In the Cause of Humanity

Fabian Klose is Professor of International History and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Cologne. He is the author of Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence (2013), and Editor of The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention (2016) and Humanity. A History of European Concepts in Practice (2016). The German edition of In the Cause of Humanity received the Carl Erdmann Prize of the German Historical Association 2018 and Geisteswissenschaften International 2020.

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Interventionism and humanitarianism under the sign of internationalism; 2. The struggle against the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of a humanitarian understanding of intervention; 3. Humanitarian intervention and its solidification as an imperial and colonial practice; Epilogue: Perspectives on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Bibliography; Index.

'In the Cause of Humanity is a masterful intervention into the debate on the origins and the first century of humanitarian intervention.  Fabian Klose has written a methodical and textured history of that explores how 19th century humanitarian intervention was entangled with new discourses of humanity, a newly evolving international law precariously situated between notions of legal equality and European confidence in their civilizational superiority, and imperial impulses and colonial conquest. Klose has written an exceptionally compelling guide to the past and the present.' Michael Barnett, author of Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism