The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain: Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire 9783031365140, 3031365143

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The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire l e sl i e ro gn e sc h u m ac h e r

The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain

Leslie Rogne Schumacher

The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain Democracy and Diplomacy, Orientalism and Empire

Leslie Rogne Schumacher Department of History Wells College Aurora, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-36513-3 ISBN 978-3-031-36514-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To my parents, Leah Rogne and Fred Schumacher

Acknowledgments

A wise mentor of mine once told me to always read works’ acknowledgments first, as they are sure to mark a clear way through the twists and turns scholars take in their quests of the book. “Twisting and turning” is certainly an apt metaphor for this study’s route to publication, and I can only hope that my thanks below provide at least some clarity to my readers. To begin, the utmost. None of the ensuing pages would have been possible without the support of my wife, best friend, and soulmate, Kaja Tally-Schumacher. We met at the beginning of both of our scholarly journeys, and we continue onward arm-in-arm nearly 20 years later. Our life together is more important than this book, but I am glad that you supported it all the same. Then, the family. My mother, Dr. Leah Rogne, has without fail offered a guiding hand, at turns gentle and relentless, in maneuvering me toward completion of this book—a progression that speaks to both her conscientious nature and her own standing as scholar. I have been gratified to see my father, Fred Schumacher, take up my areas of interest as his own, offering to me a sounding board for each phase of my research based on his own readings and thoughts. My brother, Janos Rogne Schumacher, shares not only a middle and last name with me, but a fascination with history and devotion to applying one’s creative spirit in all pursuits. Next, my friends and colleagues, many of whom are one in the same. First is my peerless Ph.D. advisor, Anna Clark, who represents the

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ideal, in my opinion, that all advisors should strive toward. Second are the Minnesota stalwarts: Jesse Vanderwerf, Ben Denkinger, Ed Snyder, Robert Gilmer, Arie Kroeger, Lindsey Hoskins, Chris Haberman, and many others. Those associated with Britain and the World are too numerous to enumerate, though I will offer the following, incomplete list: Mikki Brock, Eric Zuelow, Martin Farr, Chet DeFonso, Sue Thompson, Justin Quinn Olmstead, Jake Ivey, Brandon Marsh, Bob Whitaker, Bryan Glass, Jon Shipe, John Mitcham, Jess Hower, Laura Seddelmeyer, and Simon Hill. My Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies cohorts—whom all, as I did, benefited from and were inspired by the inimitable Theo Stavrou’s passion for the Eastern Question—continue to tolerate having a non-Russianist in their midst: Theo Prousis, Denis Vovchenko, Greg Bruess, Lucien Frary, and John Mazis. The last of them deserves a special thanks as the one who started me on this path and continues to support me every step along it. I thank also the range of scholars who have looked at drafts, provided resources, and talked (and, when I have been lucky, argued) with me: Stéphanie Prévost, Chris Close, Brian Yates, Melissa Chakers, Randall Williams, Jay Carter, JP Beetz, Giancarlo Casale, Samuli Simelius, Andrekos Varnava, Richard Scully, Ronald Granieri, Susie Steinbach, Michelle Tusan, Maya Jasanoff, and Holly Case. My team of editors at Palgrave, Molly Beck, Lucy Kidwell, and Eliana Rangel, have been endlessly patient with my many delays and minute requests. This project has received a truly humbling amount of institutional support. The University of London and Harvard University took me on as a fellow, granting access to their enormous catalogues. Saint Joseph’s University awarded me a three-year fellowship and VAP that immeasurably improved my capacity to complete this study. The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University has afforded me substantial funds, space, and resources (via the Institute for European Studies) to bring this book to realization. And finally, Wells College has supported the final stages of this study with outlays, interest, and enthusiasm. Finally, the archivists. Theirs is a job that is frequently thanked but, to me, still seems thankless compared to their efforts. Archivists at the National Archives (UK), the British Library, Harvard University, and Cornell University have done everything they can to respond to my profuse, obscure, and often confused requests related to shelfmarks that

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sit mothballed in their respective stores. Those at the British Newspaper Archive, especially Eddie Bundy, furnished crucial support in providing me many of the images my readers will view below. I am sure I am forgetting many others. For that, I apologize, and I remain in their debt.

Contents

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“Veiled Under the Easy Name of the Eastern Question”: Locating the Eastern Question in 1870s Britain May 30th, 1878: A Dark Night in London Setting the Scene Historical Background to 1870 A Synopsis of the 1870s The Sources “Altered Out of All Recognition”: Unearthing the Eastern Question from Its Grave The Debates The Historiography of the Eastern Question The Eastern Question and the “New Imperialism” The Eastern Question and “New” Diplomatic History The Eastern Question and Victorian Politics The Eastern Question, British “Interests,” and Gladstone vs. Disraeli The Eastern Question and “the East” “The Eastern Question Cannot Settle Itself”: From Bulgaria to India and Back Again A Ball in Dublin The Eastern Question’s Slavic Decade

1 1 4 7 18 19 27 27 27 34 39 44 49 52 55 55 60

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CONTENTS

Before Bulgaria: The Press, Politics, and the Eastern Question The Shift in Opinion: Murder, Massacre, and Muslims Two Eastern Questions, Two Empires Conclusion: Pressure and Response 4

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The Triumph of War: The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War in Victorian Society A Forgotten War The Failure of Peace Choosing Empire, Choosing War Britain’s Siege of Plevna: Visualizing Eastern Violence War of Words: The Daily Telegraph, Jingo Russophobia, and the New Imperialism Mob Rule, Britannia! Conclusion: “A Suggestion of National Animus”

80 93 113 129 135 135 139 151 158 173 187 197

Surveillance, Negotiation, and Propaganda in British Imperialism: The Case of Cyprus A Dance by Madame Collier General Simmons’ Secret Task Force An “Experiment in Good Government,” or Life After Cyprus Conclusion, Public Opinion(s)

201 201 206 216 232

Imperialism by Negotiation: Britain at the 1878 Congress of Berlin An Express from Germany Der Herr Von Tenterden, Das Ist Der Mann? “Others Will Grumble More Britannico” Conclusion: A New British Order

243 243 246 265 281

Another Eastern Question: The Eastern Question Expands An Army of Savages “An Inheritance of Hatred”: Tying Two Easts Together in Afghanistan “Good Old Liberal Medicine”: Race, Class, and Imperialism’s Discontents “The Anarchies of the Eastern World, the Rights of the Savage”: The Eastern Question and the Midlothian Campaign Conclusion: The People’s Eastern Question, the People’s Empire

287 287 294 312

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“The Eastern Question Will Never Be Solved”: The Perseverance of History A Dog of the Regiment Egypt for the Britons, or Sir Garnet to the Rescue June 27th, 2016: A Sunny Day in London

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355 355 356 369

Bibliography

375

Index

411

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

“Notes at the Fancy-Dress Ball, Dublin Castle” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “Receiving Payment for Human Heads—Khiva” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “The Trophy. From a design by Verestchagin” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “Murad V, The New Sultan of Turkey” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “The Assassination at Constantinople” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “New Crowns for Old Ones!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “With the Russians—The Fighting in the Shipka Pass” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “A Large Bird’s-Eye View of the Siege of Plevna” (Copyright Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk]) “Good-By, Papa!” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk])

58 74 78 99 100 111 169

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

“Inside a Turkish Redoubt” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [(www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)] “Osman Pasha Brought before the Czar at Plevna” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “Portrait of a ‘Jingo’” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk]) “For Peace and War in Hyde Park Last Sunday. Etched by a Neutral Eye-Witness” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk]) Map Relating to “Memorandum on the Erekli Mines” (Copyright: Courtesy of WikimediaCommons) “Reception of Lord Beaconsfield at Charing-Cross Station on His Return from Berlin” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “The Foreign Office” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “Hoisting the British Flag at Nicosia, the Capital of Cyprus” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version) “Mose in Egitto!!!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “Neutrality under Difficulties” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “A Blaze of Triumph!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “The British Attack on Ali Musjid” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) “The Showman” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk]) “On View” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust) “Gladstone Meeting in the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh: The Ladies’ Gallery” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

175 179

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191 222

244 250

261 273 274 275

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329 333 345

CHAPTER 1

“Veiled Under the Easy Name of the Eastern Question”: Locating the Eastern Question in 1870s Britain

May 30th, 1878: A Dark Night in London It was getting late, and Charles Marvin was in a hurry. Using his mantras to hang what he had just read on his “memory pegs,” he rushed out of the Foreign Office library and down the hall to the Grand Staircase.1 Past the mural depicting Britannia Pacificatrix in triumph over her subjugated foes, her attendant holding the imperial fasces at the ready, Marvin’s shoes clicked across the mosaic floors and down the marble stairs, turning first on a landing and then again to face the bust of Lord Palmerston. Locking eyes with “Old Pam” as he floated down the final few steps, Marvin turned once more on reaching ground level. Almost free now from the suspicious, prying eyes of his colleagues, he made for the guarded doors that protected Britain’s foreign policy professionals from the danger and

1 Charles Marvin, Our Public Offices. Embodying an Account of the Disclosure of the Anglo-Russian Agreement and the Unrevealed Secret Treaty of May 31st, 1878 (London: Samuel Tinsley & Co., 1879), 270.

“Veiled Under the Easy Name of the Eastern Question”: John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, new ed., vol. I (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 476–477. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_1

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chaos of the outside world, where lurked that “vulgar herd”: the “damned British public.”2 Inside his head, he held on tightly to the secret treaty. Exiting the new Foreign Office building on Downing Street, Marvin hustled into a murky dusk that mirrored the building’s façade, whose bright stone, barely a decade old, was layered with a “garnish of soot.”3 The fastest way to Marvin’s destination was to turn right and then left onto Whitehall. Darting between the late evening pedestrians and keeping an ear out for the clip-clop of approaching hansom cabs, he walked north along the broad street to Charing Cross. A gentle turn to the right, Marvin quickly circled counterclockwise around Le Sueur’s statue of Charles I. Then as now, the king looked down on Marvin and the other small moving figures in the twilight, guarding the entrance to Trafalgar Square with horse in high trot and rapier at the ready. Marvin veered right again and entered the Strand. Hopefully it was not too late. The next morning, a Friday on the last day of May 1878, Londoners awoke to an overcast sky—“gloomy” as The Times put it, the Channel hazy.4 The previous night, their counterparts across that narrow strait had seen the Avenue de l’Opera, from the Place de l’Opera to the Arc de Triomphe, lit up with electric lights for the first time as part of Paris’s Exposition Universelle. It was just one of the miraculous events at the world’s fair, which would see the unveiling of the head of Bartholdi’s long-planned Statue of Liberty. London’s goal of installing electric lighting was still half a year in the future.5 So on that dark, late spring morning the citizens of Britain’s imperial capital had to make do with reading the papers amid the familiar hiss of their gas lamps. The most ardent followers of political gossip would have already seen the source of the day’s buzz, as it had appeared the previous evening at nine o’clock in the popular evening paper, The Globe and Traveller.6 But for most readers, the affair was just breaking among London’s vast morning media. Weeding through the British press’s characteristically

2 Ibid., 200. 3 Ibid., 201. 4 “The Weather,” The Times, 31 May 1878, col. B, p. 10. 5 The first experimental electric lights in London were lit on December 14, 1878, along

the Holborn Viaduct. See “The Electric Light,” The Times, 16 December 1878, col. C, p. 6. 6 Marvin, 279.

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lengthy, detailed rites of political haruspex, with the reader taken from seed to blossom in the space of several dense columns, it seemed that the day before Britain had, with no discussion in or approval from Parliament, signed an agreement with Russia over age-old questions of the latter’s influence in the Balkans and the Caucasus Mountains. The Globe, the story went, had received a summary of the memorandum itself from a well-informed, anonymous source at the Foreign Office. In it, Britain agreed to support Ottoman Bulgaria being partitioned into an independent north and a southern protectorate, the latter technically under Ottoman authority but practically, as the Spectator later put it, “governed like an English colony, the Governor being appointed for five or ten years with the consent of Europe.”7 Even more stunningly, Britain would recognize Russian claims to two of the Ottomans’ major Caucasian cities, Kars and Batumi.8 If true, which many papers frankly doubted (the Morning Chronicle called it a “skit” either instigated or bumbled into by the Globe), then this agreement was earth-shattering for the British Empire’s international posture.9 Such a shift upended Britain’s traditional position on the so-called “Eastern Question”—that is, the issue of how European powers should respond to a widespread belief that the Ottoman Empire was in a state of disorder and decline. That myriad treaties and official discourse, often forged in bloody war, bound Britain in a defense—by any foreign, military, and imperial resources available—of the Ottoman orbit against Russian intrusions helps us understand why the Morning Chronicle suspected that the report was some kind of sensationalist mischief. It was akin to the confusion engendered by Americans’ discovery in 1986 that an Iran-hating administration had done a deal with that same enemy for some obscure purpose. It is hard to imagine something is true when the truth is so remarkable as to seem like a lie. Indeed, when one Foreign Office clerk found out about the leak, he said “The Globe had it before the Queen. Such a thing never occurred before in history.”10

7 See “News of the Week,” The Spectator, 22 June 1878, col. A, p. 781. 8 Ibid. 9 Marvin, 276. 10 Ibid., 280.

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Setting the Scene This is a book about the Eastern Question, whose intricacies and outcomes so animated Marvin and his contemporaries in 1870s Britain. It was really, as we shall see, a series of overlapping questions and conjectures that, under its collective heading, formed a central concern and, at times, an obsession in British politics and society between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923. Three of these obsessive moments in the mid-Victorian era help locate my study in the longer narrative: the 1853–1856 Crimean War, the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878, and Britain’s invasion of Egypt in 1882. The first and last serve as bookends that open and close an era wherein an imperial solution taken by British leaders toward this Eastern Question was more or less just a hypothesis. The second moment, i.e., the Eastern Crisis, forms the focus of this particular study, with my narrative stretching from the autumn of 1870 to the spring of 1880. Accordingly, I will say from the first that this book can both be read on its own and be seen as the second in a three-part series that covers Britain’s Eastern Question throughout the whole of Queen Victoria’s reign between 1837 and 1901, from a variety of angles both head-on and oblique. The other two books in this series, as I have mapped them out, would function as a prequel and a sequel to the one on the 1870s that you hold in your hands now. To be sure, like reigns and other regimes, decades are themselves rather arbitrary excerpts from much messier, always-inmotion histories. And sadly, chronology is too often prioritized over thematic clarity. That said, I assert that it is the 1870s where all interested parties should begin when looking at how the Eastern Question figured in Victorian Britain as a whole. My purpose here is rather different than traditional, foreign policyfocused scholars who have come before me. While I have been working on this subject since the early 2000s, I have always adapted my approach to fit the most striking works that have appeared between then and now. A sampling of what I have found to be the most significant in affecting my specific view of the Eastern Question is useful to readers in placing me in the debate over the various topics my book entails. These authors/works are: Stéphanie Prévost on the Eastern Question in British politics and the press; Maya Jasanoff on collecting culture from the region spanning the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Asia; Andrekos Varnava on Britain’s imperial laboratory in Cyprus; Eugenio F. Biagini’s

