Contemporary Authors

• Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1998
• Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865 Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2011
• A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 2016

1. Women, dissent and anti-slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865 LCCN 2011929326 Type of material Book Main title Women, dissent and anti-slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865 / edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey. Published/Created Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011. Description x, 214 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780199585489 0199585482 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1305/2011929326-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1305/2011929326-d.html Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1305/2011929326-t.html Shelf Location FLM2016 045278 CALL NUMBER HT1163 .W66 2011 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Mothers of all children : women reformers and the rise of juvenile courts in progressive era America LCCN 97049129 Type of material Book Personal name Clapp, Elizabeth J. (Elizabeth Jane), 1960- Main title Mothers of all children : women reformers and the rise of juvenile courts in progressive era America / Elizabeth J. Clapp. Published/Created University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c1998. Description ix, 214 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0271017775 (cloth : alk. paper) 0271017783 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0b0o8-aa CALL NUMBER KF9794 .C58 1998 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER KF9794 .C58 1998 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) - STORED OFFSITE 3. A Notorious Woman : Anne Royall in Jacksonian America LCCN 2015034546 Type of material Book Personal name Clapp, Elizabeth J. (Elizabeth Jane), 1960- Main title A Notorious Woman : Anne Royall in Jacksonian America / Elizabeth J. Clapp. Published/Produced Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2016. Description ix, 263 pages : map ; 24 cm ISBN 9780813938363 (cloth : acid-free paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 136139 CALL NUMBER E340.R88 C55 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) CALL NUMBER E340.R88 C55 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• University of Virginia Press - http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4312

  About the Author:

  Elizabeth J. Clapp is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leicester and the author of Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America.

• The Way of Improvement Leads Home - https://thewayofimprovement.com/2016/03/10/the-authors-corner-with-elizabeth-clapp/

  QUOTED: "I think Anne Royall deserves to be better known, but she is difficult to pigeon-hole. In part this is because she wrote so little about her own life, but also because she divided contemporaries. By placing Royall firmly within the context of her time, A Notorious Woman is more than simply a biography of a fascinating woman."

  The Author’s Corner with Elizabeth Clapp
  MARCH 10, 2016 / AB1519
  A Notorious Woman.jpgElizabeth J. Clapp is Senior Lecturer of American History at the University of Leicester. This interview is based on her new book, A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America (University of Virginia Press, 2016).

  JF: What led you to write A Notorious Woman?

  EC: I discovered Anne Royall the ‘Grandmother of the Muckrakers’, when searching for a new project after finishing my book on Progressive Era women reformers and the juvenile courts. I thought she would make a great subject for a book. I wanted to know more about this woman who, in her fifties, traveled alone on stagecoaches and canal boats to explore the United States as it existed in the 1820s, and wrote about her travels. She claimed respectability, yet her behavior appeared to contradict such aspirations. I read her books and newspapers, and what people wrote about her in their private letters and in the newspapers, and I found that she was a highly controversial figure. She was a forthright woman who voiced her opinions in public without regard to her gender, and who roundly condemned the agents of the evangelical revivals who, she claimed, were undermining American liberties. Her prosecution as a Common Scold by an evangelical congregation in Washington in 1829 threatened to silence her, but it made little difference to her presence in the public life of Jacksonian America. As I found, with the aid of her supporters she continued to write and publish for another twenty-five years, until her death in 1854.

  JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of A Notorious Woman?

  EC: Casting aside characterizations of Anne Royall as a virago, or pioneer for women’s rights, A Notorious Woman concentrates on how Royall sustained a viable publishing career in the boisterous political and religious world of Jacksonian America. An often divisive figure, she asserted her right to a political voice despite being a woman and demanded the attention of Americans as she fought to defend American liberties against those she claimed were undermining them.

  JF: Why do we need to read A Notorious Woman?

  EC: I think Anne Royall deserves to be better known, but she is difficult to pigeon-hole. In part this is because she wrote so little about her own life, but also because she divided contemporaries. By placing Royall firmly within the context of her time, A Notorious Woman is more than simply a biography of a fascinating woman, but makes a contribution to the history of early nineteenth-century American politics, religion and print culture, and women’s place within those arenas.

  JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?

  EC: I was inspired by my teachers as an undergraduate and when deciding to study for a PhD it was not difficult to choose American history. My graduate studies at University College London allowed me to spend a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I was introduced to American women’s history. Since gaining my PhD, I have become part of a strong community of nineteenth-century American historians in Britain who have a long tradition of transatlantic scholarship and close connections with their American colleagues.

  JF: What is your next project?

  EC: The next project was prompted by my research into Anne Royall’s childhood on the Trans-Appalachian frontier during the Revolution. It looks at the role of women in building communities on this frontier, and has so far been supported by a fellowship at The Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky and several research trips to other archives and libraries in Kentucky, Chicago, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It aims to challenge the focus on male pioneers such as Daniel Boone, to consider the significant contributions of the women involved in creating this first American West.

  JF: Thanks, Elizabeth!

  Share this:

• University of Leicester - https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/history/people/eclapp

  Dr Elizabeth Clapp
  Associate Professor in American History

  Elizabeth Clapp

  Office: Attenborough 614
  Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2815
  Email: ejc12@le.ac.uk
  Personal details

  I studied at the University of London, receiving my BA from Bedford College and my PhD from University College.

  While I was a PhD student, I spent a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA. I have taught at the universities of Birmingham and East Anglia, and since 1993 at the University of Leicester.

  My research often takes me to the United States, where I work on American history. I am particularly interested in the involvement of women in public life in the nineteenth century, and have most recently held a visiting fellowship at the Filson Historical Society in Kentucky.

  Teaching

  Office hours: Tuesdays, 12noon-1pm and Thursdays, 11am-12noon

  Dissertation office hour: Thursdays 12noon-1pm

  Research day: Friday

  Examples of the modules that I teach:

  Women in American Society from the Civil war to the First World War (Not Taught in 2015/16)
  Ideals of Womanhood in 19th Century America
  Domestic Revolutions: Women, Men and the Family in American History
  Publications

  Books

  Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey, eds., Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-186Women, Dissent and Anti-slavery5 (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  Elizabeth Clapp, A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall and the Political Culture of Jacksonian America (University of Virginia Press)
  Future research projects include a study of the travel diary of a late eighteenth-century woman, as well as further exploration into women's political participation in the early republic.
  Recent publications

  "The Woman's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1920", in S.J. Kleinberg, E. Boris and V.L. Ruiz, eds, The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues (Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 238-257
  Elizabeth Clapp, 'Where I first knew the nature of care:" Women and violence on the late 18th century frontier' in(American Nineteenth Century History
  Elizabeth Clapp, 'Mrs. Smith's travel journal in a family context' in American Nineteenth Century History
  Elizabeth Clapp, 'Early Women Alone on the Late Eighteenth-Century American Frontier' American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
  "American Women", in Howard Temperley and Chris Bigsby, eds, A New Introduction to American Studies (Pearson Education, 2006), pp. 326–351
  "Black Books and Southern Tours: Tone and Perspective in the Travel Writing of Mrs. Anne Royall," Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), pp. 61–73
  "The Boundaries of Femininity: The Travels and Writing of Mrs. Anne Royall, 1823-1831," American Nineteenth Century History, 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 1–28
  'A Virago-Errant in Enchanted Armor?': Anne Royall's 1829 trial as a Common Scold," Journal of the Early Republic, 23 (Summer 2003), pp. 207–232
  Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of the Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (Penn State University Press, 1998)
  "Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement,' Journal of American Studies, 28 (December 1994), pp. 359–383
  'The Personal Touch? Ben Lindsey and the Denver Juvenile Court,' Mid-America 75 (April-July 1993), pp. 197–221
  'Women and the Creation of the Chicago Juvenile Court in the 1890s,' in T. Brotherstone (ed.), Gendering Scottish History: an international approach (Cruithne Press, 1999), pp. 216–33
  "The General Federation of Women's Clubs and American Social Welfare in the Progressive Era," American Studies Journal, 44 (Winter 1999/Spring 2000), pp. 7–16
  I have also contributed a number of entries to Peter Parish (ed.), The Reader's Guide to American History (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997)
  Online article: " A larger Motherhood is Required": The Development of a Female Reform Tradition in Nineteenth-Century America
  Online article: The Chicago Juvenile Court Movement in the 1890s
  Research

  Themes

  My main research interests lie in the field of nineteenth-century American women's history. I have worked in the past on women reformers in the Progressive Era and their influence in the creation of the early American welfare state, with a concentration on the origins of the juvenile courts.

  More recently, my work has moved back in time to explore the involvement of women in the party politics of early nineteenth-century America, at a time when it has been assumed that women were excluded from all political activity. It examines the ways in which women could and did become active political agents in this period. I am particularly concerned with the strategies women used to stretch the limits of acceptable female behaviour and what happened to them if they overstepped those boundaries.

  I am just completing a monograph on women and the political culture of Jacksonian America, drawing on the example of Anne Royall (1769–1854), an outspoken supporter of Andrew Jackson and critic of his enemies, to illustrate women's involvement in the partisan politics of this period.

  Future research projects include a study of the travel diary of a late eighteenth-century woman, as well as further exploration into women's political participation in the early republic.

  Supervision

  American women's and gender history, particularly those focused on the nineteenth century
  social reforms of the Progressive Era

QUOTED: "Clapp has provided an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of an important
literary figure in Jacksonian America and of key issues of contemporary political culture."

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Print Marked Items
A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian
America
Amanda R. Mushal
Journal of Southern History.
83.2 (May 2017): p412.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America. By Elizabeth J. Clapp. (Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 263. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3836-3.)
In her study of nineteenth-century travel writer and newspaper editor Anne Royall. Elizabeth J. Clapp argues that
Royall's life reflected contemporary struggles over women's roles, especially as evangelicals fought for ascendancy in
the 1820s. Using Royall's own published writings and business correspondence, as well as court records, pension files,
and commentary by editors and acquaintances, Clapp also sheds light on a Jacksonian America whose political culture
feels surprisingly relevant today: one in which media shaped the national discourse: personality could be parlayed into
political influence; and debate surrounded the role of religion in public life.
Royall is perhaps best known for the ten travel accounts she penned in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The widow of a
planter and Revolutionary War officer, Royall supported herself through travel writing as she followed stagecoach
routes throughout the country and. later, by editing two independent Washington, D.C., newspapers. Through her
publications, she campaigned vigorously against the evils she saw as threatening American liberties, including the
Bank of the United States, corruption in government, and a growing evangelical movement.
In so doing, Royall largely ignored forces that sought to limit women's roles in public life. Yet gender remained a
powerful feature of contemporary discourse, and Clapp shows effectively how both Royall and her detractors deployed
these ideas to undermine each other's positions. Most dramatically, members of an evangelical congregation in
Washington took Royall to court in 1829 on the archaic charge of being a "common scold" (p. 136). Turning on notions
of female respectability, it was a gendered charge, one that Clapp argues was used to discredit a political opponent
while allowing evangelicals to define the terms of respectable womanhood.
Clapp's argument here is well executed if not surprising given the growing body of scholarship on gender in
nineteenth-century America. Yet her subject adds nuances to our understanding of the era. Unlike many other
politically active women, Royall opposed abolition and women's rights and was contemptuous of female reformers,
seeing them as the dupes of evangelicals. In contrast to scholarship that focuses on the progressive aspects of
antebellum reforms, Clapp shows, through Royall, a counterargument that viewed evangelicals' efforts to legislate
godliness as a fundamental threat to American liberties.
Equally intriguing is Clapp's portrayal of Royall as an entrepreneur at the cutting edge of the emerging national market.
Adopting and improving on the tactics of itinerant booksellers, Royall developed a personal "national distribution
network." delivering books on her travels, chivying booksellers, calling on far-flung acquaintances to promote sales
and remit profits, and maintaining an extensive correspondence to monitor her sales (p. 72). But she also knew that she
herself was a commodity. Courting controversy and recognizing that readers purchased her works partly for their
strongly worded opinions and caustic commentary, Royall peppered her writing with "cayenne" and even capitalized
on the scandal surrounding her trial, advertising an account of its proceedings in her next travel volume (p. 155).
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Overall. Clapp's work provides insight into not only the debate over women's roles but also publishing and political
culture in Jacksonian America. Even as she discusses Royall's political involvement, however, this study raises further
questions about the degree to which Royall was able to exert real pressure on policy makers. A divisive figure, Royall
often found her warnings ignored or mocked, while her long-running campaign to obtain a war widow's compensation
met with only partial success. At the same time, Clapp notes that Royall counted congressmen, officeholders, and
editors among her subscribers and supporters and that, because her writings were reprinted and commented on by other
editors, her influence extended beyond her own subscribers. In the absence of subscription numbers--notoriously
elusive for early publications--Clapp has provided an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of an important
literary figure in Jacksonian America and of key issues of contemporary political culture.
Amanda R. Mushal
The Citadel
Mushal, Amanda R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mushal, Amanda R. "A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83,
no. 2, 2017, p. 412+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476222&it=r&asid=505baeb7bcf11a5ffd35f6a2fb18369b.
Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476222

QUOTED: "On the whole, this is a solid collection. It is most valuable for its accounts of overlooked abolitionist women such as the immediatist pamphleteer Heyrick and the key 1790s anti-slavery publisher Martha Guernsey. It is a valuable document of the maturation of its overlapping fields—but also an indicator that their future direction is not entirely clear."

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Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and
America, 1790-1865
George E. Boulukos
Victorian Studies.
55.3 (Spring 2013): p506.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
Full Text:
Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865, edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy
Jeffrey; pp. x + 214. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 63.00 [pounds sterling], $110.00.
This collection shows how much the history of abolitionism, women's history, and histories of dissenting Protestantism
have matured in the past two decades, and how seamlessly they have come together as transatlantic cultural history. In
the 1990s, books such as Clare Midgley's Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (1992) and
Moira Ferguson's Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 16701834 (1992) were revelatory
simply for demonstrating that women, despite the separate spheres, took shaping roles in the politics and discourse of
slavery; and even in the early aughts, scholars such as Nicholas Hudson and Christopher Brown opened eyes with an
unapologetic insistence on the importance of mainstream Christians--including Anglicans--and conservative
evangelicals to early abolitionist organization in Britain, not to mention the radical impact of Paul Gilroy's The Black
Atlantic (1993) and Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History (2005).
Scholars have long known that Quakers were a motive force behind and the first organizers of the abolition movement,
but at the height of the cultural turn the role of religion in British abolition was either minimized or ignored. It is clear
that women were key to abolitionist organization on both sides of the anglophone Atlantic, and that they were often
inspired by, and certainly claimed authority for this political work through, their Christian beliefs. The importance of
Christian beliefs to American abolitionism has never been in doubt, and now there is a clearer equivalence between the
deeply interconnected American and British movements. Because these broad parameters are now so well established,
the contributors to this collection can tease out particular stories, details, and relationships. Hence such matters as
controversies about abolitionism and about the freedom of women to speak their minds within specific sects, and the
tendency of given sects to attract or to lose abolitionist members, are scrutinized. Indeed, half of the essays are as finegrained
as is possible: they focus on specific women with careers that intertwine dissent, slavery, and print culture.
Only one--Harriet Beecher Stowe--is familiar, but the others are all remarkable.
Immediately salutary, too, is the close attention in several of the essays to dissenting rejection of the marketplace in the
nineteenth-century United States. A compelling instance is the struggle of some abolitionists with the success of their
own anti-slavery fairs, and their distress about selling the donations of luxury goods provided by their British allies.
Taken together, several of these essays imply that British abolitionists (even dissenters) accepted and even appropriated
the logic of capitalism earlier and more thoroughly than their sisters in the United States. One particularly absorbing
example is Elizabeth Heyrick's immediatism in the 1820s--covered in detail by Midgley and astutely analyzed by Carol
Lasser--which was wedded to a revival of the 1790s sugar boycotts. Heyrick was influential in the United States, but
her reception was premised on a redefinition of her advocacy of the boycott. Heyrick meant to apply direct economic
pressure to planters, and to teach them the economic rationality of emancipation. American immediatists like William
Lloyd Garrison, however, ignored this economic orientation, and instead saw the boycott as a moral stance premised
on personal spiritual purity.
Such detailed pictures are satisfyingly complex and convincing. But they also raise problems about interpretive
possibilities. Clearly, dissent did not lead to abolition, given the many accounts here of conflicts within sects over the
issue of slavery, and of individuals' movements from one sect to another based on anti-slavery commitment. In other
words, as Julie Roy Jeffrey remarks, despite the belief of some female dissenting abolitionists that "their activism was
not optional," many found that their ministers and congregations were far from agreeing with them (136). Elizabeth J.
Clapp concludes the introduction by noting that the dissenting "custom of challenging established religion and its
practices" in both the United States and England "enabled women from these traditions to translate that heritage into
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anti-slavery activism" (19). This is true, but many of the individual essays trouble this claim, emphasizing that while
dissent allowed space for female anti-slavery activism it neither encouraged nor suppressed abolitionism in general.
I emphasize the absence of a causal argument about the relation between dissent, gender, and abolition not to chide the
historians included here for refusing a reductive explanatory narrative, but because some of the essays bring such
causality into play only by implication. (I should single out Lasser's thoughtfully interpretive essay as a clear exception
to such critique.) Judie Newman's essay on Stowe reveals an important equivocation about the causal relation between
dissent and anti-slavery. On the whole, the essay is an ingenious defense of Stowe against the charges of racism leveled
against her in the civil rights era and developed by historicist critics in the 1980s and 1990s. Newman's defense has
two main components: firstly, Stowe wrote strategically, and initially conceived Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as a serial
intended for a southern audience; more importantly, Stowe reworked the novel into an equally popular dramatic
production which explicitly addressed the flawed racial ideology of the novel itself. But this argument values authorial
intention more highly than cultural effect: even if the novel appears racist, we can redeem Stowe through a
reconstruction of her intentions. Newman's account of Stowe's intentions, moreover, depends on taking her
evangelicalism as underwriting and guaranteeing a sincere anti-slavery commitment. Hence, Newman begins the essay
by noting that in Stowe's day "evangelical Christians were at the frontline of struggle" against slavery, and then asking
why "in the twenty-first century ... evangelical Christianity is rather less synonymous with the forces of radical social
reform" (174). But as the collection demonstrates, to call evangelicalism "synonymous" with any single political
position is an overstatement. This slippage, with its implications of causality, explains another odd oversight in
Newman's defense of Stowe: she recounts that Uncle Tom's Cabin was "inspired by a religious vision of a bleeding
slave," thus offering a direct link between Stowe's faith and her writing (178). But Stowe herself--rather notoriously--
offered at least three variant accounts of her inspiration for the novel, and to grant this one version authority suggests a
selective view of the available evidence.
On the whole, this is a solid collection. It is most valuable for its accounts of overlooked abolitionist women such as
the immediatist pamphleteer Heyrick and the key 1790s anti-slavery publisher Martha Guernsey. It is a valuable
document of the maturation of its overlapping fields--but also an indicator that their future direction is not entirely
clear.
George E. Boulukos
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Boulukos, George E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Boulukos, George E. "Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865." Victorian Studies, vol.
55, no. 3, 2013, p. 506+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA350679391&it=r&asid=d2d20799ceee90f05e58a7791c8ea314.
Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A350679391
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Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human
Rights
Philip Alston
Harvard Law Review.
126.7 (May 2013): p2043.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Harvard Law Review Association
Full Text:
THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW. BY JENNY S.
MARTINEZ. NEW YORK, N.Y.: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2012. PP. 254. $29.95.
INTRODUCTION
How far back can we trace the genealogy of today's international human rights system? And does it matter where we
come out on such an arcane academic question? Historians, international lawyers, and human rights activists have
recently suggested that there is, in fact, much at stake here. But there the consensus ends, and the accounts reflected in
the vibrant literature of recent years diverge radically in the answers they propose. They also disagree in fundamental
respects as to why the lineage of human rights really matters in the twenty-first century.
Until fairly recently, little attention was paid to the historiography of human rights, and the mainstream histories
mostly reflected an uncritical narrative of relatively steady progress in the evolution of ideas, perhaps dating even from
biblical times, and the gradual uptake of these ideas in the form of legal norms. But these somewhat amorphous and
largely undifferentiated genealogies have come under strong challenge from a variety of critics, almost all of whom
have sought to identify more precise and recent points of origin for today's human rights family tree. The present
analysis takes as its point of departure the claim by Professor Jenny Martinez in The Slave Trade and the Origins of
International Human Rights Law that contemporary international human rights law has its origins in the early
nineteenth-century movement in Great Britain to abolish the transatlantic slave trade (pp. 149-50). In the final years of
the eighteenth century, the British abolitionist movement began to make significant inroads, and by 1807 the reformers
had succeeded, apparently against all the odds, (1) in passing the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. (2)
Parliament prohibited British subjects from participating in the trade, and slaves were no longer allowed to be imported
into Britain's extensive colonial empire. The British navy began to apply the law, and offenders were initially tried in
British courts. Starting in 1817, Britain also entered into a series of bilateral treaties that led to the creation of so-called
"courts of mixed commission" sitting in Freetown (Sierra Leone), Havana (Cuba), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and
Paramaribo (Suriname) with the power to determine whether seized ships had been engaged in slaving and, if so, to
order their forfeiture (pp. 78-79). In the course of the next five decades, the mixed commissions heard over six hundred
cases and freed some eighty thousand slaves (p. 99). (3)
Martinez portrays the mixed commissions as "the first international human rights courts" (p. 6) and sees them as an
integral part of "the most successful episode ever in the history of international human rights law" (p. 13). Not content
with staking out a large historical claim, she also implies that genealogy matters by claiming that the nineteenthcentury
history that she recounts has major implications for many of the key contemporary debates over human rights,
so much so that this history should change the way we think about the entire field, including its "origins, limits, and
potential" (p. 15).
It is, in many respects, an appealing thesis, but it has to contend with the fact that it flies directly in the face of a highly
influential new school of revisionist history. This new understanding largely dismisses the very quest for genealogy,
separates the antislavery movement out from what should properly be thought of as matters of human rights,
systematically downplays the international significance of all but the most recent discourse around human rights,
accords minimal importance to treaties in this area and even less significance to courts, and locates the origins of the
international human rights movement firmly in the year 1977.
In this Review, I first consider the extent to which Martinez's claims about the roles played by rights, treaties, and
courts in the first half of the nineteenth century are supported by the evidence. I then situate her account along the
spectrum of recent historiographical studies in the field. In particular, I contrast her approach with that of Professor
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Samuel Moyn, (4) who is the most influential of the revisionists. I argue that much of the heated controversy that has
been generated in the recent literature over whether and how the origins of human rights may be discerned is due
primarily to a failure to acknowledge the polycentric nature of the human rights enterprise. Attempts to capture the
alleged essence of that enterprise by viewing it through a single lens are intrinsically flawed and potentially deeply
misleading. I nevertheless conclude by arguing that genealogy matters a great deal in these debates, although not in the
ways that Martinez suggests.
I. THE "FORGOTTEN" STORY
Martinez's story is one about the triumph of moral values over economic and other great power considerations, the
highly positive instrumental power of domestic and international law and legal institutions, and continuity and
progress. In today's language, standard-setting, treaty-making, multilateralism, courts with potential global reach, and
the strategic use of force in the interests of justice have a crucial role to play in achieving respect for human rights. It is
a thoroughly researched, impressively reconstructed, and well-told story. But can its arguments be sustained?
She begins and ends her book by emphasizing that she is recounting an otherwise "forgotten bit of history" (p. 15).
Martinez chides historians for having downplayed the mixed commissions' significance and legal scholars for having
almost entirely ignored them (pp. 148-49). But her analysis is not entirely consistent in identifying who is doing the
forgetting or what exactly they are neglecting. And while the work of the mixed commissions is not prominent in the
literature, it has in fact garnered more attention than she suggests, (5) even from lawyers. (6)
Martinez's analysis focuses on the movement that began in the late eighteenth century to abolish the traffic in slaves
between Africa and the Americas. Between 1501 and 1867, 10.7 million people were enslaved and transported from
Africa to the Western Hemisphere -- an average of over 34,000 persons every year for over three and a half centuries.
(7) The process was inhuman at every step of the way. Large numbers died en route from their homes to the ports on
the African coast. The conditions on the slave ships were atrocious. Holds were packed full with men, women, and
children lying "spooned" tight behind one another for five weeks or more in urine- and feces-drenched squalor. On
average, fifteen percent of the "cargo" died. (8) And conditions upon arrival, especially on the plantations in the West
Indies, were generally appalling. In other words, every stage of the process was characterized by what today would be
termed gross and systematic violations of human rights. (9)
In the years before 1807, Britain had greatly extended its slave-driven colonial empire, so that by 1814 it was estimated
to have had over one million slaves in the Caribbean (consisting of its own colonies and recently conquered territories),
and British territories were producing more than fifty percent of Europe's sugar imports. At the end of the eighteenth
century, British slave traders continued to land fifty thousand slaves annually in the New World. (10)
The rise of the abolition movement was surprisingly rapid and greatly assisted by the use of highly innovative
techniques. Specifically, the movement relied on pamphleteering and other public relations tools, the gathering of mass
petitions on a scale previously unseen, and consumer boycotts. Quaker and other activists succeeded in mobilizing
diverse constituencies, and women emerged as important players. (11) Starting in 1789, an abolition bill was put before
Parliament every year for eighteen years until finally both houses of Parliament passed the 1807 Act for the Abolition
of the Slave Trade.
The campaign that culminated in this Act is familiar territory. Less well known is the network of treaties that were
negotiated and the mixed commissions that were established to implement the ban. Since the British legislation could
apply only to British ships, it was essential that Britain find ways to extend the application of the ban or the slack
would simply be taken up by ships trading under other flags. Initially, the Napoleonic Wars provided a legal
justification to board ships on the high seas in order to ascertain whether they were either enemy ships or others
providing de facto support to the enemy. Although the war was over by 1815, and peacetime searches were illegal, the
practice continued until the British courts began in 1817 to invalidate the resulting seizures of alleged slave ships of
other nations. The British government then initiated a series of long-drawn-out negotiations designed to create a
network of bilateral treaties with the key trading states. In 1814, treaties were signed with both the Netherlands and the
United States, although the treaty with the latter contained no enforcement provision. Negotiations with France and
Spain stalled, but in 1815 Britain "succeeded through a combination of bribery and threats" in getting Portugal to sign
a treaty that included enforcement provisions, although this did not apply to the trade south of the equator (p. 31). In
order to assuage fears that mutual inspection arrangements would, in practice, license the British and their own judicial
system at the expense of other nations' sovereignty, Britain proposed bilateral arrangements to create specialized
tribunals. These "mixed commissions" were set up pursuant to bilateral treaties signed with Portugal, Spain, and the
Netherlands in 1817-18. Eventually Sweden, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador also signed such treaties. But
France never did, and until the Civil War the United States resisted all enforcement arrangements. British efforts to
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persuade the Americans and others that the slave trade could be classified as a form of piracy, thus giving rise to a right
to search and seizure, were stubbornly resisted throughout.
Each of the four mixed commissions, or "courts" as Martinez generally refers to them, consisted of a commissioner and
an arbitrator from each side, and a registrar appointed by the government of the territory in which the commission was
located. If the two judges did not agree on the outcome, an arbitrator was chosen by lot to cast a deciding vote. The
functioning of the commissions proved highly favorable from a British perspective. Most of the seized ships were
captured by the British navy and the overwhelming majority of these were duly condemned, often at the end of
summary proceedings. And the British judges often managed to decide the cases on their own due to the illness or
absence of their counterparts. For example, this scenario occurred in 81 of the 109 cases heard in Sierra Leone. I
consider below the actual impact of the outcome of these cases.
Martinez does an excellent job of bringing alive the story of the mixed commissions, primarily through archival
research that provides a real feel for the ways in which the commissions functioned. She offers fascinating vignettes of
the lives of those involved, including the slaves themselves, the ships' captains and crews, the judicial officers, the
slave owners and plantation managers, and the imperial bureaucrats. But, for the most part, the book is an oldfashioned
history with a great story to tell, rather than an interdisciplinary work that seeks to locate that history within
a broader context. Thus, there is almost no engagement either with the major new historical studies on the abolition of
the slave trade, (12) or with the various recent interdisciplinary critiques challenging the coherence, legitimacy, and
effectiveness of the human rights regime that she describes.
II. EVALUATING MARTINEZ'S CAUSAL CLAIMS
