This chapter considers the nature of state aid and intervention after earthquakes at Antioch between the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity.

Tens of thousands of European ‘intellectuals’ faced starvation by 1920 and Vienna was the epicentre for international humanitarian aid. This chapter focuses on how the feeding of intellectuals was organized by a range of humanitarian organizations in this period. The most striking example of this was the phenomenon of the ‘intellectual kitchen’, a site where intellectuals were fed away from the wider populations of their towns and cities. The chapter explores the mechanics of food and clothes aid, and argues that issues of class, gender, and race shaped the status of the ‘intellectual’ for humanitarian organizations as well as aid workers.

This chapter analyses the multifaceted impact of the arrival of thousands of refugees in Macau, showing how relief activities depended on the pragmatic interplay and cooperation of different state and non-state actors. Focusing on Chinese refugees from Shanghai and Guangdong province, and on Portuguese Eurasian refugees from Shanghai and Guangzhou, the chapter details how an unprecedented refugee influx constituted both a crisis and an opportunity for the territory’s administration, local population and the refugees themselves. These wartime refugee waves led to the emergence of a peculiar wartime cosmopolitanism in Macau, which sprang from new flows of people, capital and ideas from major treaty-port metropolises.

This chapter focuses on the experience of Hong Kong refugees in Macau. It addresses the role the British consulate in Macau played in refugee management and intelligence networks, explaining how the enclave was an important base and a connecting node for British operations. This chapter argues that Macau played an important supportive role to many in and from Hong Kong from late 1941 to the end of the war. It allowed for escapees to reach unoccupied China, for a great number of refugees to receive assistance, for intelligence to be gathered and for resistance activities to be coordinated. The chapter highlights the significant experience of colonial transplantation that allowed the British to keep a foothold in South China and facilitated the reoccupation of Hong Kong.

This chapter considers Romantic surgery from the patient’s perspective. It uses Astley Cooper’s rich archive of personal correspondence to explore the complex emotions associated with the experience of surgical illness and its treatment, as well as the ways in which emotional expression functioned as a form of agency within the private surgical relationship. In addition to considering private patients, this chapter also examines how emotions expressed and mediated agency within what, following Michel Foucault, we might consider the ‘disciplinary’ space of the hospital. The pre-anaesthetic surgical patient was a deeply unstable and ‘messy’ ontological entity whose pre-operative health and post-operative recovery were determined by a complex melding of constitutional, nervous, and emotional factors. Thus, as this chapter demonstrates, the patient’s own body could exert an unconscious material agency, often frustrating both surgical intervention and the patient’s own will, something that was most evident in the associations between irritability and obstreperousness that characterised contemporary discourses on amputation and its discontents.

This chapter explores the confluence of music and memory in classical Athens by turning to figures of Sirens that frequently decorated sculpted funerary monuments. Perched above such monuments, as if on their roofs, Sirens are shown either playing musical instruments or in the throes of a lament, accompanied by birds, vessels, or other mourners. Although they occupy a different space than the figures of the deceased and their family carved below, Sirens often adopt similar postures and gestures, suggesting continuities between the body of the deceased and the body of the mourner on a kinesthetic level. Through an analysis of select examples of Siren monuments as well as a passage from Euripides’ Helen, I argue that these mythological creatures generate an imperative for the beholder to respond not simply through an imaginative act of empathy, but as a mourner fully invested in the tragedy at hand, one who remembers the dead. Sirens on funerary monuments suggest the synesthetic dimensions of sculpture, its ability to open up sensorial experiences that extend beyond sight and touch, and its powerful effects on our own capacity to remember.

The previous chapter having demonstrated how the narrative of indifference can be traced back to international law’s disciplinary identity, this chapter seeks to understand when and why this historical account emerged and still dominates scholarship. It brings a twofold ‘emotional’ explanation. The first relied on the work of Festinger and argues that ‘indifference’ emerged during the interwar as a narrative remedy for a cognitive dissonance between the belief that international law is a vector of order and the events of World War I. It transformed a failure of international law into a triumph of international law. It allowed the discipline to restore coherence between beliefs and facts and, by the same token, salvage the inside and outside credibility of the discipline. The second explanation highlights how the narrative of indifference can also be read as an expression of ‘exultant relief’ at the culmination of 50 years of pro-arbitration efforts on the part of international lawyers.

This chapter presents an overview of the history of humanitarian efforts as seen according to a new periodisation scheme, which identifies three main phases of engagement. These are the laissez-faire 'ad hoc humanitarianism' of the nineteenth century, the 'organised humanitarianism' associated with Taylorism and mass society (c. 1900–70), and the 'expressive humanitarianism' characterising the period since 1968. We combine this with background information on the context of the three case studies: relief efforts during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s; the famine that ravaged Soviet Russia and the Ukraine in 1921–3; and the devastating famine in Ethiopia of the mid-1980s.

Chapter 5 explores the politics and practices of Allied relief, which were characterised by continuous tensions between military strategies and humanitarian concerns. The British War Cabinet openly prioritised maintenance of the economic blockade, deferring all civilian relief until after the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. Eventually, the Allies and Germans agreed to allow limited relief supplies from neutral resources but only under conditions that would not upset military operations for either side. Throughout the crisis, political and military considerations determined the parameters of food relief. Due to the lengthy and detailed negotiation process, the main impact of the Allied contribution to famine relief took place only after hostilities had ended.

Chapter 3 examines the provision of cooked food as famine relief in late nineteeth-century India. Famine relief was undertaken at the local level by officials who interpreted policies and managed the balance between cost saving and lifesaving in different ways. But by the 1890s, there was widespread consensus that government “kitchens” should provide aid in the form of cooked food to children, as many local officials claimed that they were victims of parental neglect. Feeding the “field labourers of the future,” rather than expecting them to be sustained out of their parents’ relief wages, was a way to maximize the future utility of these “units.” For by the end of the nineteenth century, imperial revenue production and saving colonial subjects from starvation were no longer seen to be in tension with each other rather they were intimately linked projects. This chapter demonstrates that the provision of cooked food was a central element of famine relief precisely because it was part of late-Victorian attempts to reconcile humanitarianism and the ongoing economic development of the British Empire.

In the aftermath of natural disasters and in the urgency of the deteriorating situation in a “complex emergency”, aid is often provided in a haphazard manner. Organizing appropriate medical help is complicated by differences in the type of disaster, the available infrastructure that remains in place, the status of the country’s wealth, and, occasionally, the outbreak of violence and epidemics. Nevertheless, a sequential order of priorities and changing needs for various types of medical intervention such as (emergency) surgery, rehabilitation, and obstetrics can be made, as for managing medicinal needs, mental health, and communicable diseases. This chapter describes how this medical landscape changes qualitatively and quantitatively and how resources can be adapted dynamically and reflected in the capacity of the emergency medical team (EMT). Recently, disaster-prone countries have seen an expansion in the capacity of national EMTs. For a variety of reasons these are to be preferred over international EMTs, but where the latter are needed it is important that their competencies and capabilities follow both local and general guidelines.