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continued work on how different aspects of Victorian reform operated as an interconnected whole; Miloš Kovi´c on Benjamin Disraeli and the Eastern Question; Michelle Tusan and Davide Rodogno on the rise of Britain’s humanitarian ethic; and, last but certainly not least, Holly Case on mapping nineteenth-century European history as “an age of questions.”11 Taking these excellent scholars’ perspectives into account and adding their work to my own over the last two decades, it is clear that Victorian leaders, pressure groups, and the public routinely dueled over tradition vs. reform with regard to both the Ottoman Empire and other putatively “Eastern” places, writ small or writ large. Interestingly, reform-minded Britons were likely to be solidly reformist across the board on both domestic and Eastern affairs, while those favoring tradition were more likely to have more diverse and often inscrutably arbitrary views. Several intriguing areas of the mid-Victorian worldview bear consideration here in light of my study, especially the 11 See Stéphanie Prévost, “W. T. Stead and the Eastern Question (1875–1911); Or,

How to Rouse England and Why?,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 16 (2013) and “New Perspectives on the Eastern Question(s) in Late-Victorian Britain, Or How ‘the Eastern Question’ Affected British Politics (1881–1901),” Représentation dans le monde anglo-phone (2015); Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2006); Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which is a follow-up to his earlier book, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Miloš Kovi´c, Disraeli and the Eastern Question (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michelle Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) and The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019); Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Like Case, I have long been interested in overlapping nineteenth-century questions. I made reference in my 2012 PhD thesis to a conversation in 2009 with an award-winning, eminent scholar in European studies, in which I asked him if he saw any connection between the Eastern Question and other nineteenth-century questions, like the Polish Question and the Jewish Question. He dismissed the Eastern Question as being simply a “diplomatic question” and expressed surprise that I had identified other aspects of its relevance. More details on this exchange are found in the epilogue to this book. Tellingly as to this general tendency, Case also tells a similar story from 2008 in her book.

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dissonance between the fact that non-Christian entities existed in a system of international relations primarily overseen by Christian powers and the creeping feeling that territorial, take-over-your-country imperialism could square the circle on absorbing lands into the warm embrace of Western enlightenment. This set of developments was, of course, totally independent of received conditions. In the late 1850s, to be sure, the Ottoman Empire was regarded in Britain by both its supporters and detractors as a de jure probationary member of the Concert of Europe due it being the most obviously interested party in the alliance that had won the Crimean War and signed the peace at Paris in 1856. By the mid-1880s, after the Balkandelineating 1878 Berlin Congress and amid the monstrously methodical slicing and dicing of an independent African continent in the 1884–1885 Berlin Congress, it was clear to even the most cautious observers that the Eastern Question’s solution must involve at least some degree of direct imperial control over some portion of Ottoman territory to fit the spirit of the age. Thus, that we see in Britain a much more clearly imperialist outlook on “Eastern” matters taken from 1882 forward, by both Liberal and Conservative forces, is a self-evident platform under which lie joists and trusses built in preparation for a variety of purposes, only one of which was the ultimately triumphant imperial one. Although this book revolves around the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878, I choose to interpret its background and outcomes broadly and by juxtaposition. In so doing, I illustrate how the Eastern Question was interwoven like threads throughout the complex tapestry that made up Victorian Britons’ worldview and, in the 1870s, those threads were among the most numerous and brightest. What is more, people made these threads, admired and criticized them, and assessed the whole in light of those strands in combination with their other attitudes. Thus, this is also a book about those who produced and consumed the political and cultural products related to their community’s preoccupation with the Eastern Question. I tell this story by means of a focus on the individuals, groups, agencies, and systems that populated and drove discourse about the Eastern Question in Britain in this period. In this regard, primary sources reveal Britons’ various prejudices in more or less plain language rather than disguised allusions, given that the people writing and speaking on the topic felt that what they said was perfectly respectable. Instead of testing theory via subtlety, then, the Eastern Question’s discursive substratum

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emerges from triangulating between events and programs overseen and engaged in by human actors, noting where outcomes match and do not match the rhetoric they engaged in or signed on to. Therefore, this is in a way also a book about people like Charles Marvin and many others who, for a diverse set of reasons and happenstances, were tangled up in the web of connections between the press, pressure groups, political leaders, and the agents of foreign and imperial policy that characterized the collective culture of the Victorian era. We hear from them constantly and often at length so we can say, in a form of proof (or, better yet, witness), that people in the midst of the events in question were well aware of the major issues and opinions defining their milieu. Hence, in my narrative I am more liable to summarize complex systems and events than to summarize what people at the time said about them. As a result, chapters and major sections frequently begin with extended glosses on scenes throughout the setting of my narrative. I hope that even readers in search of a traditional study will see this conceit as I intend it, namely to give a sense of the lived experience of those who populated a present that we as historians hover over like helicopters—modern and sophisticated, but distant all the same. In a similar vein, my book has an educational intention at every point of my progress through the topic. Experts on the Eastern Question will find many things that are new to them, but they will also at times need to scan past reiterations of facts, theories, and conclusions that are not just referenced but explained for the benefit of new (and particularly young) scholars seeking an accessible, multi-purpose text on the Eastern Question as a jumping-off point in their exploration of the topic. It must be so, if we are to seriously believe that the intent of published scholarship, particularly in book form, is to educate acolytes and not just appease old hands. Accordingly, to best serve the former, an overview of the background to the historical events and forces at work in this problem is in order. I also offer here a lineage of the available literature.

Historical Background to 1870 The phrase “the Eastern Question” has been used to refer to many subjects, not to mention a substantial timeline. Scholars have made various attempts to distill it down to single statements or limited criteria, either in terms of a vague expression of the Eastern Question’s complexity

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itself or in strict, itemized detail.12 One of the better historical attempts at a brief definition comes from Norman Dwight Harris’s 1926 book, Europe and the East: The [Eastern Question] may be defined briefly as the internationalization of all trade routes and the establishment of an interstate modus vivendi in the Near East, which will protect and conserve the commercial, financial, and political rights and interests of all the nations of the region, and which will ensure a permanent peace from Belgrade to the Persian Gulf and from Egypt to the Caspian Sea.13

The value of Harris’s definition is that it provides both a material and a geographical dimension to the problems implied by the invocation of the term “the Eastern Question.” However, it lacks a historical dimension (indeed, the word “will” implies an ongoing status) and does not mention what is, I think, the crucial element of concern about the Ottoman Empire’s decline, whether warranted or not. For this aspect and for the historical angle in general, there will never be a single definition of the Eastern Question, and it is rather more useful to speak of its history by outlining the major events that have been seen to make up its narrative. A key text in this aspect, and indeed in all aspects of the past study of the Eastern Question, is J. A. R. Marriott’s book on the topic, first published in 1917 and still, for better or for worse, a standard source. Marriott attempts to situate the Eastern Question as, in his time, the latest episode in an “immemorial” conflict between the “habits, ideas, and preconceptions” of the East and the West.14 However, even he found it necessary to limit his main discussion to the shape of the conflict that first arose in the eighteenth century regarding death of the “sick man of Europe” (the term Russia’s Emperor Nicholas I gave the

12 For an example of the latter, see J. A. R. Marriott’s page-long, six-part definition on pp. 2–3 of his book The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940). Note: this book was first published in 1917. 13 Norman Dwight Harris, Europe and the East (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 25. It should be noted that he prefers to refer to the Eastern Question as the “NearEastern Question,” based on the physical location of the problems it relates to, yet on p. 23 he acknowledges that “the Eastern Question” is more commonly used. 14 Marriott, 1.

