ABSTRACT
The 1890 Brussels Conference was not only one of the most significant international meetings on anti-slavery ever held in the nineteenth century but also reflected a time when imperial politics manipulated humanitarian issues to meet their own objectives. This chapter will first dwell on the two main aspects of the Brussels Conference: humanitarian on one hand and imperialistic on the other. It will be shown that previous anti-slavery experiments in Zanzibar waters inspired the seventeen diplomatic delegations sent to Brussels. At the conference, two classic visions of international relations continued to confront each other. While France defended national sovereignty and advocated that each nation control her own shipping, Britain called for an international system of police to repress the slave trade at sea. Last but not least, this chapter looks into one of the outcomes of the Brussels Act in looking at the international office for the repression of the slave trade set in Zanzibar between 1892 and 1914. Once more, the ambiguous and multi-faced relationship binding imperialism with humanitarianism will be examined in the light of this new development.
