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Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”: The British campaign to abolish the slave trade, 1807–1900

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Abstract

Building on Robert Merton’s theory of unanticipated consequences of purposive action and Charles Tilly’s theory of error correction, the present article presents a stylized narrative about the British campaign to abolish the trading in African slaves, from its beginning in 1807 until the end of the nineteenth century. In the end, this campaign was largely successful, though it required error corrections that had extremely far-reaching consequences. The colonization of Africa was, to a certain extent, a second-degree unanticipated consequence. This case study suggests that three sorts of error correction can be distinguished, namely (a) measures that are taken to facilitate the effective implementation of the purposive action; (b) measures that are taken to minimize unintended consequences, after the purposive action has been carried out; and (c) new purposive actions that widen the objective and are more far-reaching than the original purposive action.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Mike Hanagan, Peyman Jafari, and Alice Mul for critiquing an earlier draft of this article.

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  1. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marcel van der Linden

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  1. Marcel van der Linden
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Correspondence to Marcel van der Linden .

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  1. Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Box 238, Poughkeepsie, 12604-0238, USA

    Michael Hanagan

  2. IRLE / UCLA, 10945 Le Conte Ave., Suite 2107, Los Angeles, 90095-1478, USA

    Chris Tilly

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van der Linden, M. (2011). Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”: The British campaign to abolish the slave trade, 1807–1900. In: Hanagan, M., Tilly, C. (eds) Contention and Trust in Cities and States. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_4

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