‘The Character of Contemporary History’: Human Rights History and Early Modern Violence

This essay considers the significance of this special issue of History for modern historians of human rights with regard to three aspects of that history. First, there has been a division between those who seek to chronicle the history of human rights movements and those who focus on the history of human rights violations. The essays in this volume present a view of the early modern B ritish empire that seems defined by the absence of human rights movements and a ubiquity of human rights violations. Second, modern historians of human rights have pursued two approaches: deploying a standard definition of human rights as a ‘plumb line’ by which past movements and violations are assessed, or mapping the genealogy of ‘human rights’ as an empty signifier whose content is indeterminate. This edited collection approaches the violence of the period with genealogical care. Nevertheless, these contributions are also marked by a concern with the conceptual categorization of different forms of violence, which while less bound to a specific legal code, are perhaps normative across period and geography. Third, this special issue illuminates, but does not resolve, the tension between historicism and universality that characterizes the history of human rights. Each of the authors, by engaging with the assumptions and preoccupations of the human rights field, presents evidence that for both themselves and their subjects there is often an aspiration to conceptual and moral standards by which local circumstances and contingencies might be judged.