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Ottoman Empire) and this issue’s effect on the international politics of the European Powers, especially Russia and, eventually, Britain.15 Rather enigmatically, my compatriots and I, in the attempt to pull this all-important preoccupation from the past into present-day scholarly discourse, continue to search for an acceptable summary definition that takes into account as many historical and historiographical angles as possible. As for this quest, I ventured in 2014 my own attempt at solving this problem in the Journal of European Studies, a definition that I am humbled to say has been adopted by a number of other scholars—no doubt simply because I am one of the most recent to try it: The “Eastern Question” refers to the events and the complex set of dynamics related to Europe’s experience of and stake in the decline in political military and economic power and regional significance of the Ottoman Empire from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the formation of modern Turkey in 1923.16

With my definition kept in the back of our minds, the most commonly employed starting point of the Eastern Question has been the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, the formal outcome of the First RussoTurkish War of 1768–1774.17 In this treaty, Russia, the victor, gained two major rights it had not had prior to the war: first, free navigation of the Black Sea and the right to use, by merchant vessels, the Ottomanheld access way to the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles Straits; and second, the right to keep a Russian-controlled Orthodox

15 Ibid., 5–10. 16 See p. 65 of Leslie Rogne Schumacher, “The Eastern Question as a Europe Question:

Viewing the Ascent of ‘Europe’ through the Lens of Ottoman Decline,” Journal of European Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 64–80. 17 It is becoming more common to refer to conflicts between Russia and the Ottomans as “Russo-Ottoman” or “Ottoman-Russian” wars. However, to avoid confusion in citing and discussing primary sources that use the traditional form of “Russo-Turkish,” I have retained that formulation throughout the work where the wars are mentioned, in contrast to my studious attempts to avoid the replication of ethnic anachronisms of prior scholars like “Turk,” “Turkish,” and “Turkey” as labels (and often epithets) for the Ottoman Empire. My one exception is the terms “Turcophilic” and “Turcophobic,” for which there are no other appropriately descriptive terms that do not obfuscate the fact that, indeed, these philes and phobes were, in their minds, for and against “Turks” not Ottomans.

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church in Istanbul and internationally represent “those who serve it,” a “vague and potentially dangerous phrase,” as M. S. Anderson puts it.18 Indeed, in the many conflicts between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over the next century and a half, the contested issue of Russia’s protection of Christians living in Ottoman territory generally entered into any discourse on the particular justification for the Russian side. This should not, however, be seen as some kind of long-term project by Russia to deliberately undermine the Ottoman Empire. Rather, when conflicts arose between Ottoman authorities and their Christian subjects, Russian leaders felt that it was their duty, based on the 1774 Treaty, to intervene on the Christians’ behalf. If the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji established a specific type of interest that Russia had in the future of the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the formal annexation of the Ionian Islands in 1807 established a French interest and, ultimately, a British one.19 To be sure, long before the rise of Napoleon France had been deeply invested in the fate of the Ottoman Empire, as France had for the most part a favorable economic and political relationship with the Ottomans. But as time went on France’s involvement in the Ottoman Empire revolved more and more around the objective of a permanent solution to the Eastern Question that would ultimately benefit France’s economic and political goals. In fact, one early nineteenth-century writer went as far to remark that the Eastern Question was “essentially a French question,” as the policy of direct and indirect involvement that France had in supporting the Ottoman Empire, especially against Russia, was seen by French diplomats and statesmen as being linked directly to France’s security and prosperity.20

18 M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966), xi. 19 Until 1797, the Ionian Islands were a Venetian possession, but their significance to

the Ottoman Empire, and hence to the status of the Eastern Question, was their close proximity to Ottoman Greece and the fact that they were administered from 1797 until their annexation into the French Empire in 1807 jointly by France and Russia, and after 1815 by the British. See Leslie Rogne Schumacher, “Greek Expectations: Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864,” in Imperial Expectations and Realities: El Dorados, Utopias and Dystopias, ed. Andrekos Varnava (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 47–65; also, Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14–16. 20 Qtd. in Remarks on the Conduct and Probable Designs of Russia (London: James Ridgeway, 1832), 177. This quote is, as this work states, from the introduction to French

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The goal of British involvement in the Eastern Question and the status of the Ottoman Empire was quite similar to France’s, especially as British traders and warships turned the Mediterranean into, as the saying went, a “British lake.” Even more, by the early nineteenth century, all of those intimately involved in the Eastern Question had the same general goals, including of course the Ottomans themselves: each country sought to protect and extend its strategic, economic, and religious interests (especially in the case of Russia) in the regions under Ottoman authority or, crucially, abutting Ottoman territory. Yet it is in the next key event in the narrative of the Eastern Question, the Greek War of Independence fought between 1821 and 1829, that it becomes clear that the way these goals were prosecuted differed greatly, and the particular dynamics of Britain’s involvement began to make it into a complex, increasingly central participant in the many subsequent conflicts that arose regarding what was perceived to be the imminent death of the Ottoman Empire. The issue of Greek independence was the first major element of the problem of Ottoman decline that inspired a popular response in Britain counter to Britain’s traditional policy of arresting this decline. This was mainly due to the fact that many Britons, especially those with education and liberal beliefs, felt an affinity to Greece based upon the importance of ancient Greece in the Western worldview.21 The fact that Greek Christians rose up against Ottoman authority in 1821 was seen through the prism of this “philhellenism,” and a movement for intervention on the side of the Greeks—something exactly counter to formal British policy—arose and took hold as an alternative political and cultural opinion on the Eastern Question around which Britons could assemble in the broader arenas of British society. The influence of an emerging free press (where the liberal Morning Chronicle dueled with conservative papers,22 with The Times defining the center23 ) and the dramatic involvement of Lord Byron as a Greek volunteer began to make the Eastern Question a component of popular edition of the text. It identifies no author for this introduction’s claims. However, it does seem to be the case that the term “the Eastern Question” was originally a translation of French inquiries into “la question d’Orient ” from the late 1820s. 21 Bass, 48. 22 Ibid., 59–60. 23 See G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978), Chapter 6, “The Age of The Times,” 152–177, especially pp. 153–155.

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society. Not just a dusty issue of high politics, the Eastern Question now could evoke deeply held and potentially divisive sentiments, which complicated British policymakers’ attempts to form a policy that would keep the Ottoman Empire alive and protect Britain’s trade and imperial interests. Indeed, when a combined Russian, French, and British fleet defeated an Ottoman-Egyptian one in the Battle of Navarino in October 1827, the liberal quarters of British political and popular society cheered the outcome as advancing the ultimate goal of an independent Greece,24 while the Tory Duke of Wellington deemed the battle an “untoward event” counter to the principles of British foreign and imperial policy.25 Although British politicians continued the traditional policy of ultimately protecting the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the theme of questioning and perhaps reversing that policy had become entrenched in the collective British mind. Yet as the Duke of Wellington’s comment suggests, Britain’s wider foreign and imperial interests began to be connected more and more closely to their stance as a force of order in the resolution of the Eastern Question, no matter the shape of debate about it at home. We might combine the next two major events in the timeline of the Eastern Question into one discussion, as an understanding of each is dependent on the other and their relationship illustrates a major theme that appears throughout my book, namely the connections and contradictions between the public and diplomatic sectors of Britain’s involvement in the Eastern Question. The first of these is the agreement at the 1841 London Straits Convention by diplomats from all five Great Powers (Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, and Russia) to close the Dardanelles to any non-Ottoman warship unless the Ottoman Empire was at war, which was intended as a way to ensure that no European state could directly benefit from attacking the Ottoman Empire without calling for the direct reaction of another Power.26 When France broke this agreement in June 1853 by moving a fleet to the Dardanelles 24 Bass, 148. 25 See Steven Schwartzberg, “The Lion and the Phoenix—II,” Middle Eastern Studies

24, no. 3 (1988): 287–311, especially pp. 294–296. 26 Moreover, this agreement effectively nullified a secret article of an earlier agreement between the Ottoman Empire and Russia—the 1833 Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi—that was to give Russian warships exclusive rights to the Dardanelles in a time of war—see Anderson, 106.

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in support of France’s challenge to Russia’s status as the protector of Ottoman Christians (guaranteed by the 1774 Treaty discussed above), this helped bring about the Crimean War, the next major point at which the Eastern Question figured prominently in European and British politics and society. Fought from 1853 to 1856, the Crimean War pitted an allied force made up of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Piedmont-Sardinia against Russia, which fought a losing battle to restore its right to oversee the interests of Ottoman Christians. An immensely costly,27 destructive,28 and controversial war, the Crimean War established the trajectory and general shape of the Eastern Question and the issue of Britain’s relationship to the Ottoman Empire in later British discourse. Beyond the war standing as an important aspect of the general background of the Eastern Question, three facets of the conflict help frame my research focus: first, the impetus and escalation of the war can in many ways be traced to the making and breaking of a number of important, yet contradictory treaties regarding who held authority to intervene in Ottoman matters; second, the horrific reports of bloody battles and rampant disease made it a contentious, eventually unpopular war in all the home countries of those involved, giving rise to the feeling that any resolution to the Eastern Question would involve disruptive, disturbing event; and third, Britain’s opposition to Russia in the war motivated a strong sentiment of mistrust of Russia in an increasingly large portion of Britain’s political and public sectors, which would remain an important aspect of Britain’s international and imperial affairs for at least the next half century. Although Britain’s entry into the war in 1854 was not based upon any direct provocation by Russia of the British Empire but rather was wrapped up in the diplomatic potentialities of the threat of Ottoman subjugation under Russia, much of British society supported it, having become over the years, and especially after the highly-publicized Russian destruction of an Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Sinope in 1853, “wildly

27 G. N. Clark lists Britain’s expenditures fighting the Crimean War at £70,000,000, of which £38,000,000 came from taxes and £32,000,000 from loans, although this cost affected the industrially-strong British economy much less than it did the less wealthy Ottomans and Russians—see The New Cambridge Modern History: The Zenith of European Power: 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 486–487. 28 Upwards of 300,000 troops died, most of disease and most within less than two years of the war’s length.

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Russophobic.”29 Yet as in the Greek War of Independence, this view was not universal: many anti-imperialist Liberals spoke out against Britain’s involvement, such as Richard Cobden who blamed the fomenting of militarism in British society on a cyclical process whereby a segment of public opinion was made popular by the influential pro-war newspapers (especially The Times ), driving public opinion to reflect what such papers felt was the right course of action.30 Indeed, while the diplomatic angles on the problem may have been appreciated most by the editors of the papers and by the leading politicians who often wrote the leaders (anonymously), it was the vigorous calls for war by these figures that made this phase of the Eastern Question into a highly contested public affair. Moreover, once the war started, discussion about it became nearly ubiquitous in Britain, due in large part to the fact that it was the first war experienced in real time: William Howard Russell’s correspondence— telegraphed to The Times daily—and Roger Fenton’s photographs, not to mention the drama of Florence Nightingale and her nightly, lamp-lit nursing, brought the realities of war to those at home in a way that had never before been experienced. The influence of these new mediums in bringing the Crimean War—something that started ostensibly because of the diplomatic entanglements of the Eastern Question—to a wide audience made matters that had previously been confined to the highest echelons of British authority into items of public debate and political pressure.31 To be sure, the slow, often disastrous progress of the war effort, made known in critical detail by Russell and The Times, led to a popular outcry against Lord Aberdeen’s Government, with Aberdeen resigning following the public’s and his fellow politicians’ criticism in 1855. His foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, complained that it was the press, especially The Times, that brought about Aberdeen’s fall in that it promulgated an opinion in the public eye that it was the Government’s fault that the British army and the other allied armies were unable to win decisive battles against the Russians.32 29 Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: The Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 101. 30 Ibid. 31 Bass, 36. 32 Ibid., 37. Here, it may be helpful to readers new to British studies to note

that, when capitalized, “Government” refers to the prime minister, his or her Cabinet,

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After the war’s official conclusion at the Congress of Paris, the treaty that resulted from the Congress was supposed to govern diplomatic affairs related to the Eastern Question, chief among these being the demilitarization of the Black Sea, the reaffirmation of the 1841 London Straits Convention, and the political and economic reorientation of the Ottoman Empire into the European fold—a sort of sixth Great Power on probationary status until it had enacted widespread structural reforms of its government, economy, military, and diplomatic apparatus.33 The new Liberal prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was considered a victor of a newly restored European concert, and he shaped public opinion to build support for deepening the relationship between the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire.34 It also appears to be clear that this action cemented Britain’s status as the leading power in the final resolution of the Eastern Question. From this point on, British foreign policy became centered on the protection of imperial strategic and economic interests, with a strong Ottoman Empire serving as the linchpin to the British Empire’s solidifying hegemony in Eastern affairs. And as such it bears consideration that this may have also been, as Jack Snyder has claimed, the point at which it can be argued that the idea of a comprehensive expansion of the British Empire was formulated and put into effect, predicated on the continual implementation of the diplomatic advantages that Britain had gained in the Ottoman Empire and the East at large as guaranteed by the Treaty of Paris and the treaty’s reflection in the “Crimean system,” as it came to be called.35 Yet this kind of exercise would not have been possible without the garnering of public support for a policy that relied upon the fear and hatred of Russia and, at the very least, a general acquiescence toward an ongoing alliance with the Ottoman Empire. If political and diplomatic elites argued otherwise, and they often did,36 a large segment of the press and their running of Parliament during their time in power. When rendered simply as “government,” this speaks to the British system of power and authority more generally. 33 Anderson, 142–143. 34 Koss, 101; also, Richard T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876

(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), 15–16. 35 Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 158–163. 36 For example, Lord Salisbury, the later Conservative foreign minister and prime minister, famously said many years after the Crimean War, and after the disintegration

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and of the politically and intellectually active component of Victorian society was there to assert the Palmerstonian angle.37 Here, we see the fascinating complexity of the relationship between the spheres of diplomatic activity and public activity in the history of the Eastern Question, a dynamic that took a deeper hold in British society and politics from the Crimean War on. This accordingly sets the stage for the great deal of discussion about the Eastern Question and British foreign and imperial interests in the years leading up to, during, and after the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878. That more and more Britons became interested in the East and the Eastern Question is evidence of an increasing sense that they had a stake in the outcome of the Eastern Question, as subjects of an empire that oversaw an international and imperial policy predicated on overseeing the management of Ottoman decline and protecting Britain’s imperial possessions (and maybe adding to them to do so). One must be careful, however, to avoid drawing a direct line of connection between the Crimean War and Britain’s expansionist mentality in the 1880s and 1890s, a tendentious act of which Snyder is at least partly guilty.38 Although there is no doubt that the Crimean War and the political dynamics it produced had a great effect on the following generations of British external policy, there were surely events that augmented or superseded the state of imperial ideology and practice as it stood in 1856. The late 1850s and the entirety of the 1860s were, in fact, rife with instances of, on their face, Eastern conflicts that in all justice should have always been central in discussions of the Eastern Question throughout its long period of relevance. In the past, one generally had to look outside the Eastern Question’s traditional, diplomacy-focused historiography for coverage on, at the very least: the 1857 Indian Rebellion; the conquests of Muslim states in Central Asia by Russia between 1859 and 1868; the 1860 civil war between the Ottoman Druze and Maronite populations in Mount Lebanon; the horrific genocide of the Circassian Muslims by

of the Crimean system, that, “England put her money on the wrong horse.”—Qtd. in Marriott, 265. 37 See Koss’s chapter, “The Palmerstonian Ascendancy,” on pp. 121–166, which details the growth of the power of the press in politics and Palmerston’s part in this. 38 Snyder devotes only about a page to the dynamics of imperialism post-Palmerston, even though he makes frequent references to the longer view of his thesis—see pp. 209– 210.

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Russians forces in the late 1850s and early 1860s; the 1866–1869 Cretan Revolt; the 1867–1868 Qatari-Bahraini War; and Britain’s expedition to Abyssinia in 1868. Unfortunately, because these specific issues did not elicit a big international conference or a wider European war, works on them typically ended up sitting on separate shelves than those professing to cover the Eastern Question.39 I myself used to breeze past the 1860s in my teaching, presenting, and writing on the Eastern Question, likely due to the strong influence of those old timelines that jump between crises involving two or more of the Great Powers. All Eastern Question scholars should examine our records on this front, but I think it is a phenomenon that has been most prevalent among those studying the Eastern Question from a British perspective. But just like a Sonderweg-raised scholar of Germany, we all need retraining to come up to date. Further, if the sampling listed above involves conflict with more obvious connections to the Eastern Question, there are numerous others whose relationships are more reflexive. For example, whereas a London paper might address Eastern affairs in terms of their influence on the financial markets, a port city’s media may worry about imperial trade, while a provincial market town’s editors might look for possible impacts on the price of British grain and manufactured goods. This is to say nothing of the ways that a big policy change in one area can tip the balance in another, even if the first seems to have nothing to do with the second. As one of the chief issues at hand in British politics and society in the 1870s, such potential impacts of and on the Eastern Question were endlessly mooted. Some such intersections are more reasonable than others. For example, I have come across several instances where contemporary observers identified the American Civil War and the Eastern Question to be separated by a single degree.40

39 The two major international conference in the 1860s, the 1864 and 1867 London Conferences, dealt with matters related to German unification. 40 I refer here, admittedly cryptically, to the relationship between the embarrassing (to Britain, that is) resolution of the Alabama affair and the later defeat by Gladstone’s Liberals by Disraeli’s Conservatives in 1874. It is my contention that this fracas combined with Britain’s distracted attention toward increasingly troubling Eastern and African affairs that ran under the domestic, constituent-based radar of Gladstone, who believed in 1873–1874 that the good economy he had husbanded trumped all foreign and imperial interactions that were unpopular among a plurality of the British electorate.

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In this way, the Eastern Question may have had a greater reach than any of us have ever truly considered. Certainly, I see no conclusive evidence that 1870s Britons thought the matter so limited as to bring it up only when there was some international meeting in a European capital or a fracas between diplomats in Istanbul. It is perhaps scholars’ attempts to boil down the Eastern Question into something that has blinkered us to its wider value as a collection point of disparately considered events and trends. I can only do so much in a single, short volume on this immense question. Again, as I have said, a prequel (and sequel) would address this gap.

A Synopsis of the 1870s It will be additionally helpful to readers, new and old to the Eastern Question, to have a list of the major moments engaged in this study during the period it covers. For newcomers, I recommend using this list as a way of researching and triangulating between other works specific to these moments, providing them (and anyone else) road signs marking key points of intersection along the route I travel. In chronological order, I offer analyses of the following: • The outcome of the Franco-Prussian War and its connection to the 1871 Treaty of London, which modified the earlier 1856 Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War. • The coalescing of a Slavic focus in Britons’ mental map of the Eastern Question, and the issue of tracking Ottoman reform in addressing the position of the sultan’s Christian subjects. • The explosion of British interest in Russia’s 1873 campaign against the Khivan Khanate in Central Asia, including fears that Russian victory would hurt the British Empire. • The uprising by Serbs and Montenegrins in the Ottoman province of Herzegovina in 1875, followed by British attempts to ensure stability in the Near East. • The acquisition of a controlling stake in the Suez Canal Company in 1875, orchestrated by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to give Britain control over its main passageway to India. • The outbreak of Christian-Muslim violence in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1876, which was subsequently the site of massive reprisal killings of Christians by Ottoman irregular forces.

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• The rapid growth in 1876 of a popular protest and petition campaign calling on the British government to respond emphatically to these “Bulgarian Atrocities,” and the return to the limelight by the former (and future) Liberal prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, by means of his wildly popular pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East . • The invasion and subsequent defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Russians in 1877 and 1878, as well as the huge pro- and anti-Russian public protests in London over the war in 1878. • The secret project undertaken by the British military during the above war, tasked with the responsibility of surveying Ottoman weaknesses and proposing British imperial solutions—a project whose outcome was the recommendation to acquire Cyprus as a British protectorate. • The conduct of the British representatives at the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which was intended to provide a mediated settlement to the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, as well as the popular and political response to the Tory claim that Britain had mastered the proceedings. • The emergence of a British discourse of “other” Eastern Questions in the aftermath of the Eastern Crisis, including those related to the 1878–1880 Anglo-Afghan War. • The incidence in 1878 and 1879 of a growing public feeling among Liberal (or at least anti-Tory) Britons that this newly named notion of “imperialism” was tied to Disraeli’s Eastern, Jewish affinities and, at the same time, represented Britain’s growing global responsibilities. • The campaign by Gladstone to win election in Scotland’s Midlothian constituency in 1879 and 1880, in which his focus on foreign affairs proved successful and relaunched his career.

