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  • Disraeli and the Eastern Question
  • William Mulligan (bio)
Disraeli and the Eastern Question, by Miloš Ković, trans. Miloš Damnjanović; pp. xx + 339. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, £66.00, $115.00.

Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative prime minister between 1874 and 1880, used epigrams to devastating effect in political debates in the House of Commons. Sometimes his witticisms were too sharp. In September 1876 his rival, W. E. Gladstone, erstwhile (and future) leader of the Liberal Party, published an account of atrocities perpetrated by Ottoman forces against civilians in Bulgaria. Entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, it was dismissed by Disraeli as “of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the worst” (qtd. in Ković 148). Disraeli’s reaction to the news of atrocities emerging from the Balkans revealed a very different sensibility from much of the British political nation. Why Disraeli reacted in this way and how he emerged triumphant on the Eastern Question at the 1878 Congress of Berlin is the subject of Miloš Ković’s book. [End Page 727]

Combining an analysis of Disraeli’s literary oeuvre with an assessment of the finer details of high politics and diplomacy in the late 1870s, Ković makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Eastern Question. Whereas Ann Pottinger Saab, in “Disraeli, Judaism, and the Eastern Question” (International History Review 10.4 [1988]), located Disraeli’s reaction within the context of Anglo-Jewish identities and politics, Ković argues that Disraeli’s attitudes reflected his Romantic inheritance from the 1820s and 1830s. When he travelled across the Mediterranean in the late 1820s and early 1830s he showed more interest in Islamic culture and architecture than in Jewish communities and legacies. He found the Ottoman Empire exotic and was even capable of romanticising the extreme violence used to suppress revolts. Ković argues that Disraeli also found escape in the Ottoman Empire from the petty humiliations he suffered in England as a result of his Jewish background. In the eastern Mediterranean he could act out a role which appealed to his sense of the dramatic.

Ković uses Disraeli’s books—Contarini Fleming (1832), Alroy (1833), and The Rise of Iskander (1833)—to probe his subject’s attitudes to nation, empire, and race. Disraeli’s previous biographers, claims Ković, have neglected the ways in which his changing views of democracy in the early 1830s shaped his attitude toward the question of nationality in European politics. He became more sympathetic to the plight of nationalities in the region and less confident that the Ottoman Empire could survive in the long term, let alone reform and prosper. This argument requires further analysis, as Disraeli’s alleged sympathies for national and democratic visions, evident in Iskander, were absent from his attitude to the Eastern crisis in the 1870s. Ković himself shows how Disraeli feared that British support for the principle of nationality in the Balkans would rebound on his government’s policy in Ireland.

Based on speeches and writings on foreign policy issues produced throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Ković argues that Disraeli viewed the international system as a competitive arena shaped by power politics rather than by arbitration and international law. This marked him off from Gladstone. Both men had been followers of Robert Peel, and Ković is correct to underline the centrality of foreign policy to their rivalry in the 1860s and 1870s. Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli considered Russia to be a substantial threat to British interests in Asia and Europe. For this reason, Disraeli supported Lord Palmerston during the Crimean War, though he was wary of the then prime minister’s far-reaching war aims. By the time the Eastern Question erupted in the 1870s, Disraeli was predisposed to support the Ottoman Empire against Russia.

The second part of the book offers a study of high politics and diplomacy. Greatly to his credit, Ković can switch from analysing literary sources and travel journals to making sense of the machinations of great power politics. He even integrates asides about Disraeli’s worsening health into his assessment of the Congress of Berlin. This eye for detail is impressive and makes for an enjoyable read.

It remains a challenge for historians of...

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