Abstract
The 8 August 1864 was an ostensibly momentous day for those gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, in the heart of Geneva’s old town. It was the final day of an international conference, attended by twenty-four beribboned representatives of sixteen European states, at which the First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded Armies in the Field would be signed. The occasion was presided over by the conference’s proud instigators, the fledgling International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the first incarnation of the organization that, in 1876, would be renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). For the founders of this Committee — five Swiss private citizens — the signing of the First Geneva Convention marked the end of an eighteen-month-long road of negotiations, the aim of which was to call together the heads of the most powerful states in Europe to sign a document that would outline regulations on how to care for wounded soldiers and protect those who tended them on the battlefield. Although the ICRC’s founders could lay claim to having these practices codified in such grandeur, the idea of establishing such a set of rules for states to abide by in times of conflict was not a radical one. Informal codes that regulated the practice of war had developed over the course of the preceeding centuries and, in the immediate decades prior to the signing of the First Geneva Convention, several quasi-formal codes were put into practice on American and European battlefields.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4;
see also David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), ch. 2;
John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012), pp. 16–18.
Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1986), pp. 19, 44; on Dunant’s life before Solferino
see Ellen Hart, Man Born to Live: The Life and Work of Henry Dunant, Founder of the Red Cross (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953), ch. 2.
François Bugnion, Gustav Moynier (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2010), pp. 16–23.
John F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 19–23;
Pierre Bossier, The History of the International Committee of the Red Cross: From Solferino to Tsushima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), pp. 53–69; Hart, Man Born to Live, pp. 108–11, 137–9.
Richard Shelly Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Laws of War (Chicago: Precedent, 1983), pp. 20–2;
Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), p. 106.
Diary of William Rutherford, cited in Florence Nightingale, Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, vol. 15, Florence Nightingale on Wars and the War Office, ed. Lynn MacDonald (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2011), pp. 584–5.
Lawrence Goldman, ‘The Social Sciences Association, 1857–1886: A Context for Mid-Victorian Liberalism’, English Historical Review 101.398 (1986), pp. 95–134 (98).
Angela Bennett, Geneva Convention: The Hidden Origins of the Red Cross (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), p. 49.
Bossier, History of the International Committee of the Red Cross, pp. 74–5; Hart, Man Born to Live, pp. 147–8; Wellcome Library, Papers of Sir Thomas Longmore, hereafter WL:RAM 1139/LP54 – Nightingale to Longmore, 23 July 1864; WL:RAM 1139/LP22, Longmore Minute, 3 August 1864;
John Sweetman, ‘The Crimean War and the Formation of the Medical Staff Corps’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 53.214 (1975), pp. 113–19.
Bennett, Geneva Convention, pp. 67–8; Lopold Bossier, ‘Centenary of the First Geneva Convention in 1864’, International Review of the Red Cross 41 (1964), pp. 393–410.
Martha Finnemore, ‘Rules of War and Wars of Rules: The International Red Cross and the Restraint of State Violence’, in John Boli and George M. Thomas (eds), Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 149–65 (164–5); Bossier, ‘Centenary of the First Geneva Convention’, p. 402.
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 79–80; Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp. 26–7, 52.
Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 25–7;
Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 1.
The Times, 16 and 22 July 1870. By the time of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War national Red Cross societies had already been established in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey – Hans Haug, Humanity for All: The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (Berne: Henry Dunant Institute, 1993), Annex 4, pp. 633–45.
Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp. 69–70;
Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 136–7; Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp. 235–7.
Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 141–4; Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp. 256–68;
Rachel Chrastil, ‘The French Red Cross, War Readiness, and Civil Society, 1866–1914’, French Historical Studies 31.3 (2008), pp. 445–76 (456–9).
Berryl Oliver, The British Red Cross in Action (London: Faber, 1966), pp. 186–92; ‘Formation of a new Red Cross society’, The Times, 18 July 1905.
Heather Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the First World War’, European Review of History 16.5 (2009), pp. 697–713 (697–700).
Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 40–2; Brigette Troyon and Daniel Palmieri, ‘The ICRC Delegate: An Exceptional Humanitarian Player?’, International Review of the Red Cross 89.865 (2007), pp. 97–111 (98–9).
David P. Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 7.
François Bugnion, ‘The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Development of International Humanitarian Law’, Chicago Journal of International Law 5.1 (2004), pp. 191–215.
Hart, Man Born to Live, pp. 259–60; Goldman, ‘Social Sciences Association’, pp. 127–9; Andrew Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 213–15.
