The religious origins of modern long-distance humanitarianism: England, 1780--1880, in comparative perspective

This study examines the emergence of modern long-distance humanitarianism, defined as the institutionalized patterns of action oriented meaningfully towards the welfare of distant strangers, while highlighting the formative role of religious organization for this emergence. The argument unfolds through a series of comparisons that bring into focus the distinctive characteristics of the foundational period of religiously inspired modern long-distance humanitarianism in the late eighteenth-century Britain. The centrality of religious organizations for this foundational period is highlighted by the contrast of these developments with similar developments in the sixteenth-century Iberian overseas empires, with Edmund Burke's secular campaign for reform of imperial administration in British India, and---finally---with the relatively weak nineteenth-century mobilizations against colonial slavery in France and the Netherlands. Overall, this study outlines the contours of a long-term historical process of "moral globalization" that has been driven by civil society initiatives and is distinct from globalization in other institutional domains. Religious concerns have been an important factor for this process, if only because Christian churches have been interested, traditionally, in the welfare of geographically and culturally distant potential recruits. The distinctive contribution of religious organizations in late eighteenth-century Britain, however, was to provide not only the traditional cultural resources for activities on behalf of distant strangers, but elaborated the organizational foundations of modern long-distance humanitarianism as it has existed ever since. The importance of religion for these developments corrects prevailing sociological approaches that understand long-distance humanitarianism as arising either from the logic of the global political configuration or from the logic of the global symbolic landscape, especially after in the post-WW II present.