Religious and secular actors in the emergence of humanitarianism and development

Abstract

The origins of humanitarian and development organisations can be traced to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a time of huge social change in many European countries, with industrialisation changing the shape of people’s domestic and working lives, colonial expansion bringing much of the world into the European orbit, and competition between increasingly nationalistic European countries leading to frequent wars across the continent. These changes brought with them new social ills – increasing poverty and inequality at home, slavery and poor treatment of the ‘others’ in the colonies, and increasing numbers of men wounded on the battlefields of Europe. It was in seeking solutions to these new social problems that new ideas about ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ were born and that the seeds of contemporary NGOs were sown (Barnett 2011, Paulman 2013).