianism at large. The complex causal dynamics that produced early abolitionism urges us to be more attentive to the manifold forms of humanitarian practice and to situate them in a proper causal context instead of assuming that humanitarianism is an epiphenomenal manifestation of allegedly deeper structural forces, such as the economy. Reversing this assumption and directing attention to the casual influence of humanitarianism on other areas of social life opens up a promising field of scholarly inquiry
Abolitionism · Argument (complex analysis) · Capitalism · Citation · Dimension (graph theory) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Global Security and Public Health · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law
The Worlds of the East India Company
Capitalism and Slavery
White supremacy
Early modern conceptions of property
Revenue and Reform
The Origins of Global Humanitarianism
Capitalism and Antislavery
Credit in the slave trade and plantation economies
National Interests in International Society
Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Moral Capital
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823
How Ideology Works
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
Abolition
The Art of Moral Protest
International Institutions Today
The British Government and the Slave Trade
The Moral Geography of British Anti-Slavery Responsibilities
The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2
Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3
The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility
Slavery and the British Empire
The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810
The Problem of Civil Rights for Free Men of Color in the Early French Revolution
Global prohibition regimes
Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits
Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology
Econocide
The far side
Decisions on Slavery, the Slave-Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution
Disciplining Industrial Slaves in the Old South
The Slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic Growth, 1748-1776
The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics
Edmund Burke, Economical Reform, and the Board of Trade, 1777-1780
Finance for the West Indies, 1780-1815
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |