‘Humanitarianism as History’: Entangled Histories of Humanitarian Relief in Inter-War Europe

A historian of humanitarianism must unravel many knots.The history of global humanitarianism -the organised, institutionalised expression of caring for distant others across borders, guided by principles of humanity, impartiality and neutrality -is an entangled history par excellence. 1 Humanitarian work mediated connections between people across the world, linking the histories of disparate populations.Historians must grapple with the blend of stimuli -altruistic, pragmatic and cynical -that motivated humanitarian work, which was both deeply idealistic and grounded in the imperfections of its time and place.They must evaluate how relief organisations aspired to neutrality and impartiality in a world of empires and nation-states and how the practices of global humanitarianism were shaped by, and in turn shaped, processes like imperialism, decolonisation, war and state-building.Unsurprisingly, these entanglements present certain methodological challenges.Perhaps most notably, the voices of those the humanitarians served rarely surface in institutional archives, creating deep lacunae.These problems are of course not unique.Reading against the grain to recover agency of specific groups is a common practice, disentangling complex motivations a key task of the historian and finding oneself caught in snarled threads a common occupational hazard.Nevertheless, the relative youth of humanitarian history as a field allows its practitioners to experiment with novel ways of negotiating these conceptual and methodological challenges.They do 1 This rough definition of global humanitarianism is drawn from Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle