Writing in 1860 to Lord Newcastle, the Colonial Secretary, Florence Nightingale asked for his assistance in conducting a survey of the mortality rates of Maori and Aboriginal students in colonial missionary schools in New Zealand and Australia, an effort meant “to further what I believe to be a very important interest of our country, viz., how can we civilize without destroying the natives of our colony?”Footnote ¹ Nightingale's ameliorative humanitarian goal was to combat the “racial pessimism” and “demographic fatalism” shared by many observers in settler colonies, who predicted the inevitable extinction of indigenous groups.Footnote ² Instead, Nightingale hoped that the concrete statistics she gathered from colonial administrators and school managers would allow her to identify the “causes of mortality” in order to develop educational and public health policies fostering the survival of indigenous populations. Nightingale believed that measures such as “ample space, free ventilation, cheerfulness, half-time at least given to outdoor work or play” and “day-by-day reference to the past habits and history of the people” would promote indigenous schoolchildren's health.Footnote ³ Nightingale's career encompassed multiple areas of humanitarian concern and action, including her celebrated leadership of nurses caring for sick and wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War (1854–56), her subsequent investigation and activism to reform military medical provisions, and her efforts beginning in the mid-1860s to establish medical care in workhouse infirmaries on a par with hospital care.Footnote ⁴ Nightingale's humanitarian work also contributed to one of the major fields of modern international humanitarian assistance: protection of civilians and impartial medical treatment of soldiers in wars and other violent conflicts. The other major fields of modern humanitarianism include: assistance to refugees and internally displaced persons; famine relief; rescue followed by medical care and distribution of aid and in the aftermath of natural disasters; and treatment of the sick and public health interventions to prevent spread of disease during major epidemics.

Nightingale's project of amelioration in the settler colonies can also be described as an example of humanitarian government, a key concept for current research on and critique of humanitarianism developed by anthropologist Didier Fassin, drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality, that pinpoints “a language that inextricably links values and affects, and serves both to define and to justify discourses and practices of the government of human beings.”Footnote ⁵ Pointing out a central “paradox” of humanitarianism that “the politics of compassion is a politics of inequality” as well as “a politics of solidarity” with the poor and vulnerable, Fassin identifies a “tension … between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance” as “constitutive of all humanitarian government.”Footnote ⁶ Humanitarian government as an analytical term also applies to the forms of order imposed by non-governmental agencies and international organizations such as the United Nations. Historians Alan Lester and Fae Dussart use Fassin's approach to trace a shift in British humanitarian government in its settler colonies from a “Protectionist” ameliorative approach in the 1830s, designed to reduce and mitigate the damaging effects of settler violence against indigenous populations, to a proto-economic-development approach during the 1840s and 1850s meant “to guide those surviving individuals through this process of amalgamation” within “a programme for indigenous peoples’ future welfare.”Footnote ⁷ Ideologically, this shift also “offered emigrant and metropolitan Britons an empire founded on violent dispossession without culpability.”Footnote ⁸

Nineteenth-century humanitarians were frequently motivated by Christian beliefs and missionary goals, and their projects also had strong philanthropic and voluntary dimensions. In response to witnessing the carnage and endeavoring to assist wounded and dying French and Austro-Hungarian troops after the Battle of Solferino in June 1859, Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who cited Nightingale as an inspiration for his efforts, published a memoir of his experience in 1862, Un souvenir de Solferino (A Memory of Solferino). Through its detailing of soldiers’ gruesome suffering and the inadequacy of medical assistance, this widely read text drew the attention of European leaders to the need for international laws guaranteeing the organization and protection of a voluntary medical corps to treat the wounded in war. Dunant would help to organize a conference in 1863 held in Geneva that produced the first Geneva Convention signed by European powers in August 1864, thus launching the development of international humanitarian law. The first Geneva conference also led to the founding in 1863 of one of the earliest international, non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations, the International Committee of the Red Cross. In his narrative, Dunant influentially defined humanitarian concern as “[t]he moral sense of the importance of human life.”Footnote ⁹ Dunant's definition remains relevant for humanitarian ethics, or reflection on the purposes, values, and principles, as well as the paradoxes, compromises, and conflicts, that characterize modern humanitarian practice.Footnote ¹⁰

Historians of humanitarianism place its formative rise in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in relation to the appeals to humane moral sentiments of benevolence and sympathy and public mobilization strategies developed within the international movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade.Footnote ¹¹ Historian Thomas W. Laqueur locates the emergence of a recognizable humanitarian narrative, such as Dunant's, in the techniques for mobilizing moral sentiments apparent in the realistic novel, the autopsy, the clinical report, and the social inquiry. Across these texts, the humanitarian narrative is characterized both by its “reality effect” based in “its reliance on detail as the sign of truth” and its activation of readers’ moral sentiments by depicting “the pains and deaths of ordinary people in such a way as to make apparent the causal chains that might connect the actions of its readers with the suffering of its subjects,” thereby presenting “ameliorative action” as “possible, effective, and therefore morally imperative.” The humanitarian narrative has a further defining element in its focus “on the personal body, not only as locus of pain but also as the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help and as the object of scientific discourse through which the causal links between an evil, a victim, and a benefactor are forged.”Footnote ¹² This triangle of protagonists translates into the modern constellation of humanitarian crisis, recipients of assistance, and humanitarian practitioners, with the addition of aid donors and the influence of governments. For Victorian literature scholars, Laqueur's work could invite further investigation of Victorian writers’ humanitarian concerns, including possible connections of the readerly sympathy often elicited by realist novels both to the humanitarian narrative and to projects of humanitarian governance in Britain and its empire. By extension, humanitarian motives also served in school classrooms in the colonies to articulate the moral influence, and to mask the “civilizing” rationales, of the English literature curriculum.

Although humanitarianism is most often understood as “a global architecture of concern for distant strangers,” the careers of Victorian humanitarians such as Nightingale indicate that their concerns and initiatives were often transnational and linked to domestic reform efforts.Footnote ¹³ Historian Caroline Shaw has also shown how the extension of liberal humanitarian relief to refugees became a point of British national pride through which Victorians across the social spectrum joined in fundraising campaigns to assist exiles from republican political revolutions on the continent, such as Italians Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, as well as multiple African American fugitives escaping slavery in the United States by taking refuge in Canada.Footnote ¹⁴

To study nineteenth-century humanitarianism, therefore, is necessarily to engage in transnational and transimperial scholarship that places developments in Britain in relation to European politics and wars and within British imperial networks of writing and publishing, governmental administration, missionary activity, military interventions, legal practices, educational initiatives, and the negotiation of moral concerns and political imperatives. Lester and Dussart point out the importance of spatiality, or the “particular global geography” of humanitarianism, which produced spaces of interaction that “were the products of a tentative and negotiated coming together of indigenous and colonial practices and geographies.”Footnote ¹⁵ Another space that has become a pervasive recourse of modern humanitarian government, the refugee camp, can also be traced in part to British military uses of internment camps to control the Boer civilian population in the context of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902).Footnote ¹⁶

By foregrounding the reactive, improvised, both strategic and piecemeal nature of British humanitarian government and humanitarians’ voluntary reform projects—shaped alike by colonial encounters and indigenous peoples’ resistance and their individual struggles for agency—research on humanitarianism can also contribute to a vibrant trend among today's scholars to situate Victorian studies in the frame of Britain's global empire.Footnote ¹⁷