Introduction: Humanitarianism and Biography

The celebrity journalist Stacey Dooley’s selfie holding a bemused Ugandan child prompted comments that the world did not need any more white saviours. Such self-representations are instantly familiar, for celebrity humanitarian as mediator of compassion has deep historical roots. Humanitarian activists and organisations have always relied upon narratives of the self to promote their work. Their accounts of self-realisation, emotional awakening and spiritual or quasi-spiritual quests for meaning offer a means to self-accountability and function also to promote ideals, causes and organisational identity. Our contention in this Special Issue is that humanitarian biographies – understood here as both life writings and life histories – are crucial to understanding the formation of humanitarianism as a field of cultural production with its own (often highly gendered) genres, emotional repertoires and performativity. On the one hand, as Dal Lago and O’Sullivan have suggested, the life history of the individual can illuminate the contradictions and contingencies in humanitarian action and illustrate the transnational dimensions of their work. On the other hand, personal narratives of spontaneous compassion, spiritual quest and professional values are the means by which moral reason is bestowed upon interventions in strangers’ lives and given social value. Notably, this is a field in which prominent biographies can be made to stand for the consistency of organisational ideals even where the nature of humanitarian work and its funding-base has undergone significant change. An exploration of the interplay between biography as the ‘lived life’ and biography as self-representation is germane to our agenda of critically re-examining the production of the sources of knowledge and authority upon which humanitarian narratives are written, public appeals are made and individual and organisational humanitarian action is undertaken and explicated. The articles in this Special Issue consider the life histories and life writings of individuals in Britain and British-colonial and missionary-imperial settings, at times as lone actors and at others as members of humanitarian organisations, each with distinctly different public profiles and biographical traces, and each instantiating multiple imperial, international and national layers of humanitarian action. These include considerations of the construction of the humanitarian self in female pacifist accounts in our article on Emily Hobhouse and the 1899–1902 South African War and in Bertrand Taithe and Adam Millar’s article on Huddersfield Famine Relief Committee (Hudfam) founder Elizabeth Wilson. Analysis of