The Sources Finally, in keeping with my educational intention in this project, I feel it is important here, at the beginning of the book, to provide scholars new to the field with a précis of the sources I draw on and are thus available to them as precise jumping-off points in their own further research and written (and hopefully published) work. A symbol of this laser-targeted

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approach to substantiation is my specificity in naming not just the dates, not just the page numbers, but the columns my periodical references lay in. I also take great care to format my references of Hansard, i.e., the official (and most accurate) reports of Parliamentary proceedings available to the press, in such a way that they align not with the old way of referencing the (very expensive, very rare, and usually very old) hardback versions of this source, but rather with the variety of recent online, searchable compendia of Hansard records hosted by the UK government and others.41 Experts will, no doubt, be familiar with most or all of these sources, old and new. However, like the following chapter on my chosen debates/ historiographies of the Eastern Question, the summary below may be additionally helpful to old hands in terms of noting the particular combination and layering of sources that I, specifically, have used to compose my narrative and pursue my argument—indeed, if only to help expedite their readings of it. My book depends on research from a variety of sources, especially five particular arenas of British society and culture: politics, diplomacy, print media, the intellectual community, and personal testimony. Within each of these source areas, there are specific cases I explore that illustrate key connections to the events and themes described in each chapter, e.g., diplomatic correspondence and its correlation with eventual political outcomes; the press and its coverage of Eastern affairs; and the role of intellectual societies and political pressure groups and their part in the Eastern Question. Furthermore, it is necessary to “humanize” these broad concerns about imperial British history. In addition to major figures like Disraeli, Gladstone, and other leading statesmen of the time, throughout my book I look at other individuals outside the central power structure of the British state to give a fuller and more nuanced portrait of the intersections and complex identities found in this part of history, including politicians and figures of British society such as Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and

41 So known after their original printer, Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), as well

as his son with the same name who succeeded him at the publishing house (1813–1891). For more resources on a recent transition from a pilot site known as “Millbank” (after the selfsame part of Westminster) to its various successors, see Kathryn Rix, “Accessing Hansard Online: A Research Guide,” https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2022/ 02/09/accessing-hansard-online-a-research-guide/.

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Auberon Herbert (two Victorian iconoclasts, the former Conservative and the latter Liberal); diplomats and imperial figures such as Sir Henry Elliot, Sir Austen Henry Layard (the two ambassadors to Istanbul during the 1870s), and Sir Garnet Wolseley (the first governor of British Cyprus and a noted Victorian war hero); reporters such as W. T. Stead (editor of the Northern Echo, a major Liberal organ, and later reformist hero) and Edward Levy-Lawson (owner and editor of the Daily Telegraph, which switched from Liberal to Tory during the Crisis); and intellectuals such as E. A. Freeman and Goldwin Smith (both noted historians and both rabidly Turcophobic, antisemitic commentators during the 1870s). More generally, I compare the public and elite realms of British discourse related to the Eastern Question in the 1870s. On the public side, the study of discussion about the Eastern Question in print media (including daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books), in public Parliamentary debates, and in influential political pressure groups (like the Eastern Question Association) is essential to establishing the evidence for widespread interest and controversy over the matter, especially in the imperial center of London. On the private side, the affairs discussed in Cabinet, Foreign Office, and War Office meetings, in diplomatic correspondence, and in the personal letters between people involved in the administration of the British Empire’s Eastern Policy give us a view of how the Eastern Question was dealt with according to the political and institutional structures of Britain’s foreign and imperial apparatus. In comparing and contrasting these two fundamental categories of data on Britain and the Eastern Question, I aim to formulate a more robust theory on the influence of domestic public pressure on the external affairs of the British Empire. That domestic issues certainly affected Britain’s Eastern and imperial policies is without a doubt clear, but the manner in and extent to which this occurred are less clear, as public agitation itself is less indicative of the subsequent enaction of formal policy than it is of a particular emphasis in political and cultural dialogue among the populace. Although the mapping of these political and cultural emphases is a key part of apprehending the importance of the Eastern Question to Victorian society during the Eastern Crisis and thereafter, we must look at the private side to determine if and how political leaders and governmental officials responded to public opinion. Reviewing their private papers, letters, and internal dialogue helps us gauge whether or not they rolled popular views into their official diplomatic and military strategies. Beyond

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this, an understanding of the reasons and methods by which those directly charged with devising and carrying out these policies employed is essential to understanding the global effects of Britain’s experience of the Eastern Question. At this point, the answer to this question is unclear, as is the allimportant question of if the rapid expansion of the British Empire and imperial ideology proceeded from public opinion, official design, or a combination of the two. A nuanced and up-to-date analysis of “the East” and the Eastern Question in Victorian society and diplomacy provides an opportunity to add a key, understudied issue to this dialogue. It is important to consider the influence of the press on public opinion, politics, and diplomacy both from the angle of the nature of the coverage itself and with consideration as to the methods and structure of Victorian journalism and print culture.42 I particularly focus on three types of newspapers: first, the papers that represented most closely the political opinion of the parties they were associated with, such as the Pall Mall Gazette for the Tories and the Daily News for the Liberals; second, papers that attempted to appeal to a wider audience, such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph; third, papers whose primary focus was visual and, often, sensational, like the Illustrated London News, Punch, the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, and The Graphic. Examining these and other newspapers reveals that, in the 1870s, debate over the Eastern Question increased in volume throughout Britain’s public scene, reaching a crescendo during the Eastern Crisis. This discursive space spanned the political spectrum and was particularly loud in the imperial center of London. Between the beginning of 1875 and the end of 1878, for example, The Times alone printed more than 350 articles titled “The Eastern Question,” while the Daily News ran over 150 articles with this same title over the same period.43 After the war between 42 Any use of sources from the Victorian press requires this kind of method—see Lyn Pykett, “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context,” on pp. 3–18 of Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 43 A search of The Times title index reveals 359 articles published between the begin-

ning of Herzegovinian Uprising in June of 1875 and the end of 1878 that are titled “The Eastern Question,” with a common variation including a notable person’s opinion about it (e.g., “Lord Stratford de Redcliffe on the Eastern Question,” The Times, 18 May 1876, col. C, p. 10). A similar search of the Daily News index shows 159 articles for the period listed in the previous note, with a similar arrangement in title construction as well.

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Russia and the Ottoman Empire began, the Daily Telegraph and the Pall Mall Gazette took up a regular routine of printing leaders proclaiming the danger of Russia to British interests, calling for Britain’s entry into the war to ward off Russian aggression toward British possessions.44 Further, I also often draw on important provincial papers, especially those that had a profile big enough to have national significance, like the Northern Echo, The Scotsman, and the Liverpool Mercury. Parliamentary debate was public and was available in the form of detailed reports reprinted in prominent newspapers. As these reports often differ slightly from one another, in general I use Hansard, though at times I refer to specific instances where a Parliamentary correspondent noted some peculiarity of the debate not specified in the official version. Further, my research includes evidence from political journals and literary reviews, many of which were associated with political parties or opinions, such as the Liberal Fortnightly Review (edited by Gladstone’s close confidante and, later, his first prominent biographer, John Morley). Pamphlets and books published during the 1870s also figure in my account, especially when (1) were big sellers and (2) when they are representative of a particular political or cultural theme relevant to my discussion. For example, the popular preacher Malcolm MacColl’s The Eastern Question: Its Facts & Fallacies went through five editions, showing the popularity of his approach, which revolved not only around the Ottoman Empire’s alleged crimes but admonished British leaders who sought to maintain the British-Ottoman alliance.45 To capitalize on the public’s growing interest in buying books on the Eastern Question, many works sympathetic to the anti-Ottoman cause were hastily produced,

Such titles are, of course, in addition to the literally thousands of simple mentions of the term “Eastern Question” within articles themselves. In The Times alone, there are nearly 2,300 of those cases in the 1870s, while a broader search using the British Newspaper Archive reveals just short of 180,000 instances among their collection of metropolitan and provincial holdings. 44 On the Pall Mall Gazette’s reportage on Russia, see H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism, vol. II (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), 340. 45 Malcolm MacColl, The Eastern Question: Its Facts & Fallacies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1877); The Eastern Question: The Three Great Perils of England (London: W. Ridgeway, 1877). Later, MacColl would write an additional, reflective book on the Eastern Crisis, Three Years of the Eastern Question (London: Chatto, 1878).