Much ink has been spilled in seeking to explain how abolition came about, the sources of support and of opposition,
the relative importance of religious, nationalist, economic, military, and other factors, and the waxing and waning of
both public and political attitudes toward the practice of slavery itself. Given the centrality of these questions to
Martinez's thesis, one might expect at least a survey, but instead she brushes over them very rapidly by noting that
"historians now largely concur that British abolitionism arose out of a confluence of factors, including economic
changes, Enlightenment philosophy, and religious revival movements" (p. 17). (13) More problematically, she never
seeks to reconcile this pithy summary with her own argument, based on "the best historical evidence," that "[s]lavery
was eradicated, intentionally, by people who had come to believe it was morally wrong. It was eradicated in part by
military force, but also by coordinated international legal action -- including, surprisingly, international courts" (p. 13).
While the archival work that Martinez has undertaken makes an important contribution to the literature, the heart of her
thesis revolves around the central importance in the whole episode of the legal and human rights dimensions. In her
view, this was "the first successful international human rights campaign, and international treaties and courts were its
central features" (p. 13). As already noted, this claim is not only bold, but it also does not sit easily with most other
historical evaluations of this episode. It is thus appropriate to scrutinize carefully her claims regarding the roles played
by rights discourse, and by international law and courts, and then to seek to put these factors in some sort of
comparative perspective with other causal elements.
A. Rights Discourse
The claim that human rights discourse played a central role in motivating and framing the abolitionist movement raises
three separate issues. The first is whether there was in fact significant reliance upon concepts of rights in this particular
episode. Martinez's claim is clear: abolitionists "[o]n both sides of the Atlantic ... conceptualized the issue in terms of
human rights, and spoke as well of a religious and moral obligation" (p. 17). She supports this claim with three
quotations: a British MP's reference to the "rights of men," Lord Grenville's reference to the "rights of nature," and
President Thomas Jefferson's surprisingly modern reference in 1806 to "violations of human rights" (p. 17).14 She
adds that even abolitionist arguments were "deeply intertwined with ideas of natural law and natural rights" (p. 17).
But these illustrations are almost anecdotal, and the question is how one might be able to demonstrate the ubiquity or
the absence of rights discourse in a more systematic way. For example, a search of a 400-page collection of the
principal pamphlets written on both sides of the slavery debates during the 1780s and 1790s reveals not a single
reference to "human rights" (except in the editor's introduction) but does yield twenty-eight references to the term
"rights." (15) But this type of "measurement" is also unconvincing. Indeed, one pathology that Martinez appears to
share with Samuel Moyn is what might be termed a "search engine" mentality. Just as Martinez celebrates when she
discovers Jefferson using the phrase "human rights" in 1806, Moyn emerges triumphal from electronic searches of the
New York Times (16) and Google Books databases (17) that reveal very few references to "human rights" before 1977
and a dramatic uptake thereafter.
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Martinez makes a more sustained argument in chapter 6 about the significance of over two centuries of a commitment
to promoting principles of "humanity." She attaches particular importance to President James Madison's condemnation
of the slave traffic in 1810 as a "violation of the laws of humanity," (p. 116) (18) and to the characterization of slavery
in 1842 by Henry Wheaton -- the most prominent American international law treatise writer of the time -- as a "crime
against humanity" (p. 115). (19) From there, her historical review moves fairly rapidly from the reference to "the laws
of humanity" in the 1899 Hague Conventions (the so-called "Martens Clause") (pp. 137-38) to Article 6(c) of the
Nuremberg Charter of 1945, which classified "enslavement" as a crime against humanity (p. 156), an approach also
reflected in Article 7(1)(c) of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Based on these
developments, she argues that the antislavery effort both "foresaw and justified" modern international human rights
law, and demonstrated that crimes against humanity "were a proper subject of international lawmaking" (p. 139). But
demonstrating this sort of connection would be very difficult. The concept of crimes against humanity as it emerged in
1945 differed greatly from any supposed precursors. It was given a very limited scope and, until the 1990s, was
interpreted as applying only in situations of international armed conflict. (20)
Moreover, claims of continuity between today's understanding of crimes against humanity and the historic practice of
slavery have been consistently rejected in international law. Kenya has recently argued that slavery "is not a crime
against humanity just for today, not just for tomorrow, but for always and for all times ... [because] crimes against
humanity are not time-bound," (21) and African governments have called for reparations to be paid by the slavetrading
nations. (22) But while the latter have expressed their abject regret for historical wrongs committed, (23) they
have insisted on separating issues of responsibility from reparations and rejected the imposition of ex post facto
liability. (24) Although expert reports endorsed reparations, (25) the 2001 World Conference Against Racism only
"acknowledge[d] that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so,
especially the transatlantic slave trade." (26) This formulation has consistently been interpreted to mean that slavery
was not in fact such a crime at the time it happened. Instead, the Conference recognized a "moral obligation ... to halt
and reverse the lasting consequences of those practices" and invited governments "to honour the memory of the
victims of these tragedies." (27) It is thus dubious at best to attach much contemporary significance to nineteenthcentury
uses of the phrase "crimes against humanity."
In contrast, Martinez is right to highlight the centrality of diverse forms of rights-related discourse in the abolitionist
debates. But that conclusion gives rise to the question of whether such historical usages can meaningfully be
assimilated to contemporary understandings of "human rights." The issue of synchronic versus diachronic approaches
to the history of ideas has long preoccupied scholars. Moyn and his fellow revisionists have no doubt that there is little,
if any, meaningful transferability in this regard. (28) Even Professor Lynn Hunt, who makes major claims for the
comparability of late eighteenth-century rights discourse with today's equivalent, warns of the risks involved. She takes
the example offered by Martinez of Jefferson's 1806 reference to "human rights" and points out that while he generally
used the term "natural rights" until the French Revolution, and sometimes used the term "rights of man" thereafter, his
reference to "human rights" should be interpreted to mean "something more passive and less political" than was
implied by either of the other two phrases. (29) Thus, it should not be taken to be synonymous with any current
meaning of the term.
Others have argued that the rights discourse of the abolitionists was little more than an exercise in cultural imperialism.
What counted was not any sense of obligation to a universal moral community, but rather the parochial identities of
those involved, whether religious, class based, or nationalist. (30)
But there is a powerful argument to be made that there was a strong element of continuity in the evolution of rights
discourse. Professor Robin Blackburn, for example, argues that nineteenth-century abolitionists often invoked the idea
of rights in ways consistent with its later usage. He rejects Moyn's approach and argues that "there is a living tradition
here that cannot be artificially arrested at some privileged moment that discloses its inner truth." (31) This debate about
the diachronic transferability of language essentially pits those who see a process of evolution or mutation against
those for whom discontinuity and novelty better describe the relationship over time. It is clear that the use of the term
"human rights," or something close to it, whether in the twelfth or nineteenth centuries, will inevitably conjure up a
very different meaning from that attributed to it today. But there is also a strong genealogical or ancestral component in
the sense that one generation has provided the foundation or the impetus for the emergence and shaping of the next
generation's usage. Even in a story of evolution involving significant departures from, and rejections of, what has gone
before, there are indispensable elements of continuity. It is clear that we need to disentangle the various vocabularies
that are too often used interchangeably in the area of rights, but the claim of discontinuity is unsustainable. (32)
B. The Role of International Law and Courts
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Martinez argues that international law was "surprisingly central" to the overall slavery enterprise, being used both to
"justify ... [and] suppress it" (p. 16). While she makes a strong case for its being one element among many, the case for
its centrality is hardly compelling.
First, the British Parliament was reluctant to put in place a watertight domestic legal regime, both with respect to the
slave trade and to slavery in the British colonies. Until 1824 it was not illegal for British merchants to sell goods or
equipment to a slave trader provided that the deal was arranged outside British territory. The consolidated legislation
adopted in 1824 did make those actions illegal, but a prosecution could only succeed if the seller could be shown to
have had prior knowledge that the goods were intended to be used for purposes related to the slave trade. (33) Thus, for
all its expressions of moral outrage, Britain was in no position to negotiate a strong international law regime until
1843, when Parliament barred British subjects from participating in the slave trade.
Second, while Britain devoted much energy to achieving bilateral treaty arrangements, it is unclear how much
difference these treaties made. Most historians have accorded them relatively minor significance, (34) while some of
those who consider these arrangements to have been significant do so because of their contribution to the overall
imperial enterprise of enabling Britain to interdict ships and establish precedents. (35) Moreover, Britain paid over
ninety percent of the total direct costs of the system, thus underscoring the essentially unilateral nature of the resulting
regime. (36)
Third, as noted earlier, in its failure to have slavery characterized as a form of piracy, Britain actually failed
spectacularly in its most ambitious and determined effort to mobilize the power of international law to prohibit the
slave trade.
But it is the role of the mixed commissions that takes pride of place in Martinez's analysis of "the most successful
episode ever in the history of international human rights law" (p. 13). Moyn, on the other hand, dismisses them as "a
minor episode in the history of antislavery." (37) Although the landmark cases litigated in both Britain and the United
States have in fact been the subject of reasonably extensive comment, the literature on the mixed commissions
themselves is limited. The most affirming comment made by any of the major historians is Professor Seymour
Drescher's comment that the mixed commissions were the "quiet pioneers" of the late twentieth century's international
court system, (38) an assessment that is rather more modest than Martinez's claim. In fact, between 1808 and 1867 the
mixed commissions dealt with only 572 of the 1635 ships condemned. The British vice-admiralty courts that dealt with
823 ships were more active, leading Professor David Eltis to conclude that the "international courts were no substitute
for the domestic criminal courts." (39) Since Martinez's thesis first appeared in 2008, her claims about the
commissions have gained little attention from most historians of the era, and the few exceptions have been notably
resistant to endorsing her thesis.
But perhaps more significantly, her claims raise the question of how to evaluate effectiveness in an area such as this.
(40) A first criterion could focus on the number of slaves freed by the commissions. Martinez gives the figures of
65,000 freed in Freetown between 1819 and 1846; 10,000 freed in Havana; and 3000 freed in Rio, for a rounded total
of about 80,000. (41) Other sources offer slightly higher estimates. (42)
A second criterion may consider the number of persons who would have been enslaved but for the existence of the
enforcement efforts. Eltis puts forward a strong but ultimately untestable hypothesis that without British interdiction
efforts the slave trade would have been "several times what it actually was." (43) Martinez's claim is more modest. She
takes the number of ships that were seized and condemned without any slaves on board and estimates that these 225
ships could have carried as many as 90,000 slaves (p. 79). These numbers make it difficult to understand why such
impressive achievements have not been more celebrated. One answer is that these numbers have to be compared to the
overall number of slaves who continued to be traded. Some twenty-five percent of the total number of Africans shipped
to the New World, or some three million people, were sent after 1807, and "[t]he volume of the transatlantic slave trade
between 1826 and 1850 diminished by only 5 percent." (44)
A third criterion might analyze the fates of those slaves who were freed by the commissions. By this standard, as
Martinez fully acknowledges, the results were far less impressive. In Sierra Leone, most of those freed became part of
the ordinary labor force in the colony, although relatively little is actually known about what this shift meant in
practice. (45) In Rio and Havana, those freed endured conditions that constituted little improvement from their
enslavement (pp. 99-100). (46) The fate of the others who were captured but not processed by the commissions was
also grim. They were either "enlisted" (i.e., conscripted) into the British military forces, or were indentured as "
[a]pprentices" for up to fourteen years. (47) Tens of thousands of "liberated Africans" were thus sent across the
Atlantic as indentured servants to work on the plantations, helping to make up for the reduced supply of slaves. (48)
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And even those who were "rescued" by the British navy often subsequently had to endure harsh transport conditions
that led to high mortality rates. (49)
In addition, the limited remit of the mixed commissions left them far from being empowered to render justice to all.
Neither those responsible for the slave trade itself -- such as the ships' captains -- nor those guilty of particularly
egregious cruelty perpetrated in the slave trade context were held criminally liable or otherwise punished (although the
ships and slave cargoes belonging to the paymasters of the ships' captains were forfeited). Further, reparations were not
awarded to the victims, and even those who were released were, as we have seen, not always much better off as a
result. Unsurprisingly, some commentators continue to argue that transatlantic slavery remains a crime that "has never
been adjudicated." (50)
This analysis leads to a fourth possible criterion, concerning the lasting contribution of this episode to the abolition of
slavery itself. Martinez's analysis tackles this issue by noting that slavery and the slave trade have become universally
acknowledged as international crimes, that no government officially defends slavery (which she contrasts with the
situation pertaining to torture), and that legalized chattel slavery has disappeared (p. 13). But the path from 1807 to the
modern conception of slavery and the slave trade was, in fact, very rocky. First, the adoption of some twenty-four
separate international treaties and other instruments between 1815 and 1957 shows that the international community
faced significant challenges in prohibiting, preventing, and punishing variously described acts of slavery. (51) Second,
much of the more recent international normative activity has sought to condemn "contemporary forms of slavery" (52)
or "slavery-like" practices on the grounds that old forms of enslavement have simply metamorphosed into new
techniques that require neither transportation nor chains. (53) There has also been a great deal of criticism of the
continuing absence of effective international enforcement mechanisms for dealing with slavery. (54)
Third, the so-called scramble for Africa from 1881 to 1914 involved European powers engaging in a wide range of
practices akin to slavery, and often doing so precisely in the name of what King Leopold of Belgium termed a
"crusade" designed to "open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, [and] to pierce
the darkness which hangs over entire peoples." (55) His subsequent creation of the Belgian Free State brought
immense wealth to Belgium but untold misery to Africa, and caused a population loss of as many as ten million
people. (56)
Finally, even today chattel slavery is far from having been eliminated. In 2008, for example, the Community Court of
Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ordered the Government of Niger to pay
damages to a victim for its failure to protect her from being sold into slavery in 1996. (57) Civil society groups
estimate that there are still as many as 43,000 people enslaved in Niger. (58)
None of this is to suggest that the movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade did not contribute greatly to putting
slavery squarely on the agenda of international law. However, this movement was only the beginning of a long and
bumpy ride in which there have been many setbacks, no certainties, and all too little continuity of the type implied by
Martinez's thesis.
C. The Comparative Role of Other Factors
The question that emerges from the analysis above is whether the treaties and the mixed commissions loom large (or
loom at all) when compared with the overall range of factors that have been put forward in the voluminous and stillexpanding
literature on this theme. Or is it only when seen through the eyes of international lawyers that these
elements seem particularly significant?
A nineteenth-century Irish historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky is best remembered today for his bold assertion
that the "unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as
among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations." (59) In other words, abolition
was an act of altruism, unsullied by self-interest or hidden motives. In reviewing Martinez's book, Samuel Moyn seems
to want to align her with Lecky by suggesting that she simply assumes that "pure benevolence" was the driving force.
(60) But this suggestion is unfair to her, given her emphasis on the importance of moral condemnation, military force,
and legal action (p. 13). Without seeking to review the many causal theories that have been advanced, we cannot avoid
a brief tour d'horizon in order to assess the adequacy of Martinez's three factors.
Her category of "moral condemnation" appears to include both the religious and philosophical factors identified by
other historians. Few would contest the importance of the former, especially from the 1820s onwards, (61) but the
relationship between the religious and the philosophical arguments that were put forward remains contentious among
scholars. Professors Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape contend that most of the religious discourse relied on
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condescending and paternalistic assumptions and thus had little in common with lofty moral arguments. (62) It is
difficult to dispute, however, the contention that much of the rhetoric surrounding British abolition was characterized
