E.D. Morel (1873-1924), the Congo Reform Association, and the History of Human Rights Nathan G. Alexander1 (Published in Britain and the World, Vol. 9, No. 2, (September 2016): pp. 213-235.) The Belgian King Leopold II’s rule in the Congo Free State was one of the most egregious examples of exploitative imperialism. Created at the Berlin Conference (1884-5), a meeting of European powers attempting to settle colonial disputes in Africa, the Congo Free State was Leopold’s personal property. There, he introduced a brutal system of rule which declared all ‘vacant’ lands the property of the state and forced native Africans to gather rubber to meet strict quotas. In response to growing reports of atrocities in the Congo Free State, E.D. Morel (1873-1924), a journalist and shipping clerk from Liverpool, formed the Congo Reform Association (CRA) with the British consul and future Irish nationalist Roger Casement (18641916) in 1904. The CRA mobilised public support to press the British government to take action on the issue and won a victory in 1908 when Belgium annexed the Congo from Leopold and gradually instituted reforms over the following years. Although Morel and the CRA were not entirely satisfied with the reforms, they sensed the weariness of the public mood toward further agitation and decided to declare victory, disbanding in 1913.2 A number of recent works on the CRA have described it as a human rights movement or organisation, paralleling the interest among historians in the history of human rights within the last fifteen years. On the face of it, the idea of the CRA as a human rights organisation seems 1 I would like to thank Colin Kidd, Rosario López, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on this paper. 2 On Morel and the CRA, see Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895-1914 (London, 1968), chapter eight; S.J.S. Cookey, Britain and the Congo Question, 1885-1913 (New York, 1968); Catherine Ann Cline, E.D. Morel 1873-1924: The Strategies of Protest (Belfast, 1980); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston and New York, 1998); Kevin Grant, ‘Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern Lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29, no. 2 (2001): pp. 27–58. Nathan Alexander 1 uncontroversial since the reformers referred to the atrocities as ‘human rights’ violations on several occasions. E.D. Morel spoke of the ‘violation of elemental human rights which was daily occurring in the Congo’.3 Elsewhere he wrote that the atrocities amounted to a ‘wholesale invasion of fundamental human rights’, while Roger Casement described the atrocities as ‘an extraordinary invasion […] of fundamental human rights’.4 Additionally, the reformers used a number of tactics in their campaign that are now familiar among present-day human rights movements, including the display of atrocity photographs, public lectures, mass meetings, celebrity endorsements, detailed reporting, and ‘naming and shaming’ foreign governments. But these similarities are ultimately superficial. Describing the CRA as a human rights movement is anachronistic and misleading: it confuses, rather than clarifies, the CRA’s actual goals in the Congo. While members of the CRA used the term ‘human rights’, it was only rarely; they also discussed ‘native rights’ or ‘the rights of natives’,5 but most often they simply spoke of rights without any descriptors. Their occasional use of the term ‘human rights’ does not indicate that they possessed a coherent and comprehensive ideology of human rights that would be recognisable to twenty-first century people. If one were to travel back in time to ask the CRA reformers to explain what human rights consisted of, their response, if they could formulate one at all, would probably be nothing like the kind of comprehensive response someone would give today. If we are truly concerned about understanding the ideas of Morel and the CRA, labelling them as a human rights movement actually distracts from this goal. 3 E.D. Morel, Great Britain and the Congo (London, 1909), p. 22. E.D. Morel, E.D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement, ed. William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 164; Casement quoted in William Roger Louis, ‘Roger Casement and the Congo’, The Journal of African History 5, no. 1 (March 1964): p. 115. 5 For example Morel, Morel’s History, p. 80; E.D. Morel, Red Rubber, Revised Edition (London and Manchester, 1919 [1906]), p. 8; E.D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Manchester and London, 1920), p. 232; Morel, Great Britain and the Congo, p. 34. 4 Nathan Alexander 2 This article will draw primarily on the writings of E.D. Morel, the chief ideologue of the CRA, supplemented by the writings of other CRA members, to explain the organisation’s understanding of rights and their goals in the Congo. In doing so, the article will show that the CRA’s conception of rights and their solution to the atrocities differ dramatically from those of present-day human rights organisations. Morel and the other CRA members were not human rights pioneers, but instead were political activists who found solutions that were available to them within their own historical context. This article will first begin with a discussion of historians’ characterisations of the CRA as a human rights movement and will situate these characterisations within the emerging literature on the history of human rights. Earlier histories of human rights found versions of human rights lurking in all times and places, yet Samuel Moyn has recently challenged this view and instead argued that our present concept of human rights did not emerge until the 1970s. This article will draw on Moyn’s insights and apply them to critique historians’ characterisation of the CRA as a human rights organisation. The second section will discuss the Congo reformers’ views of the natives in the Congo as racially and culturally distinct from and at a lower level of civilisation than Europeans. This lays the groundwork for the third section of the article, which discusses how Morel saw the restoration of the natives’ right to trade as a vital tool in the civilising mission. In his eyes, the most important right for the natives was their right to trade freely, a right that encouraged the development of commercial society and therefore one that played an essential role in the civilising mission. The right to trade was intrinsically important, yet perhaps most important because of its civilising potential. The fourth and final section examines the Congo reformers’ visions for an ideal colony. The CRA wanted the Congo to be run as a trusteeship, a form of colonial governance run for the benefit of the natives by protecting Nathan Alexander 3 their institutions, developing their economy, and raising them to a higher level of civilisation. Given the CRA’s belief in racial and civilisational hierarchy, their emphasis on the right to trade and its civilising component, and their support for colonialism, albeit in a limited form, it is inappropriate to describe the CRA as a human rights organisation. 