Accounts of the historical origins of international humanitarian law (IHL) routinely assume that the emergence of humanity as a constraint on the waging of war, coinciding as it did with a general rise of humanitarianism in the nineteenth century, reflected a growing commitment to a universally shared notion of human dignity. That assumption is fallacious. Those who have been mythologised as champions of humanity as constraint, including Henri Dunant and Francis Lieber, were products of their era. IHL’s ‘original sin’ was to only extend constraints of humanity to so-called civilised nations in their wars inter se. These same constraints were not intended to apply to indigenous and other colonised populations – those assumed to be ‘uncivilised’ – often referred to as such with the pejoratives ‘savages’ and/or ‘barbarians’. The exclusion of emergent constraints on the grounds of racism and colonialism is evident in the language of the early IHL treaties. It has taken many decades for the international community to overcome the exclusions of the legal protection of emergent IHL and some would argue that the tendency for exclusion is still evident in the dehumanising of the other in the Global War on Terror.

Through four regimes between 1815 and 1870, the French would regularly invent new rationales and purposes for empire. A domestic crisis of legitimization led to the invasion of Algeria in 1830. So began a French settler colony in which barely half the settlers even came from France. The revolutionaries of 1848 annexed the colonies, making them national territory. While chattel slavery was legally abolished throughout the empire, annexation meant different things in different places. Colonial incoherence continued. Missionaries fostered and legitimized imperial expansion, though the imperial state never found them completely reliable. Military entrepreneurs in Senegal and Indochina had their own agendas, and did Emperor Napoleon III, who envisaged an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. He also sought to expand the empire indirectly, through a disastrous scheme to place a Habsburg on a Mexican throne. The prison colony provided another brutal avenue of colonial expansion. French imperial capitalism generally prospered, though the French were so outmaneuvered by the British after building the Suez Canal that they overshadowed the French role altogether. By 1870, the whole of the French empire still somehow seemed less than the sum of its parts.

The abolition movement in Britain and America was primarily led and supported by people driven by Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. The major role of Quakers before 1800 is generally acknowledged. However, "[m]ost recent assessments neglect, avoid, or dismiss the Evangelicals," one scholar noted, and their much greater role after Quaker efforts faded after 1800. By contrast, the prior generation of historians typically concluded that the "evangelical roots of radical abolition are well documented"; "the abolition movement grew out of evangelical Protestantism"; and "[t]here is no question of the importance of Evangelicalism in American anti-slavery." Quakers and Evangelicals publicized the horrors of slavery, and condemned slavery theologically as sin, while building on the revolutionary generation’s widespread discomfort with slavery, and achieving steps toward gradual emancipation in the northern states. Evangelicals after 1800 broadened the movement, appealing to many of those claiming conversion in the Second Great Awakening, and supported immediate abolition. Though not every leader or supporter was primarily motivated by religious beliefs, a large number were, and Judeo-Christian faith was crucial in the abolition movement. Those activities of the abolition movement consisted largely of Judeo-Christian religious speech: sermons and oratory, tracts and circulars, antislavery newspapers and other publications, and petitions.

Judeo-Christian faith and religious speech are increasingly excluded from the public square and from equal treatment compared to other belief systems. Challenges directed at religious faith and speech include arguments that speech relying on them should be excluded from the public square, that religious speech should not be protected by government, that religious speech should not be treated the same as other speech, and that instead it may be subjected to special restrictions. Similar challenges are increasingly aimed at freedom of speech generally. Yet Judeo-Christian faith and associated speech have given many valuable legacies to the world. The most acknowledged ones are much of freedom of religious exercise and other human rights, great art and architecture, great music and literature, hospitals and charities, and education and science. However, it is not widely acknowledged that Judeo-Christian faith and religious speech growing out of it were major forces behind at least six other expansions of human rights or freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedoms of accused criminals, higher education, abolition of slavery, and the modern civil rights movement. These legacies came from various segments of Judeo-Christian faith: Puritans and Levellers, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and Liberal Protestants and African-American Churches.

Chapter 3 – How societies change – presents some key examples of how historians, anthropologists, economists, and other academics have tried to come to grips with the agents and drivers of previous societal transformations. We cite examples of how the great Western transformation between 1500 and 1900 has been framed in different ways. Furthermore, we present two analogies of transformations: the abolition of slavery, and the replacement of horse transport in cities with automobile transport. This constitutes the basis for a typology of societal transformations based on the system levels and tempo of transformations.

Chapter 5 connects efforts to reinvent to French colonial empire between the Seven Years War and the French Revolution explored in the previous chapters to the development of a republican imperial agenda during the French Revolution. Showing how it was initially the French abolitionist society, the société des amis des noirs, who carried forward earlier arguments about the value of free labour over slave labour, colonial integration over exploitation, and arguments for the creation of new colonies in Africa, the chapter discloses that it was only after slave rebellions in the Caribbean, revolutionary warfare, and terror secured the decree to abolish slavery throughout the French colonial empire in 1794, that a genuine commitment to thoroughgoing imperial innovation materialised. With the Constitution of the Year III, the French Republic integrated the colonies into the metropole as overseas departments. Shortly after, the Directory embraced the proposal to create new colonies in Africa based on a mission to civilise. Despite Napoleon’s restoration of the plantation complex in the Îles du Vent, the chapter reveals that political economists and stakeholders of colonial empire continued to promote colonial integration and African expansion into the nineteenth century.