Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-11(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Steven Pincus.

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This dissertation explores the origins of humanitarian intervention in early eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe. Scholars have contended that, during the eighteenth century, states like Britain and France intervened in each other's domestic affairs for religious reasons---specifically, to safeguard the rights and privileges of their co-religionists. By contrast, this dissertation shows that between 1690 and 1748 British diplomats and politicians protected not only foreign Protestants, but also Catholics and Jews in other states. Moreover, it demonstrates that British diplomats and politicians justified such negotiations with humanitarian arguments. State persecution, they claimed, violated the norms of acceptable behavior in human society, obligating other rulers to protect the victims of persecution from further abuse, irrespective of their religion. By exploring British diplomacy to aid five groups---including Protestant prisoners in France; Protestant communities in the duchy of Savoy; Sephardic Jews in Portugal; Jansenist theologians in France; and Ashkenazi Jews in the Habsburg lands---this dissertation shows that, during the first half of the eighteenth century, British diplomats frequently negotiated to protect refugees and prisoners from persecution by their governments. Using archival research from Britain, France, and Italy, it reconstructs why British officials intervened in each case, how they used humanitarian arguments in their negotiations, and how other European states responded to British diplomacy.

This dissertation demonstrates that religious leaders and institutions from across Europe played a crucial role in Britain's turn to humanitarian intervention. The first section shows that British politicians first intervened to protect prisoners from persecution during the 1700s, in response to lobbying from French Protestant clergymen, polemicists, and aristocrats. In an effort to win the support of both Protestant and Catholic governments, these French Protestants deployed secular natural law precedents to justify negotiating the release of Protestants imprisoned by the French monarchy---and these arguments influenced both British debates about intervention and subsequent British diplomacy on behalf of persecuted individuals. The dissertation's remaining sections conclude that synagogue officers, members of religious societies, and clergymen played similar roles in convincing British diplomats and politicians to protect Catholics and Jews. In each case, transnational religious networks brought victims' cases to the attention of British officials and pressured them to intervene.

This dissertation overturns historiographical narratives that locate the origins of human rights and humanitarian intervention in the Age of Revolutions, at the end of the eighteenth century. 1 It argues that Britain began to negotiate to prevent other European governments from persecuting individuals during the early eighteenth century. This dissertation also reassesses Samuel Moyn's conclusion that, before the twentieth century, individuals could look only to their own governments to protect their rights. 2 It contends that, on the contrary, in the early eighteenth century British and European polemicists, clergymen, and diplomats did claim that individuals possessed basic natural rights as members of human society, not as subjects of a particular state. They argued that when a government violated these rights, other states should intervene to protect the victim and prevent further abuses.

1 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: a history (New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007). Caroline Shaw, Britannia's Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Fabian Klose, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

2 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: human rights in history (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).