1. Human Rights in History Recent historians have portrayed the CRA as one of the steps in the emergence of present-day human rights movements. The earliest work to describe the organisation in this way was a 1997 collection of Presbyterian missionary documents about the ‘human rights struggle’ occurring in the Congo.6 More influential, however, was Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), which charts the history of the Congo Free State and the subsequent campaign against Leopold. In the final pages of the book, Hochschild carries his narrative of the CRA’s triumph into the present by placing the CRA into a tradition of human rights activism which ‘goes back to the French Revolution and beyond […] from the slave revolts of the Americas to the half-century of resistance that brought Nelson Mandela to power in South Africa’.7 The CRA represents ‘a vital link in that chain’ which led to present-day human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières.8 ‘At the time of the Congo controversy a hundred years ago’, Hochschild concludes, ‘the idea of full human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of most countries on earth. It still is today’.9 The implication seems to be that Morel and his colleagues were advocating ‘full human rights, political, social, and economic’ for the people of the Congo.10 6 Robert Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa: A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and the Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 1890-1918 (Leiden, 1997). 7 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 306. 8 Ibid., pp. 305–6. Quotation on p. 306. 9 Ibid., p. 306. 10 See also Adam Hochschild, ‘Belgian Congo’, in Encyclopedia of Human Rights, ed. David P. Forsythe (Oxford, 2009). Nathan Alexander 4 Other historians have, following Hochschild’s lead, reflexively labelled the CRA a human rights organisation. The historian of genocide Robert G. Weisbord describes the CRA as ‘the first global human rights campaign of the new century’.11 Likewise, Paul Gordon Lauren, in his history of human rights, calls E.D. Morel ‘one of the most influential human rights visionaries of his time’.12 The CRA also receives a brief entry in the Historical Dictionary of Human Rights, which explains that the CRA opposed ‘the gross violations of human rights committed in the Congo Free State’.13 Sharon Sliwinski, in her discussion of the use of photography in the Congo Campaign, echoes these remarks as she describes the CRA as ‘the 20th century’s first great human rights movement’ that was ‘a forerunner to the work of present-day humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International’.14 Even the Human Rights Watch website describes the CRA as ‘one of the 20th century's first international human rights movements’ in a timeline of the Congo on their website.15 Earlier historical works on the CRA do not describe the organisation in these terms, indicative of the recent interest in tracing the origins and development of the concept of human rights.16 Many of the above works do not engage with the recent literature on the history of the concept of human rights. Histories of human rights written in the first decade of the 2000s, like Paul Gordon Lauren’s or Micheline Ishay’s, have attempted to trace the roots of human rights from antiquity up to the present, locating human rights pioneers in a number of societies across 11 Robert G. Weisbord, ‘The King, the Cardinal, and the Pope: Leopold II’s Genocide in the Congo and the Vatican’, Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 1 (2003): p. 35. 12 Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2003), p. 76. 13 Jacques Fomerand, Historical Dictionary of Human Rights (Lanham, Maryland, 2014), p. 177. 14 Sharon Sliwinski, ‘The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo’, Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (December 2006): p. 334. 15 ‘DR Congo: Chronology’, Human Rights Watch, 21 August 2009, http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/08/20/dr-congochronology-key-events. Accessed 25 February 2015. 16 The CRA is not described as a human rights organisation in Cookey, Bernard Porter, or Cline. Nathan Alexander 5 time and space.17 Lynn Hunt has narrowed the concept and pushed the emergence of human rights up to the Enlightenment, particularly in the period leading up to the French Revolution.18 Other historians have gone further and argued that the concept of human rights did not emerge until the 1940s as the experience of the Second World War led to international attempts at codifying human rights.19 Yet Samuel Moyn has done more than anyone to overturn conventional wisdom surrounding the history of human rights, principally in The Last Utopia from 2010. In this work, he criticises triumphalist histories of human rights which ‘have rarely conceded that earlier history left open diverse paths into the future, rather than paving a single road toward current ways of thinking and acting’.20 Moyn compares recent historians of human rights to church historians who ‘regard the basic cause [either human rights or Christianity] […] as a saving truth, discovered rather than made in history’.21 Furthermore, he explains, ‘the heroes who are viewed as advancing human rights in the world – much like the church historian’s apostles and saints – are generally treated with uncritical wonderment’.22 Moyn argues that the democratic revolutions in Europe and the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invoked rights that made sense within and were guaranteed by the nation state.23 This, to Moyn, is why these kinds of rights cannot be considered human rights, since they were inextricably tied up with citizenship in a national community. It is also for this reason that he does not consider the anticolonial movements of the twentieth century human rights movements, since they used the language of 17 Lauren; Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley, 2004). 18 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York and London, 2008). 19 Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York, 1990); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2005). 20 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2010), p. 5. 21 Ibid., p. 6. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., pp. 12-3, 23-31. Nathan Alexander 6 national self-determination, not international human rights. As with the revolutions of previous centuries, rights were meant to exist within the nation state, not to transcend it.24 Moyn contends that, despite a brief flurry of interest in the 1940s, our present concept of human rights did not really emerge until the 1970s, as other utopian projects like communism or nationalism collapsed and individuals and organisations began to speak of human rights that went beyond sovereign borders.25 Moyn’s criticisms of human rights historians are on target in general and they apply equally well to those who have labelled the CRA a human rights organisation.26 Such a label ultimately obscures the CRA’s actual views by depicting them as thoroughly modern activists. This article therefore endorses and further supports Moyn’s critique of teleological histories of human rights. I do not wish to suggest that human rights are without a history, but that, following Moyn, our present conception of human rights began well into the twentieth century.27 This does not foreclose the possibility of noting how actors and events in the past might have contributed to the development of this concept, but such an approach always runs the risk of creating a teleological history in which the end point of the triumph of human rights is never far out of sight. This flawed approach ultimately hinders our understanding of the past by making the importance of historical actors’ ideas contingent on the extent to which they informed present ones, instead of attempting to understand why historical actors found these ideas meaningful at the time. To demonstrate the problem with teleological histories, Moyn cites the work of Jorge Luis Borges, in which Borges playfully finds seeming precursors to the novelist Franz Kafka throughout literary history. Yet, of course, as Moyn points out, ‘[t]he earlier writers 24 Ibid., p. 84-119. Ibid., pp. 3-4, 120–75. 