Bennett, Geneva Convention, pp. 156–8; Roger Durand, Henry Dunant (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 2010), pp. 64–5.
Geoffrey Best, ‘Peace Conferences and the Century of Total War: The 1899 Hague Conference and What Came after’, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 75.3 (1999), pp. 619–34 (626–7); for a view of the British delegation’s thinking at the Hague Conference see generally TNA:FO 412/65.
For a summary of the contrasting ‘peace’ and ‘war’ movements of the late nineteenth century see Best, Humanity in Warfare, pp. 131–9; Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Temple Smith, 1978), pp. 61–5.
James B. Scott, The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921) — First Commission: Plenary Meetings Hague Declaration IV (III) concerning Expanding Bullets, 29 July 1899, pp. 226–7; Stephen Barcroft, ‘The Hague Peace Conference of 1899’, Irish Studies in International Affairs 3.1 (1989), pp. 55–68 (59–64).
Neville Wylie, ‘The 1929 Prisoner of War Convention and the Building of the Interwar Prisoner of War Regime’, in Sibylle Scheippers (ed.), Prisoners in War: Norms, Military Cultures and Reciprocity in Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 91–106.
François Bugnion, The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (Richmond: MacMillan, 2003), pp. 82–3; Gill, Calculating Compassion, p. 184; on breaches of IHL and the poor treatment of POWs in the First World War
see generally Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
The Ninth International Conference of the International Red Cross in 1912 had passed a resolution authorizing this arrangement between the ICRC and the National Societies — Robert Jackson, The Prisoners, 1914–1918 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 62–3.
Howard S. Levie, ‘Prisoners of War and the Protecting Power’, American Journal of International Law 55.2 (1961), pp. 374–97 (375–6).
Alan Kramer, ‘Prisoners in the First World War’, in Sibylle Scheippers (ed.), Prisoners in War: Norms, Military Cultures and Reciprocity in Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 75–87 (77–81);
Herbert Belfield, ‘Treatment of Prisoners of War’, Transactions of the Grotius Society 9 (1923), pp. 131–47. The post-war ‘war crimes trials’ in Leipzig and Istanbul were a flop, with only three camp guards given lenient sentences —
Alan Kramer, ‘The First Wave of War Crimes Trials: Istanbul and Leipzig’, European Review 14.4 (2006), pp. 441–55; TNA:FO 369/106 – Berne to FO, 16 January 1915; TNA:FO 369/106 – De Grey to Duff, 7 January 1915; Geneva Red Cross (sic) to British Red Cross, 2 January 1915.
The ICRC in World War One: The International Prisoners-of-War Agency (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 2007), p. 13; Andr Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), pp. 70–4; Forsythe, Humanitarians, p. 31.
Durand, From Sarajevo to Hiroshima, pp. 92–5; Marion Giraud, ‘Political Decisions and Britain’s Chemical Warfare Challenge in World War I: Descend to Atrocities?’, Defence Studies 8.1 (2008), pp. 105–32 (122–5);
Edward M. Spiers, A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons (London: Reaktion, 2010), p. 42.
Neville Wylie, Barbed Wire Diplomacy: Britain, Germany and the Politics of Prisoners of War, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 44–5.
G. G. Philimore and H. L. Bellot, ‘Treatment of Prisoners of War’, Transactions of the Grotius Society 5 (1919), pp. 47–64; Belfield, ‘Treatment of Prisoners of War’; TNA:CAB 16/65 — Report of Lord Justice Younger’s Committee relating to Prisoners of War, 8 August 1923; TNA:WO 32/5337 – WO Minutes, 15 January 1926.
Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 324–5; TNA:FO 372/2550 – Montgomery to Rumbold, 28 June 1929.
Wylie, ‘1929 Prisoner of War Convention’, p. 96. Britain ratified both conventions in 1931 and the United States did likewise in 1932. Both Japan and the Soviet Union signed the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field (27 July 1929) and ratified it in 1934 and 1931 respectively. Neither the Soviet Union nor Japan ratified the Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (27 July 1929), though Japan did become a state signatory, an act that declared its willingness to abide by the ‘spirit’ of the Convention, a pledge that it did not fulfil — Gary D. Solis and Fred L. Borch, Geneva Conventions (New York: Kaplan, 2010), pp. 12–13.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 James Crossland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Crossland, J. (2014). Britain and the Red Cross, 1864–1929. In: Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399571_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399571_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48580-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39957-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)