State of the Art

The armistice of November 1918 did not mean an end to suffering or the need for humanitarian aid. On the contrary, Europe, Russia and the Middle East faced protracted humanitarian emergencies in the months and years that followed. Refugee crises emerged next to war-related displacements in the wake of the disintegration of former empires and the drawing of new borders during peace conferences. As a consequence of the Armenian Genocide and the Bolshevik Revolution, masses of people fled or were resettled, forcibly expelled or evicted. The subsequent civil wars in former Russia, the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the population exchange between Turkey and Greece – the outcome of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and overseen by the League of Nations – produced new waves of displaced persons and desperate refugees in need of support. At the same time, millions of prisoners of war waited, often in miserable conditions, for their repatriation, while famine conditions prevailed in parts of Austria and Germany, reinforced by the Allied blockade, and a terrible famine spread in Soviet Russia between 1921 and 1923.

All these humanitarian emergencies demanded comprehensive continued or new relief efforts, a call that was taken up by established actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the national Red Cross societies and the Quakers, as well as newcomers in the field, such as Save the Children, the American Relief Administration, Near East Relief, the International Workers’ Relief, and the League of Nations.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

The chapter asks how fertility was managed at home in early modern England. Conception and pregnancy were a source of fascination and gossip for elite and middling families, and were seen as having a direct relationship to the godliness of the family line. The stakes, therefore, were high and there was considerable pressure placed on newly married couples to announce that they were expecting shortly after marriage. Medical texts and records of medical practice reveal that men and women often altered their behaviours to ensure they were fertile and able to conceive. Despite this, previous histories have emphasised that early modern people thought only women could be infertile. Challenging this narrative, the chapter finds that although both men and women sought treatments to increase their fertility, male efforts were minimised in paperwork because it was perceived as especially embarrassing and emasculating to not conceive easily.

This conversation draws on an online discussion involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of the Brô MC’s duo, and Kunumi MC (a.k.a. Owerá). The Brazilian rap movement began in São Paulo in late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists, among them DJ Thaide and Racionais MC’s. As in other countries, Brazilian rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. Racionais MC’s focus on youth life in the peripheral areas of urban São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil. Performing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese, Brô MC’s emerged in 2009 as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, speaking to the violence and racism against Indigenous peoples that are particularly intense in the region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul.

The Conclusion summarises the arguments of the book and points to the anxieties that male and female family members felt about childbearing and their efforts to impose order on it. Childbearing was habitually represented as women’s work in prescriptive and personal writings. This was because this fitted with an idealised model of gendered domestic labour. However, male family members invested considerable financial, emotional and bodily energy into securing positive procreative outcomes. This was in equal parts motivated by the centrality of childbearing to male status and honour, and by its prominence in larger familial narratives about godliness and fruitfulness. The Conclusion suggests the important implications this has for history of medicine and everyday life in early modern England.

This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

This chapter distinguishes solidarity as a legal concept (LS) from solidarity as a social practice (SP). It matters for our understanding of the law to reflect on how, when and why law is able to interact with solidaristic practices. Section 1.1 explores the distinction. Section 1.2 stresses the ubiquity of solidarity in the law, from the traditional private law understanding of obligatio in solidum, to solidarity as a cohesive social force, to solidarity as a source of state duties. Section 1.3 shows that, despite its omnipresence, solidarity is an underinvestigated legal concept. Section 1.4 offers a typology of interactions between SP and the law, to show the many ways in which legal scholars may relate to SP. I list several types of interaction, and object to one. I argue that law cannot command us to act solidaristically since solidarity presupposes an intimate form of identification with others. But law may disrupt solidarities, sometimes in morally justified ways; it may compensate for the failing solidarity, recognizing and integrating it; and it may foster solidarity by its status-generative function, albeit merely in an indirect and not often controllable way.

How did early modern women and their families know they were pregnant? Childbearing guides of the period suggested that married women could know they were pregnant very soon after sex, and was related to moral and sexual continency. Women were encouraged to ‘keep accounts’ in their paperwork of their health and bodies, both as a tool to discover pregnancy quickly and as part of the broader culture of Protestant self-examination. Writing about conception and pregnancy sought to impose certainty on what was otherwise an ambiguous experience. Since keeping good accounts and records was linked to piety, orderly gendered labour and status, these records became examples of the respectability of families more broadly.

This chapter explores the theoretical themes of the book: art, politics and anti-racism; emotion and affect in art and politics; Latin American racial formations. It outlines the research project on which the book is based: Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).

Our point of departure has been that, by using the language of solidarity, we – consciously or not – participate in the politics of it. The group of authors coming together in this volume contribute analyses of solidarity as a norm, a process, a practice, or a vocabulary creating polyperspectivity. In so doing, we let the course of our analysis be directed by the actors we investigate over a span of time in history. From the start, our intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and, simultaneously, to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across a broader array of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences can engage with law.