Pallister-Wilkins 997 effective when it had the capacity to be mobilised within a framework that not only reenforced the market itself but also maintained the emerging liberal order through ever greater rationalisation using a range of governing techniques. Here, a growth in moral sentiments emerges in two ways. First, as the suffering of distant strangers grows in visibility as time and space is shrunk through imperial and colonial activities. Second, though the shift from a peasant economy of self-sufficiency to one of capitalist industrialisation saw a rise in poverty and ‘suffering’ ‘at home’. Thus not only do moral sentiments emerge but so too does recognition that suffering (and its causes) fosters insecurity. Both moral sentiments and suffering contain the imminent possibility of disaster that can be managed by the effective capturing of such sentiments and their rationalisation. Thus as Reid-Henry argues, humanitarianism has worked to set limits on state power while ‘making possible a mobius-like recuperation of sovereignty as the power over life in other ways’ (2014: 425). Here as the state developed techniques to enhance the security of the population it developed increasingly efficient techniques to intervene in times of disaster, which concomitantly enhanced the sovereign power of the state. These techniques Reid-Henry argues were geographically limited in scope to the preservation of the self, being applied to some more than others. This is apparent in the laws of war that emerged that applied only to European soldiers and combatants and not to those resisting colonial domination (2014: 425). Humanitarian sentiment as we shall see also has a contrasting geography, focused as it is on saving distant strangers. I now turn to these geographies of distance. Saving distant strangers, keeping strangers distant Alan Lester and Fae Dussart discuss similar sentiments to those of Reid-Henry in their discussion of how a ‘will to do the right thing’ or colonialism under the ‘due observance of justice’ emerged as a humanitarian form of colonial government. Lester and Dussart discuss the ways the protection of colonised populations facilitated not only the preservation of colonised life in the face of colonial violence and dispossession but also became a way for the coloniser to maintain ‘honour’ or ‘self-esteem’ (2013: 24–24). This argument differs slightly from Reid-Henry’s in its geographic scope. Colonial humanitarianism is more spatially expansive, focused on governing at a distance and securing order in unfamiliar places (Laidlaw, 2012) as opposed to within the modern, liberal state. Thus as much as humanitarian government may be a technique of effective management it has contrasting and seemingly contradictory geographies. These include contradictions around distance, proximity and containment. Saving distant strangers is a key component of a dominant humanitarian imaginary (Barnett, 2011) that contains both normative and instrumental rationalities. Building on Reid-Henry’s recent argument, I attempted above to upset the idea that humanitarianism’s traditional geography is concerned with the distant stranger not with the stranger within the walls. These issues of distance deserve further attention. All humanitarian work contains within it issues of distance. Resourceful and capable actors with a passion for ‘doing the right thing’ and preserving life may travel to distant places to save strangers. Meanwhile the act of saving may involve many instances of acute closeness, such as when doctors tend the wounds of patients, administer therapeutic foods or perform life-saving surgery. In these instances, humanitarians go from being distant and instead, literally in some instances, enter the bodies of the strangers they aim to save. Distance, then, in these instances is multi-scalar in the extreme.