26 Moyn does not discuss the CRA, although in another work he uses King Leopold as an example of the dangers of rulers professing humanitarian motives for sinister ends. Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History (London and New York, 2014), p. 37. 27 For my argument, whether the present idea of human rights emerged in the 1940s or 1970s is not pertinent, only that it was after the time of CRA. 25 Nathan Alexander 7 were trying to be not Kafka but themselves. […] [N]o one would even have seen them as anticipating Kafka had he never emerged’.28 The same point can be made about the seeming pioneers of human rights. They were not trying to anticipate the present concept, but trying to find solutions that made sense within their own context. Their ideas might have contributed to the development of the eventual emergence of human rights, yet to explain why human rights emerged when they did requires looking later into the twentieth century, as Moyn contends. Devin O. Pendas seems to be the only scholar who has critically engaged with the recent historiography of human rights in relation to the Congo Campaign. He presents the CRA as a potential challenge to Moyn’s thesis about the later emergence of human rights. Pendas acknowledges that the reformers’ rhetoric often involved ‘condescending paternalism’ and ‘“humanitarian” sympathy, not human rights’, but asks, ‘was the end result all that different? […] Is not what matters the notion that all human beings deserve a certain minimum protection from ill treatment?’29 This is also a position that Hochschild takes in King Leopold’s Ghost. As he writes, ‘Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights’.30 But the difference between the CRA and present-day human rights organisations is not merely one of terminology. The Congo reformers were not simply human rights pioneers minus the name and with a dash of paternalism – they were something fundamentally different. The remainder of the article will therefore explain how they differed from present-day organisations and will show why a characterisation of the CRA as a human rights movement is anachronistic and misleading. 2. Imagining ‘the Native’ 28 Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 11. Devin O. Pendas, ‘Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights’, Contemporary European History 21, no. 1 (February 2012): p. 107. 30 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 305. 29 Nathan Alexander 8 Central to evaluating the legitimacy of the description of the CRA as a human rights movement is to understand their conception of the natives of the Congo. The nineteenth century was shot through with scientific and cultural theories of race and these ideas influenced the Congo reformers.31 Much of Morel’s thinking about the natives was transmitted to him by Mary Kingsley, who believed in a kind of racial essentialism in which Africans and Europeans were fundamentally and permanently different. This racial relativism led Morel and his contemporaries to desire the preservation of many elements seemingly unique to African culture since they felt these were best suited to the African race. Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) was an English explorer who made two trips to Africa and wrote two large books describing her experiences there and her theories of governance. Unusual about Kingsley was the fact that she was a single woman traveling through Africa without male accompaniment and her ideas about colonial policy that stressed the retention of native institutions wherever possible.32 She lamented the imposition of European customs on African peoples – ‘I like the African in his bush state best’ – and believed this was actually harmful to their well-being.33 Indeed, she noted how ‘civilisation and reformation’ could exacerbate ‘the degeneration of these native tribes’.34 While she believed Europeans had a duty to civilise Africans as far as possible, she did ‘not believe that the white race will ever drag the black up to their own particular summit in the mountain range of civilisation’. This was because the African is not keen on mountaineering in the civilisation range. He prefers remaining down below and being comfortable. He is not conceited about this; he 31 On nineteenth-century ideas of race in Britain, see Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971); Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester, 1978); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, Conn., 1982); George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987). 32 On Kingsley’s life, see Dea Birkett, Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress (London, 1992). 33 Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London, 1897), p. 677. 34 Ibid., p. 403. Nathan Alexander 9 admires the higher culture very much, and the people who inconvenience themselves by going in for it – but do it himself? NO.35 Kingsley’s ideas about colonial policy stemmed from her polygenist racial thought, which posited distinct origins for different racial groups, in contrast to the monogenist view that all humans descended from a single source.36 While it was theoretically possible for one to have a polygenist view without believing in a racial hierarchy, this was not true for Kingsley: ‘I own I regard not only the African, but all coloured races, as inferior – inferior in kind not in degree – to the white races’.37 She disavowed notions that Africans were incapable of learning, yet rejected the popular abolitionist sentiment ‘that the African is a man and brother. And man he is, but not of the same species’.38 It seems clear then, that her polygenist thinking informed her colonial policy of encouraging the retention of native institutions: racial relativism led to cultural relativism. Kingsley’s thought had a profound influence on Morel. ‘She was’, Morel’s biographer, Catherine Cline, says, ‘quite simply, the strongest intellectual influence in his life’.39 Morel was, however, less inclined than Kingsley to engage in ordering the races hierarchically. His racial philosophy was very much relativistic and he argued that policies must be crafted to particular races since ‘there can be no common definition of progress or common standard for all mankind’.40 Despite this, the idea of a racial hierarchy lingered in Morel’s speculations on the racial origins of various African groups. The Fulani, the dominant political group of the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria, were not typical black Africans in Morel’s judgment. The Fulani 35 Ibid., p. 680. Ibid., pp. 458–60; on polygenesis and monogenesis, see Stocking, Jr., pp. 64–9. 37 Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, pp. 669. 38 Ibid., p. 672. 39 Cline, p. 16. 40 E.D. Morel, Nigeria: Its People and Its Problems, 2nd ed. (London, 1912), 151; see also Morel, Black Man’s Burden, p. 159. 