Writing in 1909, E. D. Morel referred to the national campaign against Belgian King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo as “grim hard labour” (67). The work had to proceed along “business lines” like a “machine rolling with one steady purpose in view” (67). That the Congo Reform Association would succeed in its efforts was far from a given in a moment in which prominent friends of “distant strangers” feared that “Britain's humanitarian spirit had decayed” (23) as the Second Anglo-Boer War sharpened partisan divides (1). Indeed, contemporary scholars continue to debate the impact of the Congo Reform Association's decade-long effort to ameliorate labor conditions in the rubber industry. The association's final 1913 meeting was jubilant; Leopold's personal rule came to a close in 1908, and British observers thought that the last of his colonial system was gone by 1913 (7). However, coercive labor continued (241), and the Congolese gained few rights under ongoing Belgian rule. What, then, can one make of the Congo Reform Association and of the track record of humanitarianism from afar? What were its successes? Its limitations? And what can its history tell us about British humanitarianism of this era?

Undertaking these questions, Dean Pavlakis's British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913 offers a detailed and well-balanced assessment of the Congo Reform Association, its aspirations, and the “grim hard labour” of organization, publicity, and alliance building. Whereas other scholars have tended to accentuate the role of E. D. Morel in particular, Pavlakis's biography of the association instead paints a picture of an organization whose actions were painstakingly negotiated internally and with close affiliates. Although it could be acrimonious at times, the negotiation of humanitarian tactics largely succeeded, Pavlakis argues. If other scholars have looked for a more sweeping sea change in European imperial rule, Pavlakis has more realistic expectations. Success lay in “softe[ning]” Belgian rule, “ending the most violent and oppressive features of the Congo Free State” (245). Embedded in the ideal of imperial trusteeship, these reforms fulfilled organizers’ aims but left in place “many underlying attitudes and even structures” (245) that allowed a rapid relapse into coercive labor practices.

Pavlakis's contribution lies in his careful delineation of the association's history itself. He organizes the text to highlight the organization's story, each chapter focusing on a different aspect of its campaign. Following an introductory chapter that outlines the history of rubber production in Africa as well as European imperialism and British humanitarianism more broadly, his second chapter examines the formal establishment of the association in the midst of public outrage about Leopold's brutal use of slave labor.

Having established these beginnings, Pavlakis views the full nine years of the Congo Reform Association's history (1904–1913) from different angles in subsequent chapters. In chapter 3 he examines the internal structuring of the organization, while in chapters 4 and 5 he offers detailed accounts of the association's outreach. Specifically, in chapter 4 he highlights the media through which speakers reached out to the philanthropic public and describes those who became donors, while in chapter 5 he considers the larger alliances the organization sought with missionaries, religious groups, and businessmen, often through local chambers of commerce. In chapter 6 Pavlakis takes a different tack, diverging from the close reading of the association's archives in the other chapters to offer a somewhat dutiful tour of similar work in America and across Western Europe as well as Leopold's attempts to deflect criticism. In chapter 7 he returns to the association, focusing on the content of its appeals.

In the final chapters, Pavlakis comes back to the central question of effectiveness. He does this in chapter 8 by looking at the association's relationships with the British government in particular, highlighting conflicting constituencies within the state. In keeping with the usual pattern of democratic diplomacy, Pavlakis argues, Foreign Office caution contrasted with unvarnished parliamentary outrage. While chapter 8 follows the same 1904–1913 chronology of the earlier chapters, chapter 9 and the conclusion look forward in time, drawing upon the work of other scholars to further situate the work of the association within changes in Belgian administration of the Congo in the 1910s and beyond.

Pavlakis's organization offers both drawbacks and strengths. It dilutes readers’ sense of how the particulars of each chapter link to broader social and political developments over the period, and it often puts the burden on the reader to connect the different chapters. One is left to wonder, for example, whether and how changes in political administration or international alliances altered the strategic terrain for humanitarianism in the Congo. One sees hints of this influence in chapters 6 and 8, respectively. That said, as Pavlakis tackles each layer of the organization, he succeeds in immersing the reader in the internal negotiations of the Congo Reform Association, as members sought, for example, to overcome what they feared was donor fatigue at different moments or to prod a seemingly unwilling Foreign Office to contemplate intervention. On the latter point, Pavlakis manages to avoid divisions in the scholarship on humanitarian interventionism between those who find the government willing to intervene overseas at the British public's behest and those who do not. Pavlakis takes a middle path in this account by carefully distinguishing between various governmental actors and offices.

As a history of a humanitarian organization, Pavlakis's British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913 allows us to see up close the difficulties of orchestrating sustained moral outrage in ways that often escape more ephemeral protest movements. These strengths of the book make it a useful addition to the literature on the politics and mechanics of humanitarian mobilization and to the literature examining international reactions to atrocities in central Africa.