by a high-minded moralism, whatever the deeper content or motivation of such rhetoric might have been.
Martinez's second explanatory factor is the use of military force, by which she means primarily the role of the British
Navy in interdicting and arresting slave ships. We have already seen that the importance of this dimension is contested
by some and supported by others. What is not clear, however, is whether Martinez also wishes to claim that the use of
force, especially in terms of bombardments and blockades, was an important explanatory factor. She suggests that the
actual use of force was confined to "a few shots fired by ships in Brazilian territorial waters," (p. 169) but this seems to
significantly understate the reality. (63)
Martinez's third factor is legal action. Without repeating what has been said earlier, it need only be remarked that few
commentators provide support for this contention.
More strikingly, especially for an analysis premised upon the power of rights and individual and collective action,
Martinez devotes very little attention to several factors that have been emphasized by other historians. The first of
these concerns the role of revolutions and uprisings by slaves in the colonies. Theories suggesting that these were
important have been consistently played down by Drescher, who sums up his position in these terms: "Despite attempts
to link the rise, persistence, and successes of British abolition to international defeats and near-revolutionary moments
during more than a half century after 1775, British abolitionism, slave trade abolition, and slave emancipations were all
fair-weather revolutions." (64)
But others have contested this view. Professor Christopher Brown has argued that the successful American Revolution
was a sine qua non for the subsequent successes achieved by the abolitionists in Britain. (65) Robin Blackburn's most
recent work argues powerfully that slave resistance and accompanying revolutionary ruptures were essential in
facilitating eventual emancipation. In particular, he emphasizes the impact of the uprising in the richest of the sugarproducing
colonies, Saint Domingue (which rebelled in 1791 and became independent Haiti in 1804). He argues that
this event gave deep meaning to the phrase droits de l'homme and sent an unmistakable message to all colonial powers.
(66)
A second factor not mentioned by Martinez concerns the impact of on-board slave rebellions. Eltis and his colleagues
have shown that such rebellions may have affected as many as ten percent of transatlantic voyages, although the
records are only able to confirm that thirty slave ships out of a total of 35,000 journeys actually returned to the African
coast in the control of the slaves following a successful rebellion. They argue that the impact of such rebellions was far
greater than this figure might suggest. The rebellions required more crew and weapons to be carried, increased the cost
of landed slaves, and made the route from West Africa to North America far less attractive. Eltis and his colleagues
suggest that this combination of factors saved at least several hundred thousand from potential slavery. (67)
The third factor is an element in the much larger and more complex debate over the economic dimensions of abolition.
Professor Eric Williams, later Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, famously argued in 1944 that economic
conditions in the West Indies, rather than humanitarian motives, provided the major impetus for abolitionism. (68)
While key parts of his economic data were subsequently challenged, many authors continue to subscribe to different
variations of the theme that imperial economic interests were congruent with abolitionism. (69) Both Drescher and
Davis attach major importance to what they term "free labor ideology," which contributed significantly to the
abolitionist thrust in Britain. For Drescher, it reflects a belief that free labor was economically superior to forced labor.
(70) Davis, on the other hand, is careful to distinguish his version by noting that it is more akin to an approach driven
by human dignity and based on "a sense of self-worth created by dutiful work." (71)
The fourth factor is imperialism. Like studies of abolitionism, much of the recent historiography of international law
has highlighted the role of imperialism, but Martinez makes no mention of it. I argue that imperialism is in fact central
to an understanding of nineteenth-century abolitionism, from the justifications proffered and the objectives sought, to
the means used, the outcomes achieved, and the policy conclusions that might be drawn. The justifications invoked
were, in many respects, paternalistic and condescending. (72) The objectives of imperialism have been a subject of
scholarly debate. Professor Lauren Benton, for example, argues that the abolitionist campaign fit very well with the
imperial government's goal of constraining the power of the colonial planters in order to reinforce its own legal
authority. She directly challenges Martinez's theory with her conclusion that the rights at the heart of abolitionism were
not human rights but "the property rights and legal prerogatives of slave traders and slave owners within the imperial
order." (73) Professor Wilhelm Grewe presents a more comprehensive imperialist indictment by attributing
abolitionism largely to the desire of the British to promote their own economic interests and to do so by whatever
means were available to them as the "strongest sea power in the world." (74) Of the total number of ships detained in
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the supposedly multilateral effort to abolish the slave trade, fewer than one percent had sailed from or through British
territorial waters, but eighty-five percent were detained pursuant to British action. (75)
But the means used were the most clearly imperialistic aspect of the episode. Without going beyond Martinez's own
account, a damning picture emerges of the ways in which law and legal institutions were an integral part of classically
imperialist conduct. She recounts how the British government engaged in highly dubious interpretations of
international law to justify high seas intervention, bribed and strong-armed other nations to enter treaties and to
cooperate with British dictates, and maintained faith in the mixed commissions because the government remained
firmly in control of the process. These measures can easily be seen as a vital part of establishing and enforcing the
imperialist enterprise of the Pax Britannica. Other commentators paint a harsher picture. Drescher notes that "[b]efore
and after the French wars ended, the Royal Navy stretched and breached international law in occasional or threatened
blockades of European, Latin American, and African ports." (76) And Eltis describes the creation of a Slave Trade
Department in the Foreign Office, which also pursued global intelligence gathering, the issuance of illegal instructions
to naval commanders, clandestine efforts to free slaves, British naval incursions into foreign territorial waters,
extensive payments to secret informants in other states, support for slave insurrections, and the bribery of foreign
legislators, media owners, and naval personnel. (77)
Martinez acknowledges only that the British "engaged in somewhat dubious unilateral actions," and then quickly notes
that the British could argue that "those actions were justified under the spirit of the treaties" (p. 166). The Foreign
Office did indeed make such arguments in the nineteenth century, but few took it at face value then and there are no
grounds for doing so today.
None of this is to suggest that imperialist justifications, objectives, and means constitute the entire picture. Motivations
are inevitably mixed in such situations, and lawful and appropriate techniques are often combined with others. But to
the extent that major elements of the British approach were imperialistic, albeit partly in the pursuit of an admirable
goal, it becomes all the more important to exercise caution and discernment in drawing lessons for the future.
Martinez, however, sees only positive lessons emerging. She calls upon the United States today, while it can still do so,
to project its economic and military power into the future by supporting the role of the International Criminal Court
(ICC) (pp. 170-71). And seemingly drawing inspiration from Britain's use of "raw coercive power," among other
techniques, she calls upon the United States "to foster democracy and human rights through the use of force" (p. 15).
(78) Having seen no imperialist dimensions in the earlier episode, it is understandable that the strong and potentially
disabling perception of the ICC as an imperialist tool being wielded against Africa, and concerns that the
Responsibility to Protect doctrine is merely a twenty-first-century version of earlier imperial interventions in the
Global South, give Martinez no cause to doubt the validity of her prescriptions. But it is difficult not to draw analogies
between the uses and misuses of international law by the leading imperial power of the nineteenth century and the
activities of its erstwhile counterpart in the early part of the twenty-first century. (79) Martinez seems unaware that
imperialist motives and methods might taint, or even fatally undermine, even the most high-minded of world order
projects.
III. EVALUATING MARTINEZ'S ORIGINS CLAIMS
Martinez could well have been content with her splendid retelling of an important episode in the nineteenth-century
history of human rights, a period that has been given insufficient importance in most recent histories of human rights.
But by adding ambitious claims as to the origins of contemporary human rights law, she put her book at the heart of
one of the most contested issues in the new wave of human rights scholarship. Until very recently the international
human rights regime had been of little interest beyond the relatively arcane worlds of international lawyers and
activists, and it was all but invisible in the mainstream social science literature. (80) This low profile might be
explained simply by the fact that, despite its prominence in many national legal orders, diplomatic discourse, academic
debate, and even grassroots activist campaigns, the relevant body of law is of very recent provenance. (81) Or the
explanation might lie more in what is widely thought to be its very modest impact on the real world practices of
governments. But, whatever the reasons, in the past decade social scientists have discovered human rights as a fertile
and challenging subject for inquiry. Even more importantly, much of the resulting literature has been of a deeply
critical nature. Philosophers have begun to agonize over the challenge of grounding the modern notion of human rights
in theoretical terms; (82) anthropologists have sought to address the decentering of human rights and the consequences
of their unsettled or unstable content or status; (83) critical theorists have begun to suggest that the liberation promised
by rights proponents is often just a form of imperialist or colonial domination dressed in new garb; (84) political
scientists have challenged the effectiveness of treaties and courts; (85) and historians have challenged the basic
assumption that the current human rights movement is the logical next step in a progress narrative with deep historical
roots.
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A. Locating Martinez's Book in Historiographical Debates
In order to locate Martinez's position within historiographical debates, it is helpful to distinguish three broad, but not
necessarily mutually exclusive, approaches in the relevant literature: the linear progress narrative, theories that identify
a precise but lengthy chronology, and the claim by the "new revisionists" that the human rights movement is of such
recent provenance as to lack a genealogy worthy of the name.
1. Linear Progress Narratives. -- International law scholars have long been accused of portraying their discipline as an
intrinsically or inexorably progressive one. Where once the term "civilization" had been the goal, it came to be
replaced by "progress." (86) In the human rights field, progress narratives promote a picture of more or less linear
progress from ancient times through to the present. Thus Professor Micheline Ishay observes that "the notion of
universality evolved throughout history ... [as] the ancients sketched out the fundamentals of a universal ethics that the
moderns would further elaborate." (87) Religious influences were strong -- "the moral injunctions contained in the
Bible paved the way for the liberal and socialist conceptions of human rights" -- but so too were philosophical ones, as
Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero "provided a philosophical basis for challenging oppressive regimes, thereby laying the
foundation for human rights activism." (88) Various collections of human rights source documents across the ages
follow the same type of inclusive and progress-oriented approach. (89)
Those writing human rights history from a broader social science vantage point have generally adopted a comparable
approach, albeit within a more restricted timeframe. (90) One typical account lists "the Magna Carta (1215), the
English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), and the US
Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791)" as individual rights-based documents that are "the written precursors" of
today's regime. (91)
Progress narratives of this type leap from one historical moment to another with little if any attempt to demonstrate
causality, probe lines of transmission, or explain the political economy involved. They overstate coherence and
continuity, marginalize competing understandings, and can be used to delegitimize alternative visions. (92) And they
are especially difficult to reconcile with the widely held perception that "never before, in absolute figures, never have
so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the Earth." (93)
Perhaps the only thing that those who are shaping the new historiography of rights, including Martinez, agree upon is
that such narratives yield unwieldy and unpersuasive foundations for today's understanding of human rights. As Lynn
Hunt puts it, "the risk is that the history of human rights becomes the history of Western civilization or ... even the
history of the entire world." (94) Similarly, Professor Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann questions whether "the incorporation
of all historical struggles for concrete rights and privileges -- which were not intended to be universal, but rather were
strictly tied to specific groups -- amount[s] to rewriting the entire legal history as a history of human rights." (95) In
short, what Moyn has aptly characterized as "idealist and decontextualized exercise[s] in teleological conceptual
accumulation" (96) wield little explanatory power today.
2. Precise Timeframe Theories. -- The most prominent alternatives are those that identify a reasonably specific
chronological starting point, such as the Magna Carta or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In view of space
constraints, it must suffice to mention just a few of the more recent examples. The European Renaissance is a common
starting point. In a controversial recent book, Professor John Headley credits European civilization with having created
the "culture-transcending" notion of a "common humanity that reveals itself in programs of human rights." (97) While
these ideas originated in Stoic-Christian times, they came of age during the Renaissance and Reformation periods. (98)
Headley denies any polemical or triumphalist goals in tracing the evolution of an essentially Western and Christian
tradition through its more secular manifestations until he reaches today's understanding of human rights. (99)
Lynn Hunt, a specialist in the history of the French Revolution and in cultural history, locates the origins in the cultural
and literary milieu of the Enlightenment. They are to be found in the efforts of thinkers like Cesare Beccaria who
sought to discredit the use of torture, cruel punishments, and the death penalty, and the novels of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Samuel Richardson who unleashed the emotions and sensibilities of their readers and set the scene for
"human empathy" to spread beyond each individual's immediate community. (100) Other writers focus on the French
and American revolutions and bills of rights as constituting the watershed moment for the emergence of a modern
notion of human rights, (101) and debates have long raged over which set of influences came first. (102) Critics have
rejected this attempt to pinpoint a chronological beginning. Professor Balandine Kriegel has expressed the criticism
colorfully: "According to this myth, there arose, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new island, this absolute
beginning called the individualist doctrine of human rights. Pure, smooth, round, healthy, and naked, this doctrine was
like the noble savage. ..." (103)
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While Martinez's starting point is shortly after the Age of Revolutions, Professor Gary Bass locates it in British
responses to humanitarian crises in the later nineteenth century, and he concludes that "[t]he agitation over the
Bulgarians in the 1870s paved the way to the modern human rights movement." (104) As a result, today's human rights
practitioners, rather than being "faddish [or] even particularly modern," are simply "the ideological and organizational
descendants" of those who campaigned in the nineteenth century against cruelty "in remote places like Greece and
Bulgaria." (105)
Finally, by far the most common starting point for modern histories of human rights is the United Nations Charter of
1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. (106) The principal American academic proponent of
this approach was Professor Louis Henkin, who marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Charter by writing: "[A] halfcentury
of human rights has been the cause, or the result, or both, of radical change in the international state system, in
the character of international law, and in its relation to national constitutions. ..." (107) I return to Henkin's role below.
These theories all compete, and are not readily compatible, with one another. Generally, this incompatibility is not
particularly problematic, as the authors mostly identify different key variables against which to locate the origins for
their own purposes. Thus, while one need not in fact choose between them for analytic purposes, the existence of these
highly plausible competing theories suggests that the attempt to identify a single origin is a flawed approach.
3. The New Revisionists. -- Moyn's book, The Last Utopia, presents the most radical and uncompromising version of
the discontinuity thesis, and his analysis has been highly influential among a particular group of historians, some
international lawyers, and some social scientists. While his broad iconoclasm compels a deep and healthy revisiting of
some of the assumptions taken for granted by mainstream writers of human rights history, his thesis is driven home
with such single-mindedness, selectivity, and lack of nuance that it is essentially a polemic, thus putting it into a genre
especially popular in French scholarship.
In Moyn's view, the phrase "human rights" did not enter the English language until the 1940s, (108) and it was not until
the 1970s (1977 to be precise) that the international human rights movement first emerged. He is thus deeply critical of
most of the historians who have gone before him in this area, most of whom have rushed to embrace human rights as a
"saving truth," and resorted to "[h]agiography" in order to "provide the myths" needed by the new human rights
movement. (109) He is particularly critical of those like Martinez who scrutinize "earlier eras in the quixotic search for
deep roots." (110) And about the era of which she writes he asserts that "during the birth of internationalism in the
nineteenth century, human rights were not on the horizon." (111) Martinez, along with various other authors, has been
the target of strong critiques by Moyn. (112)
The relevance of Moyn's work in the context of British abolitionism is well illustrated by the fact that the leading
British historian of this field, Robin Blackburn, devotes extensive, indeed inordinate, attention to Moyn's work in the
