Human Capital

Historian Laura Robson reveals the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into cut-rate, disposable migrant labour, Robson elucidates global humanitarianism's deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment.

The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story of humanitarians fighting tirelessly for a system that would recognise and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson meticulously demonstrates, modern refugee policy emerges from a different goal: to use refugees as cheap workers in an emerging system of global industrial capitalism.

With a global eye, Robson captures the travails of Balkan refugees in the late Ottoman Empire, Roosevelt's secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as labourers in Latin America, and contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan.

Human Capital offers a critical examination of the underlying motivations of refugee policies and the humanitarian framework, shedding light on the historical exploitation of refugee populations.