Empire, Refugees, and the Use of Humanitarian Universals

According to standard accounts of refugee history, the refugee became a matter of political and philanthropic concern in the aftermath of WWI. The term then applied to a handful of groups only. In the mid-twentieth century, the category shifted, its application becoming potentially universal: any individual fleeing persecution could qualify as a refugee. This standard account parallels the rise of a human rights regime. The accruing of rights, whether one places it the late-eighteenth century or in the 1940s or in the 1970s, follows a standard telos from group to individual. The proposed paper challenges this account. It traces the emergence of a powerful British normative claim on refugees’ behalf to the long nineteenth century. First offering a brief look at this longer history, the paper then focuses on British arguments on behalf of foreign refugees between the 1870s and 1940s, be they refugee slaves in the Indian Ocean region or Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. As this paper highlights, British activists, officials, and public commentators alternately individuated or aggregated would-be refugees by group throughout this period. Group or individuated categorization was not necessarily better for the persecuted parties themselves, the paper finds. Yet, understanding this dynamic, the paper argues, can help us better understand the difficulty of elevating refuge to a human right.