tome that brings together Blackburn's decades of research on slavery and its abolition. Indeed, where his previous 560-
page book does not discuss human rights to any significant degree, (113) the new 502-page volume is subtitled
"Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights." Moyn's argument features at both the beginning and the end of the book.
(114)
Other young historians strongly influenced by Moyn include Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, who introduces a volume of
essays on diverse aspects of the twentieth-century human rights movement by arguing that only in the latter half of that
period did human rights develop into a "vocabulary for confronting abuses of disciplinary state power ... -- a claim
foreign to revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, who believed that the nation-state would guarantee civil and
human rights." (115) Hoffmann's goal is to transcend (avoid) a teleological history of the idea of human rights and
replace it with a genealogy that explains their origins "as the unpredictable results of political contestations," (116) or
more dramatically, as "the product of a global history of violence and conflict." (117) Those who argue that human
rights have a pedigree that long predates the 1970s are dismissed as seeking to invent an extended history of human
rights in an effort to "demonstrate the evolution of universal morality." (118) Moyn's work, in addition to being widely
reviewed, has also had a significant impact on much of the scholarly (119) and practitioner (120) literature about
human rights.
Moyn's radical discontinuity approach is so counterintuitive, and so directly at odds with Martinez's assumptions, that
it requires some explanation to convey a sense of how he manages to detach the centuries before 1977 from the
decades that followed. It must suffice in the present context to provide a few snapshots from his analysis, which is in
itself something of a whirlwind. He begins by dismissing all of the standard accounts that attempt a synthesis of human
rights history as falling into "teleology, tunnel vision, and triumphalism." (121) In terms of specific ancestors, the
ancient Greeks and Romans have little to teach us in this context since "neither the cosmopolitanism of the [Greek]
Stoics nor the original concept of humanity [of the Romans] were remotely similar in their implications to current
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versions." (122) The Magna Carta is an example of "aristocratic rights talk." (123) Rights proclaimed by
Enlightenment thinkers "were so profoundly different in their practical outcomes -- up to and including bloody
revolution -- as to constitute another conception altogether." (124) The French and American declarations are also
dismissed, for reasons to which I shall return shortly.
One of Moyn's fellow revisionists argues that human rights "almost disappeared from political and legal discourse in
the nineteenth century." (125) This is a very problematic claim, and while Moyn at least points to the example of
Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy, (126) he makes almost nothing of the very relevant writings of Pasquale Fiore or Johann
Caspar Bluntschli. (127) The League of Nations era has nothing to tell us about individual, as opposed to collective
(minority), rights, and the Holocaust is equally marginal to understanding the rise of human rights since "there was no
widespread Holocaust consciousness in the postwar era, so human rights could not have been a response to it." (128)
The rest of the 1940s, despite the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (129) was also not
significant because the United States -- after a fleeting interest in human rights -- turned its attention to the Cold War
and entirely forgot its human rights advocacy. In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet Union and anticolonialist forces were
focused on "collective ideals of emancipation" that ignored or at least marginalized any notions of human rights. (130)
Even as late as 1968 (the year of the first World Conference on Human Rights) human rights "remained peripheral as
an organizing concept and almost nonexistent as a movement." (131) And the United Nations was responsible for the
irrelevance of human rights and thus "had to be bypassed as the concept's essential institution for it to matter." (132)
But in the 1970s, it seems, all of this changed. Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 and a new
age of "internationalist citizen advocacy" was born. (133) Jimmy Carter was elected in the United States and suddenly
"[t]he moral world had changed," as human rights became a central focus of international politics. (134) Indeed, they
emerged "seemingly from nowhere." (135)
While Moyn's analysis contains a number of hard truths that demand careful reflection, there is also much about it that
is contestable. Three particular problems stand out. The first concerns the long history of human rights provisions in
national constitutions, dating back even before 1776 or 1789, and the wave of constitutions in the 1950s and beyond
that adopted large chunks of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These bills of rights, according to Moyn, are
not relevant because they are essentially state centered and sovereignty reinforcing, (136) and yet there is vastly more
to be said about the significant impact of such statements.
The second problem relates to the U.S. Constitution and the French Declaration of Rights, which run afoul of the same
critique. In Moyn's view, the rights guaranteed by these documents are better seen as citizens' prerogatives that are
invoked against the state, whereas human rights must be external to the state and able to be invoked against it. He
argues that the two types of rights need to be "rigorously distinguished" from one another. (137) Thus, the "central
event in human rights history is the recasting of rights as entitlements that might contradict the sovereign nation-state
from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation." (138) In other words, Moyn's vision of a human right is
something that transcends the "state forum for rights." (139) His is a determinedly cosmopolitan and suprastate vision.
And the third problem concerns the European Convention of Human Rights, which in almost all other accounts is seen
as central to the historical evolution of today's human rights regime. For Moyn, this too does not count. To Moyn, the
Convention was largely a conservative Christian plot and the law of human rights mattered little in what was
essentially an exercise in ideological signaling. (140)
Much of Moyn's myopia is facilitated by an excessive and unconvincing focus on the role of a handful of American
international law scholars. The prime target is Louis Henkin, although Moyn cites, but barely engages with, Hersch
Lauterpacht's 1950 book International Law and Human Rights, which long stood as the most relevant effort by an
international lawyer to ground human rights historically. (141) As a result, a large array of other actors are
marginalized. A short list of the ignored or neglected includes: (1) the great majority of non-American international
lawyers, including all of those who worked on the drafting, adoption, and implementation of the European Convention
on Human Rights; (2) all domestic lawyers working at the coalface of domestic constitution-drafting to ensure the
incorporation of the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the national level; (3) all lawyers,
activists, and others working to develop the substantive content of particular parts of the human rights pantheon (from
habeas corpus, through freedom of speech, to freedom from torture); (4) the antiracism movements in the United States
and elsewhere; (5) minority rights regimes before and after World War II; (6) the international labor movement with its
emphasis on social justice and its extensive array of treaties begun in 1919; (7) the entire women's suffrage and rights
movement; (8) the children's rights movement with its landmark 1924 League of Nations Declaration on the Rights of
the Child; and (9) a wide range of other actors working on issues that they considered to involve rights, social
movements, and elements of internationalization.
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B. Who is Right?
What then are we to make of these competing, and apparently irreconcilable, claims to have identified not just the
chronology but also the deeper genealogy of human rights? Professor Marc Bloch perceptively observes that "for most
historical realities the very notion of a starting-point remains singularly elusive. It is doubtless a matter of definition,
but of a definition which it is unfortunately all too easy to forget to give." (142) At a superficial level, this points to the
principal differences among the main protagonists in this debate. Thus, many of the classic progress narratives fail to
provide any meaningful definition to confine the scope of the inquiry. Martinez's stated focus is "international human
rights law." Hunt looks even more ambitiously for the period in which "human rights" were "invented." (143) And
Moyn directs his attention to locating the origins of the "international human rights movement." (144)
Underlying these definitions are the analytical assumptions -- sometimes made explicit and sometimes almost buried --
that inform the choice of criteria against which each author determines when human rights "began," or came to matter,
or passed some other designated threshold. Martinez's assumptions are not explicitly spelled out but they are very clear
by implication. She takes the legal and institutional characteristics of today's international human rights regime and
looks for their direct counterparts in an earlier era. But if the question she set herself had been either broader or
narrower, her inquiry would have led to quite different results. For example, the moment of origin might have been
much earlier if she had looked for historical examples of bilateral treaties that incorporated human rights-type
provisions. Or it might have been considerably later if she had instead used one or more criteria related to impact as
part of her framework.
Hunt seeks to extricate her project from what would otherwise be a "very diffuse history" (145) (a quagmire, perhaps?)
by coming up with criteria of naturalness, equality, and universality, in addition to what she calls "political content,"
which seems to require guarantees by the state of political rights and popular demand for those rights. (146) But it is
difficult to avoid the sense that they were chosen in retrospect in order to justify the assertion that the period of crossAtlantic
revolutions was a veritable watershed, rather than because they are essential characteristics that distinguish all
that went before that time from all that followed.
Moyn, for his part, begins by defining "contemporary human rights," rather than the "international human rights
movement," as "a set of global political norms providing the creed of a transnational social movement." (147) Two
characteristics are apparently indispensable to Moyn's analysis: (1) the norms need to be "global" in the sense that they
are not merely rights claimed by citizens against their own state but instead bypass or transcend the authority of the
state; and (2) they need to be championed by a powerful transnational movement.
But in Moyn's case, the hypothesis that the definitional choices made will predict the outcome of the inquiry is
stretched to the breaking point, since the criteria differ dramatically from those used in the existing literature, require a
degree of globalization that by definition could not be satisfied until late in the twentieth century, and are inherently
unconvincing. The first criterion -- that human rights norms need to be able to "contradict the sovereign nation-state
from above and outside" (148) -- is highly artificial. The norms invoked by the international movement are not natural
law norms but derive from custom and treaties made by states; the obligations are incumbent upon the state itself; and
the international mechanisms to which appeals may be directed are extremely weak and themselves largely dependent
upon states. The element that does arguably transcend all of this -- the victim's ability to invoke universal norms in
order to appeal to, and hopefully to mobilize, international public opinion -- is a relatively hollow achievement in the
absence of a strong domestic human rights sphere.
The second criterion -- the existence of a powerful international movement -- is equally hollow. Moyn's evidence of
such a movement consists almost exclusively of the role played by just two groups -- Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch -- the latter of which was defined domestically by its orientation toward Washington, D.C., and
internationally by its "focus on the United States as the key actor," (149) and was only tangentially concerned with
building an international movement. To the extent that there is a powerful transnational movement, its most important
components are arguably national-level actors rather than international organizations such as Amnesty International or
Human Rights Watch. (150)
Moyn's definitional criteria thus fail to persuade, and the reader is left to wonder what deeper agenda might be at work.
At one level there seems to be a not uncommon academic desire to dismiss all competing theories and to be
iconoclastic for the sake of iconoclasm, but this observation helps little in terms of a deeper understanding. Perhaps the
most instructive clue is provided by his strong embrace, signaled only in his footnotes, of Professor Martti
Koskenniemi's work. (151) The latter is the most brilliant international law scholar of his generation, but he has a deepseated
skepticism about rights. (152) This skepticism flows from his questioning of the validity of metanorms, his
concern about the impact of hegemonic agendas, and his belief in the centrality of politics and the need to ensure that it
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is not preempted by rights or other claims. (153) In Moyn's hands these factors are combined with an exceptionally
America-centric perspective on the world, a reluctance to acknowledge the power of ideas until they reach a high
threshold, and a preoccupation with formal global political power. There is thus an instinctive distrust of the
multilayered and often amorphous human rights movement and a desire to reduce or diminish it into a phenomenon
that is largely illusory and destined to self-destruct.
Moyn seems implicitly to acknowledge the artificiality of the criteria he puts forward in his book in a subsequent
article that identifies three different "lenses" that might be used in human rights historiography. They are: (1)
substance, which covers the content of norms; (2) scale, which evaluates the geographical scope of the rights; and (3)
salience, which effectively measures impact, although he describes it as focusing on "the prominence and believability
of human rights as a language of political ideology, maneuvering, and struggle." (154) He relates these different
elements to the earlier criteria by arguing:
Only a history of human rights oriented to scale and salience can
capture not merely how the idea was propounded or the practice
started, but also how it came to fit the imagination and reorient
the actions of large swathes of people ..., informing their
everyday thought and lives and legitimating one sort of moral
world over another both at home and abroad. (155)
The criteria/elements/lenses that Moyn puts forward would be plausible in their own right if they were given their
ordinary meaning and interpreted as requiring reference to normative substance, geographical diversity, and real-world
relevance or salience. But this is not his intention, since again few enterprises can meet the immensely demanding
criteria that he imposes: a global reach, a major transnational movement, a dramatic impact on both the thinking and
the practice of vast numbers of people, and a prescription for a particular ideology of world order. By any standard, this
list makes little sense when presented as the minimum threshold that human rights must surpass before it can be said to
have a genealogy worthy of the name.
The key issues are whether the historical dimension really matters and, if so, what criteria should be used in future
human rights historiography. I turn now to those questions.
IV. RETHINKING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Does it matter whether the origins of the international human rights regime can be traced back over the centuries? Why
should it matter? If it does matter, what period of time and what evidence of influence or continuity should be
required?
A. Genealogy Matters
Martinez makes strong claims as to why genealogy matters and, especially, why the particular lineage that she traces is
important. She argues that there is still much to be learned today from the techniques and institutions used two
centuries ago, and that they exemplify a range of "dichotomies and tensions that continue to play out today," including
those between natural law and positivism, religious and secular ideas, European and non-European societies and
cultures, treaties and custom, and national and territorial jurisdiction versus universal jurisdiction. Somewhat
tantalizingly, she asserts that understanding how these tensions played out "can help us better understand the
jurisprudential foundations of modern international human rights law" although, for the most part, she leaves readers to
draw the relevant conclusions for themselves (p. 14).
In response, Moyn is correct to remind us that much of the historiography of human rights promoted by international
lawyers has been superficial and unconvincing and has done little to help us understand what they describe as the long,
winding, and convoluted evolution of international human rights consciousness over the centuries. He is wrong,
however, in the basic assumptions of his "big bang" theory that sees human rights emerging almost out of nowhere in
1977. In what follows I consider first the importance of understanding the origins of ideas and second the
consequences of accepting a big bang theory of human rights.
Consider first the history of ideas. If a nonhistorian were to put forward the thesis that human rights began in 1977, she
would be accused of being ahistorical. Moyn, anticipating such a response, has an answer. He invokes the work of the
French historian Marc Bloch, (156) whose all too brief meditation on the craft of the historian, written just before he
was executed by the Nazis, contains great wisdom. (157) Bloch warned about the obsession of many historians,
particularly but not only those writing religious history, with the "idol of origins." (158) His worry was that origins
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were often presented as providing a complete explanation of historical events and were also linked directly to "that
other satanic enemy of true history: the mania for making judgments." (159) Bloch was especially concerned that the
historian would confuse ancestry for explanation. The lesson that Moyn draws from these reflections is encapsulated in
a metaphor warning against the assumption that all of the water in a great downstream flood can be traced back to a
trickle of melted snow in the mountains. (160) In reality, the water might have joined the flooded river from multiple
other sources, seen and unseen. Thus, his theory, according to which a pre-1970s trickle exploded into a massive river
just a few years later, presents a straightforward challenge: "[I]t is not a persistent stream but a shocking groundswell
that has to be explained." (161) While other historians have debated the point at which the river gained significant
momentum and have come to different conclusions, only Moyn has discerned a shocking groundswell, in the sense of a
dramatic rupture with the flow of previous history. We need to try to understand why.
In essence, his reading of Bloch is seriously distorted. He cites Bloch as concluding that "[h]istory ... is not about
tracing antecedents." (162) Yet in writing about the relationship between different forms of slavery and freedom in the
context of French feudal society, Bloch is well aware of the importance of historical continuity, as for example when