36 Nathan Alexander 10 men were ‘copper or bronze complexioned’ while the females had ‘rounded breasts’, ‘[n]ot pearshaped, as with the negress’. This led Morel to conclude that the Fulani were undoubtedly ‘Asiatics’ descended from the ancient Hyksos people.41 After a visit to Nigeria in 1911, Morel said of the Fulani, ‘you are aware of an indefinable sentiment of affinity in dealing with them. They are a white, not a black race’.42 In another work, Morel discussed the Bakuba and Baluba people in the Kasai region of the Congo. They were ‘a people lighter in skin, of aristocratic bearing with features of greater refinement than we have met in the true forest’.43 With these groups, ‘[w]e are conscious of having touched the high-water mark of African indigenous civilisation’.44 The ruling classes of Africa, to Morel, seemed unrelated to the black races, implying that the lighter-skinned races were naturally suited to ruling.45 One can also see Morel’s cultural and racial relativism in his discussions of Christianity and Islam in Africa. Christianity ignored ‘racial idiosyncrasies’ and had a ‘tendency […] to denationalise’ West Africans.46 Furthermore, Christianity’s opposition to polygamy was another reason for its failure to take hold. Since ‘the sexual side of man’s nature becomes more pronounced as the tropical zone is approached’, many people ‘in West African educated native circles’ held that ‘the effects of monogamy upon the Negro are racially destructive’.47 While Christianity tended to ‘denationalise’ Africans, ‘Islam, on the other hand, not only encourages the spirit of nationality in the African, but intensifies it’.48 Christianity might yet thrive in West Africa, but for that to happen, the West African church needed to be ‘founded […] upon a wise 41 E.D. Morel, Affairs of West Africa (London, 1902), p. 151. Morel, Nigeria, p. 119. 43 Morel, Morel’s History, p. 24. 44 Ibid., p. 25. 45 This view is not unique to Morel. See the case of European views of the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda: Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (London, 1997), pp. 5–9. 46 Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 224. 47 Ibid., p. 226. Emphasis in original. 48 Ibid., p. 229. 42 Nathan Alexander 11 recognition that what is good and proper and right for one great branch of the human family may be bad, improper, and wrong for another’.49 That Islam was better suited to Africans than Christianity was held by other Victorians, including the African explorer and iconoclast Richard Burton, one of Mary Kingsley’s heroes. Burton’s belief in polygenesis enabled him to take a relativist approach: Islam might not be the superior religion, but it was ideally suited to the African race at this moment in their history.50 This racial essentialism had implications for colonial policy, which will be discussed in greater detail below. Broadly, Kingsley and Morel both rejected the Europeanisation of Africans as contrary to their racial essence and identity. Morel’s 1911 visit to Nigeria, then a British possession, allowed him to see colonial governance firsthand. He remarked favourably on the continued use of African dress, since ‘[i]t is much healthier for him [the African]. It is preservation of his racial identity’.51 The African who adopted European dress was ‘far less long lived than his ancestors, and has far fewer children’. In all, the rush to bring European customs to West Africa was ‘totally unscientific’.52 Morel also supported education that taught local geography and history and other skills that would be relevant to Africans, rather than topics that European children would learn about.53 But Morel’s racial essentialism also had a less benign aspect to it. After the end of World War One, he railed against the French use of African troops to occupy the Rhineland in his pamphlet, Horror on the Rhine. His main target was what he saw as French militarism, but in particular he focused on the outrage of using these troops in Germany, a further indignity after their recent defeat. As part of his argument, Morel pointed to the ‘strong 49 Ibid., p. 237. Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 2007), pp. 157–63. 51 Morel, Nigeria, pp. 219–20. 52 Morel, Black Man’s Burden, p. 160. 53 Morel, Nigeria, pp. 162–3. 50 Nathan Alexander 12 sexual instincts’ of the African soldiers, which ‘must be satisfied upon the bodies of white women’.54 Morel, again inspired by Kingsley, rejected both negative and idealised portrayals of Africa – the latter more insidious since they had ostensibly benevolent motives, yet led to equally damaging outcomes. Such sentimentality had no place in Morel’s thinking. In one work, he boasted that his critics would need ‘a microscope of great power to detect any sentimentalism in the ensuing pages’.55 Morel mocked the negative image of ‘the native as an abject being, brutish, lazy, and degraded, greatly honoured by the bestowal of a bible, a suit of clothes’,56 but he also condemned sentimental portrayals of the African ‘as a half-babe, half-saint, to be petted and veneered with an outward culture altogether foreign to his ideas, leaping over twelve centuries in a few years’.57 A more realistic view, however, would take note of the fact ‘that the West African is a land-owner, […] an agriculturalist, a farmer, a herdsman, and, above all, to the marrow of his bones, a trader’.58 Part of the basis for these racial differences was the climate and environment, an idea that dated back at least to the eighteenth century.59 Morel accepted the idea that certain races were better suited for certain environments than others. Given the high mortality rates for Europeans in West Africa, dubbed ‘the white man’s grave’, Morel labelled the chances that whites could ever inhabit the region ‘excessively remote; so remote, indeed, as to be outside the sphere of useful discussion’.60 The region will therefore ‘always remain unsuitable for European colonisation’.61 It was partly for this reason that West Africa lagged so far behind a country like India in 54 E.D. Morel, The Horror on the Rhine, 8th ed. (London, 1921), pp. 9–10. Emphasis in original. Morel, Great Britain and the Congo, p. 28. 56 Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 30. 57 Morel, Red Rubber, p. 188. 58 Morel, Nigeria, p. xxi. Emphasis in original. 59 Stocking, Jr., pp. 13–4. 60 Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 20. 61 Ibid., p. 21. Emphasis in original. 55 Nathan Alexander 13 civilisational terms. Europeans were unable to survive long periods in West Africa and therefore ‘[t]he agent of civilisation dies on the threshold of the country which he comes to develop’.62 Morel’s theory about the importance of the land to the natives, explained in greater detail below, was partly based on the notion that Africa was a region inhospitable to Europeans. The natives were the only ones who could collect the produce from their land and the only way Europeans could access these resources was by developing a trading relationship with the African inhabitants. As Mary Kingsley pointed out, in America and Australasia, the British had exterminated the natives and had profited by doing so, but this strategy simply could not be applied to Africa: If you were to-morrow to kill every native there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist, geologist, mineralogist, &c., but a place of no good to any one else in England.63 Ideas about race and climate informed the CRA’s view of civilisation and progress. Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions both contained narratives of societal progress, but Enlightenment thinkers, particularly from Scotland and France, sketched out a more precise framework in which societies moved, more or less in a linear fashion, from savagery to barbarism and finally to civilisation.64 The British school of political economy, in the early nineteenth century, assigned an important role to commerce in the distinction between savage and civilised people.65 Morel accepted that the Congo natives sat on a lower rung on the ladder of civilisation, though he did not hold their backward state against them. ‘Barbarism’, Morel explained, ‘which is merely a stage in human development, has, in the case of the Congo natives, been talked and written of as 62 Ibid., p. 155. Mary Kingsley, West African Studies, 2nd ed. (London, 1901 [1899]), p. 315. 64 Stocking, Jr., pp. 10–19. 65 Ibid., p. 32. 63 Nathan Alexander 14 though it were a crime’.66 To Morel and the CRA, the natives were in a lower state of human civilisation and they therefore had a duty to uplift them to a higher level. Despite the relativistic and somewhat sympathetic views of Africans, it is clear that on the whole Morel and the Congo reformers did not view Africans as equal to Europeans: they were inferior in terms of race, culture, and civilisation. Since equality is a fundamental premise of human rights, this fact strikes a blow against the idea of the CRA as a human rights organisation. Furthermore, as we will see in the next section, these racial ideas had implications for which rights certain groups were granted, and the instrumental reason for granting them these rights. 3. The Right to Trade Freely The central violation of the natives’ rights, in the eyes of the CRA, was Leopold’s confiscation of native land and its produce, and the natives’ subsequent inability to freely trade it. The CRA’s criticism of the Congo Free State was not criticism of colonialism itself. Rather, as their dispute with the Aborigines Protection Society shows, it was about the specific kind of colonialism being practised which violated the natives’ right to trade. The outrage at this violation was not only because the rights to land and to trade were tied up with all other rights, but also because commerce had a vital role to play in the civilising mission. Violating the natives’ right to trade damaged their chance to reach a higher level of civilisation. This contradicted the goals of the 1884-5 Berlin Conference, namely, to civilise the natives and to respect free trade. What Morel and the CRA wanted was simply for Leopold to respect the aims of the Berlin Conference. To Morel, the natives’ rights to their land and to freely trade the produce thereof were bound up with all other rights. The system in the Congo destroyed the natives’ ‘right to buy and to sell the produce of their country’, but also ‘their right to dispose freely of their own labour, 66 Morel, Morel’s History, p. 11. Nathan Alexander 15 their right to the freedom of their very movements, [and] their rights over their very bodies!’67 As Morel explained, the key features of the Congo system stemmed from decrees made by Leopold in 1891-2, in which he declared all supposedly ‘vacant’ lands – meaning areas not in a village or under cultivation – and their resources, particularly rubber, the property of the state. This meant that the natives were stripped of their ownership of the land and could only trade its fruits with Leopold’s agents.68 The consequences of this were far-reaching: ‘Enjoyment of their [the natives’] land and its products had passed from them. Their labour was no longer their own to dispose of. Their polity was shattered. Their whole social life disrupted’.69 Writing to Morel in 1908, Charles Dilke, one of the chief allies of the CRA in the House of Commons, reflected on Morel’s importance in heightening the public’s understanding of the connection between the right to trade and all other rights: ‘You showed us that all depended upon the right of the original black inhabitants of the soil to own their property and carry on trade’.70 Morel attempted to show that Leopold’s system in the Congo was, by its very nature, harmful to the natives’ rights. It was not just individual atrocities, of which there were many, but the specific system itself that was the problem: the ‘connection between the immoral economics and personal cruelty’ of Leopold’s system was ‘inseparable’.71 In a 1902 letter to William Thomas Stead, a journalist and early ally of Morel, Morel explained that the focus needed to remain on root causes, since ‘it matters not whether you have 10,000 records of reputed atrocities or only one’.72 As Morel and the CRA strived to show, the Leopoldian system was not characteristic of all forms of empire, but was uniquely evil because of its denial of the natives’ 67 Morel, Great Britain and the Congo, pp. 218–9. ‘Trade’ is a misnomer: the requirement to fulfill rubber quotas, by force if necessary, meant that the natives were essentially enslaved. 69 Morel, Morel’s History, p. 44. 70 Quoted in ibid., p. 67. 71 Ibid., p. 138. 72 Quoted in ibid., p. 112. 68 Nathan Alexander 16 right to their land and their ability to trade. The situation in the Congo, Morel wrote, ‘does not belong […] to that class of regretable [sic] incidents from which the history of no Colonial Power is altogether free’.73 It was here that Morel disagreed with other critics of the Congo Free State, particularly H.R. Fox Bourne, the leader of the Aborigines Protection Society (APS). Fox Bourne and the APS were critical of imperialism since they believed it inevitably harmed indigenous people, while Morel did not accept that the Leopoldian system in the Congo was a typical example of imperialism. To him, the difference between the Congo Free State and a British colonial possession was not one of degree, but kind. Fox Bourne, Morel stated, ‘was prone to think European interference with coloured peoples had no redeeming features, and that the Congo horror was merely the inevitable result, in specially aggravated form, of contact between the White and Black races on African soil’.74 To suggest that the Congo Free State was representative of all forms of imperialism, as Fox Bourne seemed to, ‘was to show a complete lack of perspective’.75 Morel criticised many features of British imperial governance, but he never maintained that imperialism per se was wrong. This meant that the CRA could oppose Leopold’s system specifically, while not questioning the necessity of Britain’s own imperial efforts. A large part of these efforts were, from Morel’s perspective, directed toward civilising the native people, chiefly through the introduction of free trade. While the right to trade had an intrinsic value for Morel and the CRA, it also had the instrumental value of advancing a society from a lower level of civilisation to a higher one. This kind of thinking was influenced by debates surrounding abolition that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, when it was contended that the introduction of ‘legitimate trade’ would replace that of slaves. Thomas Fowell 73 E.D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (London, 1904), p. xii. Morel, Morel’s History, p. 56. 75 Ibid., p. 164. 