Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire by Emily Baughan

Abstract

successful practices respected indigenous traditions and attracted voluntary participation, and then lobby governments and private investors to bring these modalities to other colonies. Chapter 4 offers an especially revealing study of the Buitenzorg botanical garden inDutch Java, the plants and techniques ofwhichwere imported to German East Africa, the Belgian Congo, and French West Africa. But according toWagner, such supposed colonial success stories were inevitably based on “myths.”Theywere neither as profitable nor as transferrable as the experts claimed, and they actually relied on heavy doses of coercion and violence. The true function of places like Buitenzorg was ideological; they stood for the idea that trans-colonial science could improve colonialism. Thus, Wagner concludes that the main function of the ICI was not to improve life for colonial subjects, nor even to enhance the productivity of the colonies. Instead, it helped its members to “boost their careers as colonial experts” (349), with commensurate salaries, pensions, and respect. Chapters 6 to 9 trace the group’s lasting influence from the 1920s into the decolonization era. By the 1930s, it stood in opposition to the liberal reformism of the League of Nation’s Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) and became a haven for fascists and their sympathizers from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. The organization—which renamed itself the Institute of Differing Civilizations (INCIDI) in 1949—even admitted war criminals and notorious antisemites. The group continued to embrace “cultural relativism” and local knowledge, arguing not only that the PMC’s liberal universalism reflected ignorant Eurocentrism but that prominent anticolonial nationalists were unrepresentative of the diverse desires of their people. At times, the significance of the ICI in shaping particular colonial policies can be difficult to ascertain from this book, and Wagner’s claims of wide INCIDI influence into the 1960s are not fully developed. Moreover, the book’s deep research can sometimes result in excessively dense passages. Wagner succeeds, however, in demonstrating the centrality of the ICI to discourses about colonial governance. That the group’s members promoted a remarkably consistent narrative of reform throughout its lifespan should interest the many scholars tracing the role of empire in the construction of twentieth-century internationalism and development.