he laments that the lords and judges who might have otherwise maintained the old social nomenclature "were generally
too ignorant to be encumbered with legal memories." (163) And the book Moyn cites is replete with sage advice about
the need to balance present and past and to understand the relationship between them. Bloch warns on the one hand
that "[m]isunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past," but adds on the other
hand that "a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of
the present." (164) In other words, genealogy matters.
Bloch actually warned of the perils of grand theory, or what he termed "the great attempts at interpretation," (165) and
emphasized that one of the great challenges of history is to understand how and why transitions occurred. (166) He
seems unlikely to have been particularly drawn to or persuaded by a big bang theory of history such as Moyn's.
Let us now return to consider the practical consequences of Moyn's theory, whether for Martinez's interpretation or for
almost any historically grounded theory of the ancestry of human rights. Central to his argument is the notion that
human rights is a "utopia," defined as a "maximalist political vision," (167) and a "worldview." (168) Human rights
prevailed after the 1970s because "they were widely understood as a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias,"
such as socialism, nationalism, and communism. (169) When these all collapsed, human rights could be constructed as
an attractive replacement. The problem is that in their new utopian guise human rights become a recipe for displacing
or transcending politics, thus sapping "the energy from old ideological contests of left and right." (170) And therein lie
the seeds of destruction: the vision is no longer a moral but a political one, and it is doomed to disappoint and perhaps
even implode. Moyn's prescription therefore is to reject the utopian approach and to opt instead for a set of "minimal
constraints on responsible politics." There seems to be no middle path -- it is a choice between "minimalist ethical
norms" and a "maximalist political vision." (171)
For Moyn, everything is contingent and the human rights edifice seems a particularly precarious one. Little wonder,
since in his view it was built almost overnight, and such buildings do not usually last too long. Thus, the era in which
human rights has so briefly prospered is "surely fleeting," and other ideologies will soon "seem more plausible." (172)
Similarly, human rights historiography is a fad and despite its very brief existence, it may well be that it has already
"reached the point of declining returns, if it was a worthy field to build in the first place." (173) And the future of
Human Rights Watch, located within a particular and time-bound form of "American, bureaucratic, and informational
politics," (174) is far from assured as the specific circumstances that facilitated its emergence disappear.
In the end, what is clearly a very sophisticated and nimble excursion through a vast amount of historical material
actually comes down to a realpolitik critique of any explanatory efforts that are not constructed essentially in terms of
power. Thus, abolition is to be explained not in terms of the pressures generated by revolutions (actual or feared),
humanitarian or rights-inspired movements, or even economic calculations. Rather, the impetus was to secure British
control over the seas in the face of threats from competing imperial powers. Similarly, the birth of the international
human rights movement can be located squarely in 1977 when President Carter proclaimed an "absolute" commitment
to human rights and the evolution of the Helsinki Process saw human rights being invoked in the great power battle
against the Soviet Union and its communist allies.
By detaching today's international human rights regime from its deep roots and dismissing the relevance of the many
historical as well as intellectual struggles to define a shared understanding of the subject, the revisionists are able to
present us with a clean sheet from which to begin their own speculations as to both the nature and the origins of the
human rights movement. It is no accident that Moyn, having demolished all prior claims that human rights must be
seen to have a deep and rich ancestry, then moves to portray human rights in terms that most of its theoreticians as well
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as practitioners will find unrecognizable. In short, there is a struggle for the soul of the human rights movement, and it
is being waged in large part through the proxy of genealogy.
B. The Road Ahead
Any meaningful history of human rights must disaggregate and address separately the different analytical dimensions
of the overall enterprise. The enterprise of "human rights" consists of too many distinct facets to be reduced to one or
two variables. The history and power of ideas, the force of grassroots social and political movements, the impact of
legal and constitutional traditions, and the influence of institutions at both the domestic and international levels
constitute indispensable elements that need to be factored into any effort to understand the origins, nature, and
potential significance of the present regime. Several lessons emerge from the analysis above.
1. The Intrinsic Polycentricity of the Human Rights Enterprise. -- Each of the different historiographical approaches
has something important to offer, but we should be very wary of any single account that purports to have found the
answer to the puzzle and to have invalidated alternative interpretations. The human rights enterprise is intrinsically
complex and multifaceted. Its origins are to be found in different and multiple sites, and they cannot usefully be traced
back to any single source or through examining the evolution of a single theme, process, or institution.
2. Linear Claims as a Suspect Class. -- Histories that rely on strong claims of continuity over a long period of time are
inherently questionable. Thus, for example, the history of antislavery alone, considered quite separately from the much
broader array of human rights issues and regimes, has been a remarkably circuitous, uncertain, and often tragic one,
even in the limited period from 1807 to the present. Claims of a direct lineage over a century or two will generally
imply elements of consistency and perhaps even inevitability that do not resonate with the actual path that history has
traced, and this is certainly true of the struggle to abolish slavery. Various recent studies have pointed to this very
checkered history even in terms of the struggle to build an international legal regime throughout the nineteenth and
into the twentieth century, let alone the path taken in relation to the new colonialism of the second half of the
nineteenth century in Africa.
In this respect the interpretations offered by Martinez and Moyn are unhelpful mirror images of one another. Martinez
exaggerates the continuities involved in two centuries of history, while Moyn exaggerates the discontinuities. Both
have important points to make. But there are crucial continuities as well as discontinuities, and neither should be
overlooked or underestimated.
3. The Need for an Analytical Framework. -- Given the polycentric nature of the overall enterprise, a serious historical
analysis should spell out more clearly what it is seeking when searching for the roots of human rights. As a starting
point we should acknowledge that "human rights" might be thought of as:
(a) an idea, including careful consideration of the extent to which vocabularies are interchangeable over time;
(b) an elaborated discourse, going beyond basic ideas, but not requiring institutional manifestations;
(c) a social movement, including a definition of such a movement and specification of why it is significant;
(d) a practice, or an institution, that resembles in at least some respects the elements that we might consider important
today;
(e) a legal regime, either at the national or international level, or both; or
(f) a system that is capable of effectively promoting respect for the rights of individuals and groups.
Each of these categories would constitute a plausible focus for analysis, and each is likely to be linked to the other, thus
forming elements in the historical genealogy of the system. An isolated focus on one or another will inevitably produce
different accounts of the origins, antecedents, precursors, and so on, as is illustrated by the approaches adopted by
Martinez and Moyn. The choice of focus will also produce different causal accounts.
4. The Power of Ideas. -- At the end of the day, the most compelling reason for the importance of genealogy is to be
found in the history of ideas. But human rights does not consist of a single idea. Much of the recent literature seeks to
single out one particular element that is then said to have transformed an otherwise amorphous mass of claims and
assertions into a suddenly coherent body of "human rights" that had not previously existed. To the extent that Martinez
seeks to mark out the origins of a regime that consists of the elements that would be most prized by a twenty-firstcentury
international lawyer -- treaties, courts, and enforcement -- her case is strong. Nor is she oblivious to the
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broader political and societal contexts in which this regime emerged. But the weakness of the bolder claim that she
makes is that she fails to trace the historical evolution of either the basic normative claims of the antislavery movement
or the techniques that were pioneered at the time. Even if the case can be made that today's norms and institutions look
much like those of yesteryear, any compelling genealogical claim needs to be demonstrated rather than surmised.
For Moyn, the key transformative step is that the claim made by an individual is directed to the international
community, rather than to the state of which the individual is a citizen. But this step is just one among many in the long
and winding voyage of the concept of human rights, the evolution of which continues. There is no single element, no
single idea that enables us to declare that the notion of human rights has reached a definitive threshold that not only
marks it off from all that has gone before but also makes it qualitatively and fundamentally different. We are looking at
a continuum, albeit not a linear one. While there have indeed been important discontinuities along the way, these do
not lead to what might be termed a discontinuum, or a situation in which the wheel needs to be reinvented each time.
Of course, Moyn recognizes the importance of ideas, but he marginalizes them at a very early stage in his analysis.
Philosophical ideas of ancient lineage that concern issues that we now think of in terms of rights are dismissed as
precursors because their form bears no direct resemblance to today's approach. And the evolution over many centuries
of substantive legal norms such as habeas corpus is relegated to what is at best a very minor role, and at worst a
distraction. Lawyers, Moyn tells us, "can stick with teleological histories because they live in a universe of
authoritative textual precedents with little analytical interest in how they fit into a complex world of causal
interrelationships among law, politics, and society." (175) But instead of the power of ideas or norms, Moyn's main
concern is with power tout court.
5. The Role of Power. -- Power, in both its positive and negative iterations, must be an integral part of any history of
human rights. But power comes in many shapes and forms ranging from military force to the soft power of ideas.
Martinez is almost beguiled by the power of legal norms and courts but neglects the complex imperialistic power plays
at work in the episode she recounts. Moyn, in contrast, is primarily concerned with geopolitics and worries about a
world "beset by economic crisis and American and European decline," (176) and heading into a "geopolitical storm."
(177) But where Martinez sees the imminent waning of American power as the best moment to seek to lock in global
human rights commitments, Moyn draws the opposite conclusion. For him, the glory days of human rights have
passed, and other ideologies will rapidly and easily overtake them. (178) The rapid growth of Asian power, perhaps
combined with the resurgence of Islam, seems to concentrate greatly the minds of these historians, but for very
different reasons. (179)
V. CONCLUSION
The rapid growth of interest in and discourse about the law and politics of human rights has provoked mixed and
sometimes contradictory reactions on the part of scholars, even if there is broad agreement that many of the older
historical narratives are deeply problematic and have become patently obsolete. In their place, an array of sophisticated
interdisciplinary scholarship has begun to emerge. Some of it, exemplified by Martinez's excursions into the archives
surrounding the early nineteenth-century anti-slavery courts, seeks to demonstrate and build upon the deep roots of
today's international human rights law, and to suggest lessons for the future. Her historical account is deeply
instructive, if not always for the reasons she puts forth. But her type of scholarship is also seen as passe by the new
revisionists such as Moyn. While these revisionist scholars have done much to challenge and expose the shortcomings
of a great deal of the received wisdom in the field, there has also been a seemingly irresistible urge to demonstrate that
nothing is what it seemed to be and that the history of human rights, defined in their own conveniently idiosyncratic
terms, was negligible until a big bang occurred in the mid-1970s. Moyn heavily discounts the significance of the ebb
and flow of rights discourse across the centuries, and of the often long and bitter struggles that have helped to shape
today's complex and multifaceted human rights endeavors. By doing so, he is able to conjure up a parody of the human
rights movement with shallow and unconvincing roots, defined almost exclusively from an America-centric vantage
point, and sure to be swept away by the emergence of an international order no longer dominated by the West. Such a
vision might explain what some consider to be the parlous situation of human rights in certain advanced democracies,
but it does little to help us understand why, for example, one of the most vibrant human rights cultures in the world
today is to be found in India.
The history of human rights is both long and deep, which is not to say that its progress has been linear, steady, or even
predictable. But we need to understand the struggles that have shaped the movement, for better and worse, over the
centuries and to acknowledge the role of precedents, including historical precedents, in terms of paving the way for
change.
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(1) Until at least 1783, the British Parliament showed surprisingly little interest in questioning the slave trade. A key
turning point came with the eventual discrediting of the Company of Merchants Trading to India, an industry lobby
group that in 1750 had replaced the monopoly previously entrusted to the Royal African Company. Christopher L.
Brown, The British Government and the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713-83, 26 PARLIAMENTARY
HIST. 27, 40-41 (2007).
(2) 1807, 47 Geo. 3, c. 36 (Eng.) (repealed 1824).
(3) The network of mixed commissions expanded enormously in later years to include sites such as Bremen, Cape
Town, Genoa, Luanda, and New York. See DAVID ELTIS, ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE ENDING OF THE
TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE 84 (1987).
(4) See generally SAMUEL MOYN, THE LAST UTOPIA (2010).
(5) For a very detailed accounting, see generally ELTIS, supra note 3.
(6) See, e.g., WILHELM G. GREWE, THE EPOCHS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW (Michael Byers trans., Walter de
Gruyter rev. ed. 2000) (1984); Jean Allain, The Nineteenth Century Law of the Sea and the British Abolition of the
Slave Trade, 78 BRIT. Y.B. INT'L L. 342 (2008); Tara Helfman, The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the
Abolition of the West African Slave Trade, 115 YALE L.J. 1122 (2006); Patricia M. Muhammad, The Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade: A Forgotten Crime Against Humanity as Defined by International Law, 19 AM. U. INT'L L. REV. 883,
947 (2004).
(7) See DAVID ELTIS & DAVID RICHARDSON, ATLAS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE, at xvii
(2010).
(8) DAVID BRION DAVIS, INHUMAN BONDAGE 93 (2006).
(9) For a statistical overview, see David Eltis & David Richardson, A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave
Trade, in EXTENDING THE FRONTIERS 1 (David Eltis & David Richardson eds., 2008).
(10) SEYMOUR DRESCHER, ABOLITION 206 (2009).
(11) See generally WOMEN, DISSENT, & ANTI-SLAVERY IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA, 1790-1865 (Elizabeth J.
Clapp & Julie Roy Jeffrey eds., 2011).
(12) These works include DRESCHER, supra note 10; and ROBIN BLACKBURN, THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE
(2011).
(13) The corresponding footnote cites to DAVID BRION DAVIS, THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN WESTERN
CULTURE (1966). This is the oldest of Professor Davis's many books about slavery, and his later work presents a
more detailed and significantly revised analysis.
(14) Internal quotation marks have been omitted. Three additional references, spanning much of the nineteenth century,
are cited in footnote 4 (pp. 180-81).
(15) THE SLAVE TRADE DEBATE (Bodleian Library 2007).
(16) MOYN, supra note 4, at 4.
(17) Samuel Moyn, Substance, Scale, and Salience: The Recent Historiography of Human Rights, 8 ANN. REV. L. &
SOC. SCI. 123, 133 (2012).
(18) Emphasis has been omitted.
(19) Emphasis and an internal quotation mark have been omitted.
(20) See generally M. CHERIF BASSIOUNI, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY (2011).
(21) Marc Bossuyt & Stef Vandeginste, The Issue of Reparation for Slavery and Colonialism and the Durban World
Conference Against Racism, 22 HUM. RTS. L.J. 341, 350 (2001) (internal quotation mark omitted).
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(22) See id. (noting that this position was put forward on behalf of the African group at the World Conference Against
Racism in 2001).
(23) In 2003 President George W. Bush characterized the slave trade as "one of the greatest crimes of history."
President George W. Bush, Remarks by the President on Goree Island (July 8, 2003), http://georgewbush-w
itehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030708-1.html.
(24) See EMMANUEL DECAUX, LES FORMES CONTEMPORAINES DE L'ESCLAVAGE 200-01 (2009);
RHODA E. HOWARD-HASSMANN WITH ANTHONY P. LOMBARDO, REPARATIONS TO AFRICA 69-70
(2008).
(25) See generally Anti-Slavery Int'l, Abolishing Slavery and its Contemporary Forms, [paragraph][paragraph] 142-
146, Office of the United Nations High Comm'r for Human Rights, U.N. Doc. HR/PUB/02/4 (2002) (by David
Weissbrodt).
(26) World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Durban, S. Afr.,
Aug. 31-Sept. 8, 2001, Declaration and Programme of Action, [paragraph] 13, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.189/12 (2001).
(27) Id. [paragraph][paragraph] 101-102.
(28) See, e.g., MOYN, supra note 4, at 32-33 ("[C]auses [such as] ... the campaign against the slave trade ... were
almost never framed as rights issues."). For a powerful critique of this aspect of Moyn's work, see Robin Blackburn,
Reclaiming Human Rights, NEW LEFT REV., May-June 2011, at 126, 131-33 (reviewing MOYN, supra note 4).
(29) LYNN HUNT, INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS 22 (2007).
(30) See Chaim D. Kaufmann & Robert A. Pape, Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-Year
Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade, 53 INT'L ORG. 631, 644 (1999).
(31) BLACKBURN, supra note 12, at 485.
(32) As Professor David Boucher has argued, "natural law, natural rights (both prescriptive and descriptive), and
human rights are conceptually distinct, but are related to each other, not as answers to the same question, but as part of
the same historical process by which one turns into the other." DAVID BOUCHER, THE LIMITS OF ETHICS IN
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 3 (2009).
(33) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 83.