74 Nathan Alexander 17 Buxton, an abolitionist and humanitarian, wrote in 1840 that ‘[l]egitimate commerce would put down the Slave Trade, by demonstrating the superior value of man as a labourer on the soil, to man as an object of merchandise’.76 But ‘legitimate trade’, aside from being an antidote to the slave trade, was also a step in the development of human civilisations. This belief was a standard of mid nineteenth-century humanitarian thought, as seen for example in the work of Saxe Bannister, a colonial official in Australia, who wrote in 1830 that ‘[i]t is universally agreed that trade is an important means of civilisation’.77 David Livingstone, the famous missionary to Africa, similarly believed commerce was one of the keys to uplifting the natives to a higher level of civilisation.78 Humanitarians’ belief, however, in the veracity of the link between commerce, civilisation, and Christianity ebbed and flowed over the course of the century.79 While Morel’s rhetoric was devoid of the Christian overtones that animated earlier abolitionist and humanitarian arguments, he echoed their ideas about the importance of trade as a civilising force. It was, Morel wrote, universally recognized that commercial intercourse is, above all things, the surest medium for an advancement of communities from a state of primitive barbarism to a greater knowledge of arts and crafts, and, generally speaking, to a higher conception of life.80 The manner in which trade would civilise was illustrated by Morel by way of a story. He described a simple scene of African village life before the arrival of Europeans, where the people ‘are happy […] in their primitive way’. After a steamship carrying white men appeared, the natives quickly learned that ‘[t]he white men have come in peace, and with many marvellous 76 Quoted in Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), p. 210. 77 Quoted in Bernard Porter, p. 24. 78 Bolt, p. 129. 79 See Andrew Porter, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan’, The Historical Journal 28, no. 3 (September 1985): pp. 597–621. 80 Morel, King Leopold’s Rule, p. 4; see also Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 21. Nathan Alexander 18 articles to sell’. In Morel’s tale, the Africans discovered that in return for natural resources like ivory and rubber, they would receive ‘gaudy handkerchiefs, and cloth, brass wire, beads, iron pots, and copper rods for it [in this case rubber], and many more wonderful things’.81 The African men coveted the brass to make various ornaments, while the African women wanted goods to enhance their beauty: ‘If Lofinda has set her heart upon that string of bright blue beads, Yamina must have that kerchief with the gorgeous checks; and shall Bikela, the comely one, see her beauty reflected in that curious shiny thing, brighter even than the spear of Molobo her lover?’ Morel concluded, Thus is trade born in Western Africa, the trade between the white man and the African: the only incentive to the widening in the horizon of the African, the only incentive to acquire new ideas, to develop arts and crafts; the awakening of desires before undreamt of – a page in the evolution of the human race.82 By essentially turning Africans into consumers of European goods, they would become civilised. No longer would they live by subsisting only on the basic necessities of life; they would be brought into the modern civilised world through commerce. It should not be surprising that Morel emphasised the role of free trade given his commercial background. He spent over ten years working for the Elder Dempster shipping company, based in Liverpool, which maintained a considerable trading relationship with West Africa. Additionally, he was the editor of a newspaper, the West African Mail, that promoted trade with Africa,83 and his books frequently gushed about the vast and untapped potential of Africa as a centre of commerce and natural resources. In one work, for example, Morel wrote of ‘the fertility and producing power and almost boundless resources of West Africa’.84 One of 81 Morel, King Leopold’s Rule, p. 34. Ibid., p. 35. 83 Cline, pp. 29–30. 84 Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 2. 82 Nathan Alexander 19 Morel’s early supporters, introduced to him by Mary Kingsley, was the merchant John Holt, a trader in West Africa known for his ‘fair dealing’ and his ‘deep and genuine’ concern for his African trading partners.85 Holt was a friend and follower of Kingsley and the two teamed up with Morel to oppose, unsuccessfully, the imposition of a hut tax in the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1898.86 Holt was an early patron of Morel’s agitation against Leopold, and while Holt was no doubt sincere in his opposition to Leopold’s system, he also had a financial interest in opposing it. His business was dependent on trade with West Africa and he was worried about the trend toward state trading monopolies in Leopold’s Congo and the neighbouring French Congo that would cut into his business.87 While Holt and by extension Morel had a financial interest in encouraging free trade with Africa, this does not mean their motives were cynical and selfserving. They believed all parties would benefit from the introduction of free trade: Africans would receive European manufactured goods, while Europeans would gain resources attainable only with the help of Africans. To criticise Leopold, Morel highlighted the promises made at the Berlin Conference.88 The goals of the conference, aside from defusing European rivalries in Africa, included, in Morel’s words, ‘a desire to protect the natives of Africa from injustice and expropriation; to guarantee them in the peaceful possession of their land and property’, to put down the Arab slave trade, and, most importantly in Morel’s view, ‘to maintain and develop trade’.89 Statements from participants at the conference showed their support for these goals. At the conference, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, for example, explained that all those attending the conference 85 Cline, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 18–20. 87 Ibid., pp. 33, 49–50; Bernard Porter, p. 244–5. 88 On the Berlin Conference, see William Roger Louis, ‘The Berlin Congo Conference’, in France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, ed. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (New Haven and London, 1971), pp. 167–220. 89 Morel, King Leopold’s Rule, p. 4. 86 Nathan Alexander 20 ‘share the wish to bring the natives of Africa within the pale of civilisation by opening up the interior of that continent to commerce’.90 Among the articles of the Berlin Act, agreed to at the conference, were that all nations should be free to trade in Africa and that the European powers ‘bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral well-being’.91 As seen in the rhetoric of the participants, the twin goals of opening the continent to free trade and civilising the natives were closely intertwined. Morel summarised the conference and resulting act this way: Freedom of commerce, synonymous with the freedom of the native – that was, and is, the truth – the truth we are preaching now; the truth embodied in the Berlin Act; […] the truth King Leopold and his agents bound themselves on their personal honour and by public pledges to adhere to.92 For Morel and the CRA then, what was desired in the Congo was for Leopold and Belgium to live up to the high ideals of the Berlin Act. Britain had a responsibility to take action against Leopold because of their support at the conference. Britain ‘recognised a benevolent and civilising enterprise’, Morel insisted, ‘not a piratical undertaking’.93 The fact that the Congo reformers continually called for a new conference of the European powers to decide on the fate of the Congo showed that they found nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, only the Leopoldian version. Indeed, one prominent CRA supporter, Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books, offered a partition of the Congo territory between France, Germany, and Britain as one potential solution.94 He believed that all those nations, for the most part, acted in benevolent ways, although he noted France had enacted policies in the French Congo similar 90 Ibid. Ibid., p. 6. 