A British International Humanitarianism? Humanitarian Interventions in Eastern Europe (1875–1906)

This article contributes to the growing literature on the history of humanitarian intervention and the politics of humanitarianism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It discusses the writings of three British thinkers: the prominent scholar James Bryce, the archaeologist Arthur Evans, and the radical journalist H.N. Brailsford. All three have been credited with discovering and transmitting news about the sufferings of Christians in the Ottoman Empire during times of war and conflict. The article showcases the rise in the demand for knowledge about the region brought about by the late-nineteenth-century Eastern Crisis and its early-twentieth-century afterlife. It fills a gap in the literature on British attitudes toward Eastern Europe by offering a comparative reading of long-held Orientalist and Balkanist stereotypes, as well as nationalist visions of international and regional order articulated in a humanitarian language.