Core reading

Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sentiment’, American Historical Review 90: 2 and 3 (parts 1 and 2)

Jeremy Waldron, ‘The Decline of Natural Right’ in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 2012), 623-650.

Further reading

Jeremy Waldron, 'Nonsense upon stilts': Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen, 1987).

Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell, 2013).

Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim, Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge, 2011).

Alexis Heraclides, ‘Humanitarian Intervention in the 19th Century: The Heyday of a Controversial Concept’, Global Society 26: 2 (2012), 215-240.

Joanna Bourke, What It Means to Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present (Counterpoint, 2011).

Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in Lynn Hunt, ed. The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176-204.