92 Ibid., p. 14. 93 Morel, Red Rubber, p. 177. 94 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo (New York, 1909), pp. 124–5. 91 Nathan Alexander 21 to those of Leopold.95 He did, however, explain that ‘[t]he French Colonial system has usually been excellent, and there is, therefore, every reason to believe that this one result of evil example will soon be amended’.96 The CRA believed that the natives possessed a right to trade, which was suitable to their particular level of civilisation. Far from a present-day human rights movement in which rights are intrinsically important, this right, to Morel and the CRA members, also had an instrumental value that made sense only within a hierarchical view of human societies. Since the Congo natives sat at a lower rung on the ladder of civilisation, participation in global commerce would gradually allow them to rise to a higher level. This was the intended goal of the participants at the Berlin Conference and the CRA simply wanted the goals of the conference to be upheld in the Congo. 4. The Colonial Ideal In place of Leopold’s system, the Congo reformers advocated a colonial trusteeship, in which the colony was run for the benefit of the natives. Even if one could make the case that establishing a colonial regime in order to protect human rights is not itself a violation of the subject people’s human rights, the Congo reformers desired much more than that form of colonialism. While Morel, again influenced by Mary Kingsley, believed that colonial rule should be indirect and should preserve native institutions whenever possible, he also saw European intervention in Africa as necessary to set up stronger and more effective native institutions and to instruct the natives about more scientific ways to manage their resources to be able to participate in the global commercial order. He speculated about the idea of a charter of rights for African people, yet this was not one recognising their rights as humans, but how they would be treated under a colonial regime. 95 96 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 118. Nathan Alexander 22 The Congo reformers did not worry about the legitimacy of colonialism. ‘We old-fashioned Teutons’, Kingsley proclaimed, ‘want and we will have all the world we can, and we will have it no burden to us; nor will we calmly allow England to be a burden on those we gather beneath the shadow of her wings’.97 Morel was less strident than Kingsley, but he never doubted that the ‘proper function’ of European colonialism in Africa was to be ‘trustee for, and protector of, the native peoples’.98 In this sense, the Congo Free State was ‘in contradistinction to the modern civilised conception of a tropical possession in which the European power regards itself as overlord, trustee for the people, their protector against foreign aggression and their helper in the economic development of their own country’.99 With trusteeship, the European ‘over-lords’ knew what was best for the natives, and the natives, if they were able, would consent to such a system. But uplifting the natives did not mean imposing European customs on them. Following Kingsley’s ideas, Morel believed that enlightened colonial policy should civilise the natives, but not Europeanise them. As Kingsley explained, ‘By destroying native institutions there, you merely lower the moral [sic] of the African race, stop trade, and with it the culture advantages it brings both to England and West Africa’.100 When possible, Europeans should attempt to rule indirectly through native leadership. Aside from the principle of respecting native institutions, indirect rule made sense from a financial point of view, since in a large territory like Nigeria, it would be incredibly expensive to staff a government composed entirely of Europeans.101 For indirect rule, Morel encouraged ‘training the natives to govern themselves instead of trying to govern them ourselves’.102 One wonders why, if native Africans already had their own systems of 97 Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 420. Morel, Black Man’s Burden, p. 234. 99 Morel, Great Britain and the Congo, p. 200. 100 Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 332. 101 Morel, Nigeria, pp. 138–9. 102 Ibid., p. 145. 98 Nathan Alexander 23 government, they would need to be trained by Europeans how to rule. Morel partly addressed this point later in the work when he insisted that native rulers had proved inept at using public revenues for the benefit of their own people.103 Another goal of a colonial trusteeship, ‘the highest conception of Imperialism’,104 was to preserve and strength native institutions, particularly the African system of land tenure, where the land was held by the community: a system, in Morel’s view, that ‘is an infinitely better, sounder and healthier system than that which the British people tolerate and suffer from in their own country’.105 ‘The preservation of the land of Africa for its peoples is thus’, Morel explained, ‘the “acid” test of trusteeship’.106 But what did native institutions actually need protection from? Morel explained that if European governments left Africa, this would leave the continent open to even more rapacious characters: If to-morrow the Governments washed their hands of them [Africans] and retired from the country, these races would become the prey of international freebooters far more numerous and infinitely more powerful than the adventurers who fought for supremacy in the Slave trade up and down the West Coast of Africa, ravaged the Carnatic and pillaged the Americas.107 In other words, Africa would fall prey to Europeans either way; it was therefore left to Britain and other European governments to ensure that the rulers in Africa were at least benevolent. Another reason for European intervention in Africa was to teach the native people how to develop their economy and better exploit their natural resources. Whether the natives actually wanted to do this did not seem to have entered into Morel’s thinking. In any case, he believed Europe could lend its technical and scientific expertise to Africa, but not its institutions: 103 Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 152. 105 Morel, Black Man’s Burden, p. 199. 106 Ibid., p. 197. 107 Ibid., p. 180. 