Imperial Powers and Humanitarian Interventions: The Zanzibar Sultanate, Britain, and France in the Indian Ocean, 1862–1905, by Raphaël Cheriau

In this book, Raphaël Cheriau argues that the ‘brutal power politics’ of recent humanitarian interventions have shaped historians’ perspectives on earlier interventions, but that he is able to escape these present-day sensibilities in his approach to British and French interventions in nineteenth-century eastern Africa. While I might challenge that suggestion, nonetheless he offers historians a valuable book that explores in detail the way imperialists of the nineteenth century did and did not use humanitarianism as a justification for their work in eastern Africa. One of the most useful aspects of this book is that Cheriau uses the substantial, and almost wholly unused, French archive of records of their interventions in the Indian Ocean Islands in conversation with the more widely researched British archival record.

The book is divided into three parts, with each part containing three chapters. In Part One Cheriau tackles early efforts to repress the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and the question of whether the French flag was used to circumvent British naval power. The third chapter explores the ways the British navy transformed international law through the use of humanitarianism as a justification for stopping and searching non-British ships. This chapter beautifully transitions to Part Two, which looks at three case-studies spanning the 1840s to the 1890s that explore the conflict between imperialism and humanitarianism. Part Three analyses the role that anti-slave trade work in Zanzibar played in international law and the rules of humanitarian interventions.

Cheriau carefully parses the roles played by ‘abolitionists, public opinion, men on the spot’ and government officials. Cheriau argues that his scholarly intervention is twofold. First, he gives a balanced and nuanced account of whether imperialists and humanitarians were working hand-in-hand. Secondly, he demonstrates that imperialists and abolitionist humanitarians were not working in tandem. He makes the case that his second argument greatly changes the historical understanding of imperialism in Eastern Africa, because it challenges the scholarship written by historians of Africa. A careful reading of Cheriau’s chapters suggests that his arguments are more subtle than this. He notes that, before the 1880s, most imperialists distanced themselves from abolitionists, and that after the 1880s imperialists used humanitarian arguments as a tool to justify imperialism in the islands and conquests in mainland eastern Africa, while remaining outside of the abolitionist movement.

Cheriau defines himself clearly as a historian of European imperialism, and he challenges what he perceives as the ‘knee-jerk’ assumptions made by historians of Africa about the intertwined nature of imperialism and humanitarianism. He takes a decidedly ‘European approach’ to imperialism and considers the minutiae of imperialist and abolitionist policies and efforts, while completely ignoring the scholarship that acknowledges the outcomes of these policies and efforts. Thus, while he suggests his approach is more ‘even-handed’ in its analysis of European imperialism, what he means is that he takes a European perspective rather than an African one.

Ironically, the question of whether British abolitionists were humanitarians is never addressed. The abolitionists studied in Cheriau’s book advocated against the slave trade but most did not question slavery itself because they saw Africans as being too disabled by their enslavement ever to become civilised. The intention was that, if the slave trade was ended, the enslaved people would eventually die off and slavery would end—hardly a humanitarian perspective. In many cases, imperialists saw themselves as profoundly humanitarian because, to their minds, when they controlled African territories, the enslavement of Africans would end.