(34) See DRESCHER, supra note 10, at 236-37.
(35) GREWE, supra note 6, at 566-67.
(36) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 90, 96.
(37) Samuel Moyn, Of Deserts and Promised Lands: The Dream of Global Justice, NATION (Feb. 29, 2012),
http://www.thenation com/article/166516/deserts-and-promised-lands-dream-global-justice (reviewing JENNY S.
MARTINEZ, THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW (2012)).
(38) DRESCHER, supra note 10, at 237.
(39) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 86.
(40) Evaluation is a vital, but much neglected and poorly understood, issue in the human rights field generally,
although it should be more feasible in relation to the issue at hand because of the detailed statistics and the
extraordinary documentary trail available to us. Martinez makes effective use of the extensive data compiled in the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which is available at http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/index.faces.
(41) The number freed by the commissions was of course considerably fewer than the total number interdicted.
Blackburn indicates, for example, that Britain's naval squadron off the West African coast apprehended ships carrying
145,000 slaves in the period 1815 to 1865. BLACKBURN, supra note 12, at 232.
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(42) See, e.g., Samuel Coghe, The Problem of Freedom in a Mid Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Society: The
Liberated Africans of the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda (1844-1870), 33 SLAVERY &
ABOLITION 479, 481 (2012) (citing figures of 66,000 freed in Freetown, 6700 freed in Rio, 13,000 freed in Havana,
137 freed in Luanda, and 54 freed in Suriname). Differences in numbers reflect the probable inclusion in the leading
database of some slaves who had been disembarked before the apprehension of the vessel.
(43) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 139.
(44) DRESCHER, supra note 10, at 245.
(45) For example, Professor Walter Hawthorne has found records of an African who opted to remain a slave in Brazil
rather than obtain his legal freedom in either Rio or Freetown. See Walter Hawthorne, Gorge: An African Seaman and
his Flights from 'Freedom' back to 'Slavery' in the Early Nineteenth Century, 31 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 411, 413
(2010).
(46) For more searching accounts of the conditions in Rio and Havana, see generally Beatriz G. Mamigonian, In the
Name of Freedom: Slave Trade Abolition, the Law and the Brazilian Branch of the African Emigration Scheme
(Brazil-British West Indies, 1830s-1850s), 30 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 41 (2009); Rosanne Marion Adderley, 'A
Most Useful and Valuable People?' Cultural, Moral and Practical Dilemmas in the Use of Liberated African Labour in
the Nineteenth?Century Caribbean, 20 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 59 (1999); Luis Martinez-Fernandez, The Havana
Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade and Cuba's Emancipados, 16 SLAVERY &
ABOLITION 205 (1995).
(47) See Anita Rupprecht, 'When He Gets Among His Countrymen, They Tell Him That He is Free': Slave Trade
Abolition, Indentured Africans and a Royal Commission, 33 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 435, 439 (2012).
(48) See id. at 451 (internal quotation marks omitted).
(49) Robert Burroughs, Eyes on the Prize: Journeys in Slave Ships Taken as Prizes by the Royal Navy, 31 SLAVERY
& ABOLITION 99, 102 (2010).
(50) Muhammad, supra note 6, at 947.
(51) M. Cherif Bassiouni, Enslavement as an International Crime, 23 N.Y.U. J. INT'L L. & POL. 445, 453 (1991).
(52) Nicholas Lawrence McGeehan, Misunderstood and Neglected: The Marginalisation of Slavery in International
Law, 16 INT'L J. HUM. RTS. 436, 439 (2012).
(53) See generally id.
(54) See, e.g., DECAUX, supra note 24, at 9. See generally JEAN ALLAIN, SLAVERY IN INTERNATIONAL LAW
(2012); THE LEGAL UNDERSTANDING OF SLAVERY (Jean Allain ed., 2012).
(55) ADAM HOCHSCHILD, KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST 44 (1998) (quoting from King Leopold's address to the
Geographical Conference, which led to the establishment of the International African Association).
(56) Id. at 233. This figure is an estimate that takes into account population loss from: (1) murder; (2) starvation,
exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) the plummeting birth rate. See id. at 226-32.
(57) Koroua v. Republic of Niger, ECW/CCJ/JUD/06/08 (ECOWAS CCJ, Oct. 27, 2008).
(58) Lydia Polgreen, Court Rules Niger Failed by Allowing Girl's Slavery, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 28, 2008, at A6.
(59) 1 WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY, HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS 153 (3d ed., rev. 1913).
(60) Moyn, supra note 37.
(61) See DRESCHER, supra note 10, at 252.
(62) See Kaufmann & Pape, supra note 30, at 643.
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(63) Apart from the ever-present threat of the use of force, one incident alone -- the shelling of Algiers in August 1816
-- resulted in the death of 141 Anglo-Dutch troops and the wounding of 742. DRESCHER, supra note 10, at 235.
(64) Seymour Drescher, History's Engines: British Mobilization in the Age of Revolution, 66 WM. & MARY Q. 737,
739 (2009).
(65) CHRISTOPHER LESLIE BROWN, MORAL CAPITAL 451-62 (2006).
(66) BLACKBURN, supra note 12, at 173-219.
(67) Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis & David Richardson, The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the PreModern
Atlantic World, 54 ECON. HIST. REV. 454, 473-75 (2001).
(68) ERIC WILLIAMS, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY (1944).
(69) David Richardson, The Ending of the British Slave Trade in 1807: The Economic Context, 26
PARLIAMENTARY HIST. 127, 140 (2007).
(70) SEYMOUR DRESCHER, THE MIGHTY EXPERIMENT 34 (2002).
(71) DAVIS, supra note 8, at 248.
(72) See Yasuaki Onuma, When Was the Law of International Society Born? -- An Inquiry of the History of
International Law from an Intercivilizational Perspective, 2 J. HIST. INT'L L. 1, 43 (2000) (contending that the
humanitarian motives reflected "the discriminatory assumptions of civilized Europe (or West or 'white') vs. uncivilized
(or savage, barbarian, barbarous, backward or stagnant) Africa (or Orient or East)").
(73) Lauren Benton, Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790-1820, 39 J. IMPERIAL & COMMONWEALTH HIST. 355,
369 (2011).
(74) GREWE, supra note 6, at 562.
(75) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 97-98.
(76) Drescher, supra note 64, at 754-55.
(77) ELTIS, supra note 3, at 111-16.
(78) An earlier study also views the nineteenth-century anti-slave-trade seizures as precedents for efforts by the Bush
Administration, through its Proliferation Security Initiative, to create rules empowering it and its allies to board and
inspect ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction. See Helfman, supra note 6, at 1153-55.
(79) I will resist the temptation of drawing out the current day analogies, since they would simply distract from the
issues of primary concern for this Review. For an unhappy example of one who could not resist this temptation, see the
epilogue to JOHN M. HEADLEY, THE EUROPEANIZATION OF THE WORLD 207-18 (2008).
(80) Professor Jonathan Glover's book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century is built around notions of
ethics, morality, and humanity but contains not a single index entry for either "rights" or "human rights," although there
is a closing but unexplained assertion of the need for an "international authority to keep the peace and to protect human
rights." JONATHAN GLOVER, HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 401 (1999).
(81) As Professor Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann puts it, human rights "are a fundamentally new phenomenon ..., indeed, so
recent that historians have only just begun to write their history." Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Introduction to HUMAN
RIGHTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1, 2 (Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann ed., 2011).
(82) See generally CHARLES R. BEITZ, THE IDEA OF HUMAN RIGHTS (2009); JAMES GRIFFIN, ON HUMAN
RIGHTS (2008); Amartya Sen, Elements of a Theory of Human Rights, 32 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 315 (2004).
(83) See generally THE PRACTICE OF HUMAN RIGHTS (Mark Goodale & Sally Engle Merry eds., 2007).
(84) See generally ANTONY ANGHIE, IMPERIALISM, SOVEREIGNTY AND THE MAKING OF
INTERNATIONAL LAW (2004); COSTAS DOUZINAS, THE END OF HUMAN RIGHTS (2000); MAKAU
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MUTUA, HUMAN RIGHTS: A POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE (2002); ANNE ORFORD, READING
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION (2003).
(85) For a survey of this literature, see generally Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, International Regimes for Human Rights,
15 ANN. REV. POL. SCI. 265 (2012).
(86) See, e.g., Russell A. Miller & Rebecca M. Bratspies, Progress in International Law: An Explanation of the
Project, in PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW 9, 11-17 (Russell A. Miller & Rebecca M. Bratspies eds., 2008)
(discussing MANLEY O. HUDSON, PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS (1932)).
(87) MICHELINE R. ISHAY, THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 47 (2004).
(88) Id. at 57-58.
(89) See, e.g., THE HUMAN RIGHTS READER: MAJOR POLITICAL WRITINGS, ESSAYS, SPEECHES, AND
DOCUMENTS FROM THE BIBLE TO THE PRESENT (Micheline R. Ishay ed., 1997); THE HUMAN RIGHTS
READER (Walter Laqueur & Barry Rubin eds., 1979).
(90) See generally, e.g., PAUL GORDON LAUREN, THE EVOLUTION OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS
(3d ed. 2011); Burns H. Weston, Human Rights, BRITANNICA ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/275840/human-rights (last visited Mar. 30, 2013).
(91) A Short History of Human Rights, U. MINN. HUM. RTS. RES. CENTER, http://www1.umn.edu/
umanrts/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-1/short-history.htm (last visited Mar. 30, 2013).
(92) For a strong critique, see generally THOMAS SKOUTERIS, THE NOTION OF PROGRESS IN
INTERNATIONAL LAW DISCOURSE (2010).
(93) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 205 NEW LEFT REV. 31, 53 (1994). Other social scientists, however, argue
that progress can in fact be demonstrated with a degree of scientific and historical accuracy. See, e.g., STEPHEN
PINKER, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011).
(94) HUNT, supra note 29, at 20.
(95) Hoffmann, supra note 81, at 4.
(96) Moyn, supra note 17, at 127.
(97) HEADLEY, supra note 79, at xv, 63.
(98) Id. at 7, 67-69.
(99) See id. at 7. Thus he describes how the "gradual detachment of the features denoting what we understand as
civilization from the long nurturing chrysalis of the medieval church -- its theology, liturgy, and political structures --
becomes decisive for the outward thrust of an essentially moral and religious universalizing principle, its
transformation, and its ramifying deployments in the global arena." Id. at 65.
(100) See HUNT, supra note 29, at 64-65.
(101) See generally A CULTURE OF RIGHTS (Michael J. Lacey & Knud Haakonssen eds., 1991).
(102) Professor Georg Jellinek, for example, famously argued that the American Bill of Rights was fundamentally
different from anything that had gone before it in England or France, and that the roots of the French Declaration lay in
the American debates rather than the works of Rousseau and the philosophes. GEORG JELLINEK, THE
DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF CITIZENS 48 (M. Farrand trans., 1979).
(103) BLANDINE KRIEGEL, THE STATE AND THE RULE OF LAW 33 (Marc A. LePain & Jeffrey C. Cohen
trans., 1995).
(104) GARY J. BASS, FREEDOM'S BATTLE: THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION 6 (2008).
(105) Id. at 5.
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(106) See generally MARY ANN GLENDON, A WORLD MADE NEW (2001); JOHANNES MORSINK, THE
UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: ORIGINS, DRAFTING, AND INTENT (1999).
(107) Louis Henkin, Human Rights and State "Sovereignty," 25 GA. J. INT'L & COMP. L. 31, 31 (1995-1996).
(108) See MOYN, supra note 4, at 44.
(109) Id. at 6.
(110) Id. at 311.
(111) Id. at 41.
(112) As an active and timely reviewer of all books in this area, Moyn has systematically critiqued any approach that
does not fit with his own thesis. Thus, for example, Aryeh Neier's historical survey contains "few new facts or
interpretations" and is "weak on the prehistory of the international movement," Samuel Moyn, The International
Human Rights Movement: A History by Aryeh Neier, 26 ETHICS & INT'L AFF. 392 (2012) (book review); Professor
Kathryn Sikkink's The Justice Cascade (2011) "ignores the darker reasons why morality can shine forth," and fails to
recognize the fundamental geopolitical significance of America's Cold War victory, Moyn, supra note 37; and Lynn
Hunt's Inventing Human Rights presents a "creation myth" and "treats 'human rights' as a body of ideas somehow
insulated from history," Samuel Moyn, On the Genealogy of Morals, NATION, Apr. 16, 2007, at 25, 28, 31 (reviewing
HUNT, supra note 29).
(113) ROBIN BLACKBURN, THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY 1776-1848 (1988) (omitting any
entry for "human rights" in the index).
(114) BLACKBURN, supra note 12, at 5, 485-87.
(115) Hoffmann, supra note 81, at 2.
(116) Id. at 4.
(117) Id. at 25.
(118) Id. at 24-25.
(119) For example, Moyn's influence is palpable at many points in Professor Jean Cohen's superb overview of much of
the recent theoretical literature about human rights. See generally JEAN L. COHEN, GLOBALIZATION AND
SOVEREIGNTY (2012) ("Many have noticed the shift of human rights discourses from a minimalist apolitical moral
rhetoric to a maximalist moral utopianism in the decade prior to 1989." Id. at 172.). Professor Susan Marks lists
Moyn's "myth of deep roots" as one of four myths that should be debunked. Susan Marks, Four Human Rights Myths 6
(LSE Legal Studies, Working Paper No. 10/2012), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2150155. And Professor Jan
Eckel relies strongly upon Moyn in concluding that human rights "never turned into an anticolonial ideology or even
into an important rhetoric at all." Jan Eckel, Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open
Questions, 1 HUMANITY 111, 115 (2010).
(120) See, e.g., ARYEH NEIER, THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT 4, 338-39 (2012). Neier
is significantly influenced by Moyn, although he cannot bring himself to decide if Moyn is largely correct, or largely
mistaken. Id. at 338-39.
(121) MOYN, supra note 4, at 311.
(122) Id. at 15.
(123) Id. at 24.
(124) Id. at 1-2.
(125) Hoffmann, supra note 81, at 1.
(126) MOYN, supra note 4, at 29.
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(127) See MARTTI KOSKENNIEMI, THE GENTLE CIVILIZER OF NATIONS: THE RISE AND FALL OF
INTERNATIONAL LAW 1870-1960, at 128 (2002) (discussing the arguments of Fiore and Bluntschli).
(128) MOYN, supra note 4, at 7.
(129) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights "was less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid
on the grave of wartime hopes." Id. at 2.
(130) Id.
(131) Id.
(132) Id. at 8. Another revisionist also argues that "[r]egional treaties such as the Helsinki agreements, or national
legislation like the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in the United States, were far more important than international law
crafted at the UN." Kenneth Cmiel, The Recent History of Human Rights, 109 AM. HIST. REV. 117, 130 (2004).
(133) MOYN, supra note 4, at 4.
(134) Id.
(135) Id. at 3.
(136) Id. at 111-14.
(137) Id. at 12.
(138) Id. at 12-13.
(139) Id. at 20.
(140) Id. at 78-79.
(141) HERSCH LAUTERPACHT, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS (1950). Moyn does, however,
make liberal play of Lauterpacht's disillusionment with the nonbinding nature of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. MOYN, supra note 4, at 82, 184, 199, 205.
(142) MARC BLOCH, THE HISTORIAN'S CRAFT 29-30 (Peter Putnam trans., Manchester Univ. Press 1954).
(143) HUNT, supra note 29, at 23 (internal quotation marks omitted).
(144) MOYN, supra note 4, at 1.
(145) HUNT, supra note 29, at 20.
(146) Id. at 20-21. In her assessment, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 does not meet the criteria, but the American
Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of 1789 do. Id. at 21.
(147) MOYN, supra note 4, at 11.
(148) Id. at 13. Caroline Anderson similarly critiques Moyn's definitional criteria, which she char-acterizes as
"sufficiently demanding and circumscribed to demonstrate the infallibility of his conclusions." Caroline Anderson,
Human Rights: A Reckoning, 53 HARV. INTEL L.J. 549, 551 (2012) (reviewing SAMUEL MOYN, THE LAST
UTOPIA (2012)).
(149) Yves Dezalay & Bryant Garth, From the Cold War to Kosovo: The Rise and Renewal of the Field of
International Human Rights, 2 ANN. REV. L. & SOC. SCI. 231, 248 (2006).
(150) Taiwan provides an interesting example of a society in which a strong national human rights culture emerged
over time, driven by domestic NGOs and with no significant involvement by any of the international NGOs. See
generally Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao, NGOs and the Democratization of Taiwan: Their Interactive Roles in Building a
Viable Civil Society, in CIVIL SOCIETY IN ASIA (David C. Schak & Wayne Hudson eds., 2003). For illustrations of
the roles played by national human rights institutions, see HUMAN RIGHTS, STATE COMPLIANCE, AND SOCIAL
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CHANGE: ASSESSING NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTIONS (Ryan Goodman & Thomas Pegram eds.,
2012).
(151) MOYN, supra note 4, at 293 n.3, 320.
(152) See generally Martti Koskenniemi, The Effect of Rights on Political Culture, in THE EUROPEAN UNION
AND HUMAN RIGHTS 99 (Philip Alston ed., 1999).
(153) See Martti Koskenniemi, Human Rights Mainstreaming as a Strategy for Institutional Power, 1 HUMANITY 47
(2010).
(154) Moyn, supra note 17, at 125.
(155) Id.
(156) MOYN, supra note 4, at 41.
(157) See generally BLOCH, supra note 142.
(158) Id. at 24.
(159) Id. at 26.
(160) MOYN, supra note 4, at 41.
(161) Id. at 42.
(162) Id.
(163) 1 MARC BLOCH, FEUDAL SOCIETY 260 (L.A. Manyon trans., 1961) (1939).
(164) BLOCH, supra note 142, at 43.
(165) Id. at 71.
(166) See id. at 27.
(167) MOYN, supra note 4, at 226.
(168) Id. at 221.
(169) Id. at 227.
(170) Id.
(171) Id. at 226-27.
(172) Moyn, supra note 17, at 137.
(173) Id. at 136.
(174) Samuel Moyn, The International Human Rights Movement: A History by Aryeh Neier, 26 ETHICS & INT'L
AFF. 392 (2012) (book review).
(175) Moyn, supra note 17, at 125.
(176) Id. at 136.
(177) Id. at 137.
(178) Id.
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(179) Headley, whose work Moyn dismisses as deeply flawed, see Samuel Moyn, Book Review, 43 CANADIAN J.
HIST. 364 (2008), shares Moyn's consciousness of the rise of China but prefers to see the possible emergence of a
middle path between the West's and China's notions of human rights. Chinese "humanism" has the potential to correct
"Western individualism, now exaggerated to the point of promoting hedonism and permissiveness," while the Western
approach can "extend the principle of equality to the traditional Confucian program of rites, rather than rights, wherein
hierarchical and dictatorial features still lurk." HEADLEY, supra note 79, at 217.
Reviewed by Philip Alston*
* John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. I am grateful to various colleagues for
comments and advice. Foremost amongst them are David Garland and Grainne de Burca. Dan Hulsebosch, Adam
Samaha, Martti Koskenniemi, Nehal Bhuta, Liam Murphy, Stephen Holmes, Kevin Davis, James Stewart, and Nicole
Barrett were also generous in commenting on the project, and Jessye Freeman provided helpful research at the outset.
Alston, Philip
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Alston, Philip. "Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights." Harvard Law Review, May 2013, p. 2043+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA333333599&it=r&asid=72139d1bd1bddd60ea9e53cc3f7a6e89.
Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A333333599