104 Nathan Alexander 24 Tropical Western Africa needs the assistance which Europe is able to give to its peoples and to its economic development in the shape of railways, good roads, improved waterways, harbours, ocean and river craft, technical instruction, internal security, medical and sanitary services. It needs the European-trained administrator, the merchant, or buyer for the European manufacturer, the engineer, forestry officer, entomologist. It does not require the European company promoter and planter; nor Europe’s land laws and social customs.108 This was in keeping with his philosophy of indirect rule. Since ‘[t]he natives require breathing space’, Europeans should limit themselves to constructing public works projects, collecting ethnographic information, strengthening native institutions, protecting trade, and developing native industries.109 Given Morel’s interest and background in commerce, it comes as no surprise that a frequent topic of discussion was on finding more efficient and ‘scientific’ ways of harvesting the fruits of the land. With regard to the ‘great oil-palm industry’ in Nigeria, Morel believed it was necessary to develop a ‘thorough and comprehensive plan of teaching the natives more scientific methods of production’.110 On rubber cultivation, meanwhile, Morel noted that Lagos had outperformed other coastal areas, but ‘the wastefulness, or perhaps it would be fairer to say the lack of scientific knowledge on the part of the natives in tapping the trees and vines’ had hindered production.111 Morel recommended the creation of instructional centres to teach the natives the ‘scientific’ way to collect rubber. The heads of these centres would have no formal power but would act as an ‘instructor, supervisor, guide, and assistant’.112 In the aftermath of World War One, Morel called for ‘an amplification and precision of the purposes of the Berlin Act’ for the former German colonies in Africa, just as he had done for 108 Ibid., pp. 189–90. Emphasis in original. Morel, Affairs of West Africa, p. 15. 110 Ibid., p. 81. 111 Ibid., p. 120. 112 Ibid., p. 124. 109 Nathan Alexander 25 the Congo Free State.113 As William Roger Louis explains, Morel’s ideas about the importance of free trade and a concern for the welfare of Africans influenced South African statesman Jan Smuts and American President Woodrow Wilson, the chief architects of the new League of Nations mandate system responsible for governing the former German colonial territories. It was because of this influence that ‘Morel has a modest claim to being one of the grandfathers’ of the system,114 although he believed all European territories in Africa should be deemed a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’, not just the German ones.115 Morel argued for ‘a charter of rights for the people of tropical Africa’ with a preamble ‘frankly recognising that the driving force which has conducted European States to undertake the experiment of direct government of the tropical African region, is neither altruistic nor sentimental, but economic’. Such a charter would allow Europe to ‘become possessed of the natural riches of the African tropics […] without degrading, enslaving and, in the ultimate resort, probably destroying the peoples of tropical Africa’. With this in mind, the League ‘would then regard the preservation of this fundamental native right as the first step in the elaboration of its charter’.116 He also recommended the creation of a ‘tropical African Commission in permanent session at the headquarters of the League’ which would report on conditions in African territories and conduct ethnographical research. Furthermore, it would provide a check on the kind of exploitation seen in the Congo: ‘It would help to create an international conscience with regard to tropical Africa which does not now exist, and would be the vehicle through which that aroused conscience would find expression’.117 113 Quoted in William Roger Louis, ‘African Origins of the Mandates Idea’, International Organization 19, no. 1 (December 1965): p. 31. Emphasis in original. 114 Louis, ‘African Origins’, p. 30. 115 Morel, Black Man’s Burden, p. 225. 116 Ibid., p. 232. 117 Ibid., p. 240. Nathan Alexander 26 The CRA’s support for colonialism puts their human rights credentials in doubt. Whether human rights and colonialism are ultimately contradictory or whether an arrangement could be divined in which a colonial protector intervenes to ensure a subject people’s human rights are open questions. While there may be parallels between modern interventions to enforce human rights and earlier humanitarian interventions against atrocities, the kind of colonialism Morel advocated went beyond that since it meant taking an active role in shaping African economies and systems of governance. While Morel speculated on a charter of rights for Africans, this did not contain a list of rights all humans should enjoy but rather recognised the rights of Africans only as subject peoples participating in a global commercial network. The rights granted to Africans were from the perspective that they were in an inferior position in civilisational, if not racial, terms. Human rights need to be applicable universally to be valid, yet this was clearly not the view of Morel and the CRA. 5. Conclusion This article has cast doubt on the prevailing interpretation among recent historians that the CRA was a human rights movement. This characterisation is anachronistic and oversimplified. Morel and the CRA simply did not have a comprehensive and coherent ideology of human rights. While they did on occasion use the term ‘human rights’, this was always interchangeable with other phrases about rights, which indicates that they did not place any special importance on the term itself. More important to the CRA members were the specific rights of the natives to own land and freely trade with Europeans. Because of the racial essentialism inherited from Mary Kingsley and the idea that West Africans were at a lower level of civilisation, Morel and the CRA proposed the right to trade as an appropriate means for Africans to become civilised into the commercial world. Their prescription for the Congo was therefore very different from what a Nathan Alexander 27 present-day human rights organisation might propose. The CRA did not reject colonialism altogether, just the particular form in the Congo Free State. Morel supported indirect rule that would protect native institutions while providing Europe’s technical and scientific knowledge. The charter for African peoples imagined by Morel was no human rights charter: it considered them as subject peoples in need of Europe’s help. It should be clear, then, that the CRA was not a human rights organisation since they simply did not possess the concept of human rights. Their solutions to the problems in the Congo were, albeit radical for their time, clearly of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They were not human rights pioneers but individuals who found solutions within their own context. Despite the conclusions of this article, it is important to note, as Moyn does in The Last Utopia, that ‘[t]o give up church history is not to celebrate a black mass instead’.118 That is to say, to view the history of human rights with a critical eye is not to discard the concept altogether or to denigrate those figures often associated with human rights’ history. The same sentiment applies to this article. We can still appreciate the efforts of Morel and the CRA members while at the same time being alert to the historical context in which they lived and worked. We do not need to refashion them into modern human rights reformers in order to make them relevant to today. The CRA’s work is no less laudable for not being a human rights organisation. 118 Moyn, The Last Utopia, p. 8. Nathan Alexander 28