Mushal, Amanda R. "A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, p. 412+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476222&it=r. Accessed 20 Oct. 2017. Boulukos, George E. "Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865." Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, 2013, p. 506+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA350679391&it=r. Accessed 20 Oct. 2017. Alston, Philip. "Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights." Harvard Law Review, May 2013, p. 2043+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA333333599&it=r. Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.

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  https://networks.h-net.org/node/18732/reviews/18945/shores-clapp-mothers-all-children-women-reformers-and-rise-juvenile
  Word count: 1228

  QUOTED: "Clapp's work is valuable for demonstrating the formative, if informal, role women have played in advocacy for children."
  "However, Clapp's theoretical construction of three distinct perspectives within the early juvenile justice movement, those of the traditional maternalist, professional maternalist, and male philanthropic, is not sturdy enough for an otherwise valuable contribution to children's history. Her thesis is strained."

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  Shores on Clapp, 'Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America'

  Author:
  Elizabeth J. Clapp
  Reviewer:
  Elizabeth F. Shores

  Elizabeth J. Clapp. Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. ix + 214 pp. $31.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-271-01778-5; $86.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-01777-8.

  Reviewed by Elizabeth F. Shores (M.A.P.H., Shores Research and Editorial Services, Little Rock, Ark)
  Published on H-Childhood (December, 1998)

  Gender Issues in the Early Juvenile Justice Movement

  Elizabeth J. Clapp, a lecturer in American history at the University of Leicester, U.K., provides a detailed account of early advocacy for juvenile courts in the United States, focusing on the roles of middle- and upper-class women's clubs and of Chicago's settlement house workers. She builds her work on extensive research in archives in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and she offers the thesis that female advocates for truants and juvenile delinquents were all maternalists despite different orientations and, further, that their perspective was distinctly different than that of male advocates.

  Separate chapters cover the activism of the Chicago Woman's Club, settlement workers in Chicago, the emerging national network of women's clubs, and the widely-known efforts of Benjamin Barr Lindsey, a county court judge in Denver.

  Clapp characterizes the members of the Chicago Woman's Club, established in 1876, as traditional maternalists. She describes their efforts as volunteer matrons in the city jail and police stations and as volunteer probation officers or social workers in court, their creation of a jail school and a charitable boarding school for neglected children, their advocacy in the 1890s for a separate juvenile court and for trials of juveniles within 24 hours of arrest, and finally their support of the 1899 Illinois legislation creating separate juvenile courts--a law which male lawyers and legislators actually carried to enactment.

  She characterizes the young women in Chicago's settlement house movement during the same period as professional maternalists because they typically had college educations and were not married. The settlement house workers hoped to infiltrate slum communities, document poverty and its effects, and by advocacy improve conditions for the poor. In addition, however, Clapp describes several women who belonged to both the Chicago Woman's Club and settlement houses.

  A third chapter concerns advocacy around the nation for juvenile courts, particularly by the National Congress of Mothers and the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Clapp describes activity in Missouri and Wisconsin to demonstrate how the Chicago Woman's Club was mother to juvenile justice drives in other states. She concludes that women operating at a national level tended to be traditional, rather than professional, maternalists.

  Beginning in 1901, Judge Lindsey brought an unusual style to juvenile justice. Typically, he ordered delinquent boys to resume attending school and required them to regularly present him with written status reports from their teachers. On these report days, Lindsey delivered homilies on character and virtue and sometimes spoke privately with especially recalcitrant boys, appealing to their better nature (p. 114). Clapp demonstrates that Lindsey's focus on correcting individual boys' characters was distinct from the maternalists interest in correcting slum mothers parenting techniques. In Clapp's view, Lindsey sought to be a super-father to Denver's wayward boys, whereas maternalists hoped to reform delinquent children's mothers through charity and home visits. According to Clapp, Lindsey delegated handling of truant girls, who were sometimes accused of immorality, to female assistants and was less likely to release them on their own recognizance. Clapp seems to consider this fact a bulwark of her thesis that Lindsey's approach to juvenile justice differed from the Chicago approach, that predated it by a few years, because of his gender, when it appears just as possible that Lindsey's method was merely idiosyncratic. In fact, Clapp states later in the same chapter that Lindsey was not typical of male juvenile court reformers. Moreover, she notes that the Denver Woman's Club endorsed Lindseys method. Thus, her premise that there was a single, distinctive masculine approach to juvenile justice seems weak.

  Clapp's work is valuable for demonstrating the formative, if informal, role women have played in advocacy for children. The pattern of men taking the lead as spokesmen and sponsors after women recognized social problems and devised solutions continued to the mid-twentieth century, as this writer has found in examining parents efforts to establish special education in Arkansas.

  However, Clapp's theoretical construction of three distinct perspectives within the early juvenile justice movement, those of the traditional maternalist, professional maternalist, and male philanthropic, is not sturdy enough for an otherwise valuable contribution to children's history. Her thesis is strained, as when she acknowledges that in many senses the reformers of the Chicago Woman's Club reflected the bias of their social class and yet argues that of more importance was their gender identification (p. 44). She groups the clubwomen and the nascent social workers of the settlement houses together, although doing so obscures the importance of the latter groups recognition that poverty underlay juvenile delinquency. To this reviewer, the more important point is that gender solidarity did not extend across class lines. Middle-and upper-class clubwomen did not understand or empathize with poor mothers. On the contrary, they believed that if slum women simply acted more like middle-class women, their children would be better off. This attitude continues to permeate conservative thinking about child welfare.

  On another note, Clapp's work deserved more careful editing. Her book suffers from repetition and muddled writing. A more thorough explanation of the circumstances of children in the courts before the juvenile justice movement would have been helpful, as would have a bibliographic essay, a key to abbreviations in the footnotes, and, for that matter, more scrupulous editing of the footnotes (admittedly, a very tedious task).

  Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=2609

  Citation: Elizabeth F. Shores. Review of Clapp, Elizabeth J., Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America. H-Childhood, H-Net Reviews. December, 1998.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2609

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• Oxford Academic - The American Historical Review
  https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/122/3/840/3862837/Elizabeth-J-Clapp-A-Notorious-Woman-Anne-Royall-in
  Word count: 1177

  QUOTED: "Clapp’s biography provides a more complete understanding of Anne Royall as an author and politico who fought against the rise of the evangelicals and stood defiantly outside of the developing cult of true womanhood."

  ELIZABETH J. CLAPP. A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America.
  Elizabeth J. Clapp . A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 263. $39.50.
  Alison M. Parker
  The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 3, 1 June 2017, Pages 840–841, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.3.840
  Published: 08 June 2017
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  In A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America, Elizabeth J. Clapp tells the compelling life history of Anne Newport Royall (1769–1854), a widow of a Revolutionary War veteran who became a public woman in the mid-1820s after she lost control over her deceased husband’s estate in a bitter fight with his relatives. To support herself, Royall turned to travel writing and became a published author and bookseller. A Jacksonian-era politico and an anticlerical maverick, Royall wrote and published her own newspaper in Washington, D.C., in the early 1830s, openly engaging in partisan politics and making no apologies for her gender.

  Anne Newport grew up in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, where her parents joined other white settlers who had wrested land from the Native Americans. When her father died in an Indian raid, the young teen took refuge with a gentry family in Virginia. Into her thirties, Anne worked as a self-supporting woman with no dowry and minimal education. Then she married Major William Royall, a slave-owning member of Virginia’s gentry. During their marriage, her husband provided her with opportunities to read widely, and she discussed literature and nonfiction with him and their guests, facilitating her later career choice as a writer.

  William Royall’s elite family and friends never accepted Anne, believing that she had married him for his wealth. Clapp explains that after his 1812 death, “The charge of sexual misconduct and coercion was useful as a means to cast doubt on Anne’s character in a court dispute to overturn a will” (27). Her husband’s relatives accused her of having forged his will and of mismanaging the estate; the court ultimately agreed with the latter charge.

  Court testimony over the contested will reveals that in his later years, William Royall had become a violent alcoholic. Anne Royall broke taboos by challenging the patriarchal authority of her husband. Neighbors testified against her, complaining that when he was in a drunken rage, she would try to restrain him with the help of their slaves. The neighbors claimed that Anne Royall “had encouraged the slaves to participate in the abuse of her husband” (43). Clapp, however, does not consider the larger implications of this statement. In fact, Anne Royall’s demands endangered the enslaved men and women under her control, who risked the violence of their master and the wrath of the members of the local white community, who were upset at seeing an elite white man seemingly dominated by his social inferiors.

  Clapp misses other opportunities to give readers a sense of the human costs of slavery, as when she flatly notes that Royall was “slow to relinquish her control of items belonging to the estate … and she was particularly incensed at having the slave who had acted as her servant taken from her” by a court order that gave her husband’s “property” to his blood relatives (51, 53, emphasis added). And when Royall subsequently moved to the new territory of Alabama in order to sell her last two slaves at a better price in the new cotton-growing country, Clapp neglects to speculate about the effects of these traumatic upheavals on the enslaved man and woman separated from their families.

  In the 1820s, the widowed Royall became a professional travel writer and itinerant bookseller, taking on the costs of publishing and then peddling her travel books by subscription. Even as most publishing remained decentralized and local, Clapp notes that Royall “thrust herself into the marketplace and eventually created a national circulation for her work” (65). Royall wrote nine popular travel volumes that titillated readers, who purchased subscriptions to her volumes for their combative, sharply pointed “pen portraits” of the prominent citizens of each town or city she visited. Royall, in her published writings, staunchly defended the institution of slavery, insisting, “Not that the slaves are treated bad … they live as well as their masters; and are by no means hard taxed” (97–98). Royall denied the back-breaking, demeaning labor forced upon enslaved men and women. She also opposed petitions demanding the emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital, arguing that the presence of freed blacks there would undercut and threaten poor white workers’ jobs.

  Although Protestantism undeniably gained cultural ascendancy in the antebellum era, Clapp rightly points out that its rise was contested by mavericks like Royall. Evangelicals, Royall charged, were plotting to use federal laws to create a national religion. She particularly opposed banning the delivery of the U.S. mail on Sundays. Royall’s vehement anticlericalism and strong critiques of women’s religiosity alienated evangelicals. Her critics linked her to the more notorious anticlerical free thinker Frances Wright, and began banning her from their homes and towns. By 1830, evangelical ministers and their supporters verbally and physically attacked Royall as a disreputable woman.

  At almost the age of sixty, Royall was put on trial in 1829 in Washington, D.C., for being an outspoken, immodest, unruly woman. In “an attempt by her enemies to diminish her,” Clapp explains that Royall was charged with the uncommon offense of being a “common scold.” She had insulted the pure Christian women of the Engine House Congregation by shouting at them as they passed under her window, accusing them of being dupes of their minister. As Clapp notes, “the common scold charge allowed the court to investigate a woman’s general reputation, not just a specific incident,” and Royall was certainly “notorious” (139). The jury declared her guilty, thereby linking Royall to women like Anne Hutchinson, who dared question the Puritan ministers.

  Anne Royall receded from historical memory until World War II, when journalists celebrated her as a champion of free speech and of the press, pointing to her unfair prosecution. With the advent of the second wave of the women’s movement, activists pointed to Royall as a feminist and a pioneering journalist. Royall would have gladly accepted plaudits for her journalism, but as Clapp points out, she “was not interested in the ‘advancement’ of women and could not understand the need for women’s rights, since she believed that women already had all the rights they needed” (197). Clapp’s biography provides a more complete understanding of Anne Royall as an author and politico who fought against the rise of the evangelicals and stood defiantly outside of the developing cult of true womanhood.

  Issue Section: REVIEWS OF BOOKS
  © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.

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  Word count: 772

  QUOTED: "Elizabeth J. Clapp’s A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America is a thoroughly researched, well-presented biography that chronicles the many unexpected turns in Royall’s life to construct a ... comprehensive portrait of an adventurous, resilient, hardworking, and persistent woman."

  A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America by Elizabeth J. Clapp (review)
  Susan Ibarrato
  From: Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
  Volume 115, Number 3, Summer 2017
  pp. 430-432 | 10.1353/khs.2017.0061

  In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
  Reviewed by
  Susan Ibarrato (bio)
  A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America. By Elizabeth J. Clapp. ( Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp 280. $39.50 cloth; $39.50 ebook)
  Elizabeth J. Clapp’s A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America is a thoroughly researched, well-presented biography that chronicles the many unexpected turns in Royall’s life to construct a [End Page 430] comprehensive portrait of an adventurous, resilient, hardworking, and persistent woman. In doing so, the book also addresses Royall’s combative, controversial, and, at times, contradictory elements: she asserted her own freedom to travel yet supported the curtailment of rights for Native Americans and African Americans, and her own forthright assertions stood in contrast to her opposition to women’s rights efforts. More sympathetically, Royall petitioned relentlessly for pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans, supported efforts for female education, and sought to expose corruption in Washington. Clapp deftly weaves these various elements into a compelling narrative that brings this well-known public figure in her day to a new audience. In doing so, Clapp draws extensively on archival materials including Royall’s correspondence and travel writings, along with newspaper accounts and court records to construct a biography steeped in social context and historical background.
  Clapp charts Royall’s continuous ability to adapt to changing situations, from her childhood in frontier Pennsylvania through her witnessing of the French and Indian War, her family’s relocation to Virginia in 1787, and her marriage to Major William Royall in 1797. When her marriage ended with William’s death in 1812, Anne entered a protracted battle with his family over his will. Clapp’s detailed discussion about wills, probates, and executors provides helpful, relevant context for this section. With the proceedings ongoing, Anne “determined that she would no longer live in the isolation of William’s Sweet Springs plantation. She soon made preparations to move to Charleston in Kanawha County, western Virginia” (p. 35). She then settled in Alabama from 1817 to 1823. Eventually, the will was deemed invalid, and with her finances in turmoil, Anne began writing as a way to alleviate her situation. Royall’s first publication, Letters from Alabama (1826), followed by a novel, The Tennessean (1827), offered some relief. Here, Clapp carefully contextualizes Royall’s publication efforts with a discussion of the contemporary print culture.
  Royall then embarked on a series of book tours for her subsequent [End Page 431] volumes, ten in all, and developed clever, aggressive techniques for selling her books, by including caustic portraits of public figures, referred to as “pen portraits,” and elaborate descriptions of towns and scenery that, in turn, customized each volume. Clapp follows Royall’s travels from 1823 to 1830 along the “length and breadth of the settled United States and some parts not yet open to settlement,” including the “‘fashionable tour’” through New York and New England (p. 77, 82). Moreover, as Clapp elaborates: “As she traveled, Royall was constantly preoccupied with the need to earn a living—a concern she frequently voiced to those she met on her expeditions. Her journeys served the dual purpose of research for her new books and a search for patrons to buy those she had already written” (p. 82). Traveling amidst “dangerous and unpredictable” conditions of the day, Royall nevertheless “depicted herself as an indefatigable traveler” (p. 100). Royall also conveyed aspects of Jacksonian democracy, including a sense of patriotism in her travel books that mirrors notions of “Manifest Destiny,” while her public attacks on evangelical ministers for trying to enforce Sabbath laws aligned with Jacksonian policies that maintained the separation between church and state.
  In 1829, Royall’s troubles escalated when she was brought to trial as “a common scold.” Then living in Washington, Royall launched two newspapers intended to combat and expose corruption, the Paul Pry followed by The Huntress, and continued her attempts to secure pensions for widows of Revolutionary War veterans. In 1848, she herself was finally granted one, which provided some financial relief prior to her death in 1854 at the age of eighty-five. Presented in an engaging, accessible style, Elizabeth J. Clapp’s A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America expertly...

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