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like Times reporter Antonio Gallenga’s Two Years of the Eastern Question and Lloyd’s executive Sir Henry Hozier’s The Russo-Turkish War: Including an Account of the Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Power and the History of the Eastern Question.46 Meanwhile, those suspicious of Russia could buy a translation of Russian General R. A. Fadeyev’s 1871 book Opinion on the Eastern Question (which went into a popular second edition in 1876), or peruse confidential papers stolen from Russia’s Constantinople ambassador, P. N. Ignatiev, by buying Russian Intrigues: Secret Despatches of General Ignatieff and Consular Agents of the Great Panslavic Societies.47 Finally, certain government documents were offered for sale in the form of diplomatic “Blue Books,” which usually offered a selection of pertinent correspondence between the Foreign Office and its overseas agents. Their intended use was for MPs to consult them in conducting Parliamentary debates, but the public (and, more importantly, newspapermen) could purchase copies for their own use—if they had the money, of course. We can differentiate the above version of the “Blue Books” with another type that I use, here in reference to the “elite” sources of my discussion. Members of Cabinet received their own set of “Blue Books,” which included additional letters deemed too sensitive for public eyes; the vital distinction between these two types of diplomatic correspondence available in the deliberation over external policy accounts for a way in which I distinguish between truly public and truly elite discourse. Likewise, the written reports of Cabinet meetings offer a perspective into how the top policymakers sought to take control of the matter. These documents show a Cabinet that sought to control public debate, while simultaneously keeping certain pieces of information secret. This dynamic was especially evident in the Cyprus takeover and in the preparation of the Congress of Berlin.

46 Antonio Carlo N. Gallenga, Two Years of the Eastern Question (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1877); Henry Montague Hozier, The Russo-Turkish War: Including an Account of the Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Power and the History of the Eastern Question (London: Mackenzie, 1878). 47 R. I. Fadeyev, Opinion on the Eastern Question, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1876). P. N. Ignatiev, Russian Intrigues: Secret Despatches of General Ignatieff and Consular Agents of the Great Panslavic Societies (London: W. Ridgeway, 1877).

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For his tenure as Disraeli’s foreign secretary, Lord Derby’s detailed personal diary of his work at the Foreign Office and in Cabinet meetings forms a core part of the evidence of how actual debates took place at the highest level.48 Similarly, letters between Gladstone and Lord Granville (Liberal leader in the House of Lords and Gladstone’s foreign secretary between 1870 and 1874 and 1880 and 1885) show the way the Liberals sought to use their own channels of power to organize their fight against Disraeli’s policy. Finally, Disraeli’s letters to his friends Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, and Foreign Secretary (formerly India Secretary and later Prime Minister) Lord Salisbury’s personal letters as compiled and commented on by his daughter, Lady Gwendolyn Cecil, offer a more “human” view of the leaders involved. As in the case of the press, the correspondence of Foreign and War Offices, Cabinet members, and diplomats in the field must be understand as representative of particular institutional structure and of the personal opinions that the individuals espoused.49 Most of the physical archival work for this book was done at the British Library and the National Archives at Kew. From the British Library’s collections, I draw on three primary sets of documents, the Layard Papers, the Gladstone Papers, and the Carnarvon Papers. The last of these sets of papers figures most prominently in my discussion. At the National Archives (which contains documents held in the name of the Public Record Office), my work was more extensive and thus includes a greater range of the sources employed in my thesis. These are chiefly under the headings of Cabinet reports (CAB shelfmarks), Foreign Office reports 48 Citations for such diaries and collected letters I mention here are listed in the notes corresponding to their first use as direct evidence. 49 Raymond Jones finds it necessary to understand the structure of the British diplomatic apparatus and of its relationship to changes and developments within the makeup and procedures of the Foreign Office and the Civil Service—see Jones, 9-10, and Chapter IX, “The New Diplomatic Service,” 152–171. For a nice distillation on the important changes in the Foreign Office that affected the Foreign Service during the latter half of the nineteenth century, see Frank R. Ashton-Gwatkin, The British Foreign Service: A Discussion of the Development and Function of the British Foreign Service (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, c. 1950), especially pp. 10-21. D. C. M. Platt’s book, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls Since 1825 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1971), is the best book to date on the structure and arrangement of the Consulate, while some interesting “Eastern” experiences of the Consulate system appear in the chapter, “The Men Who Went to the East,” on pp. 57–80 of John Dickie’s book, The British Consul: Heir to a Great Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

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(FO shelfmarks), War Office reports (WO shelfmarks), and various papers of figures who either committed their papers to the National Archives in accordance with the regulations of the offices they served in or did so of their own accord, with a mind toward posterity. For general reports, the collections most relevant to this study were the CAB documents for the period under review, FO series of 78 (materials relating to Turkey) and 881 (Turkish affairs correspondence, organized by year), and the WO series of 33 (relating to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Cyprus takeover). For the collections of individual figures, the Tenterden Papers, the Granville Papers, the Cairns Papers, and the Simmons Papers are the ones most drawn upon in this study. In using this combination of public and exclusive material, I have attempted to portray British society as grappling with these issues in a state of tension between the knowledge of the issues held by nonelites and that of the people in charge of policymaking. In many cases, this came down purely to who had access to fields of information that described as well as possible what was “actually” going on, rather than what was assumed from hearsay and conjecture among the body politic (and, indeed, in political circles separated from the highest arenas of power). This complex between knowledge and power is key to my discussion throughout this work, as it forms the basis for certain suggestions I will make regarding the effects of democratization on Victorian society. In both balancing and putting into conflict the various sectors and poles of 1870s Britain, I intend to offer certain insights into the dynamics, forces, and actors which accounted for the emergence of an imperial solution to the Eastern Question—a solution that was at first controversial but ultimately prevailed. The following chapter frames the major debates that I draw on and add to achieve this goal.

CHAPTER 2

“Altered Out of All Recognition”: Unearthing the Eastern Question from Its Grave

The Debates As just alluded to in the prologue, there are six major debates in Eastern Question historiography that I engage. Again, these are provided here not primarily for the expert on the matter but for the neophyte, to better include the latter and guide them toward those areas more closely studied by the relevant area experts. At the end of the day, there is a certain overarching view that this study quests at that can easily conceal those who have done the hard work of looking very closely at the granular aspects of the vast array of settings and subjects that I engage in this short study. Simply put, seasoned Eastern Question scholars are invited to more or less skip this section (apart from their responsibility to be extra-scrutinous), while newcomers are for the same reason minded to tune in closely to the very general glosses below.

The Historiography of the Eastern Question The Eastern Question has been treated most often as an objectively identifiable episode or historical facet of modern international politics: as addressed in the last chapter, it was the problem of what was to be done about the Ottoman Empire’s supposedly inexorable decline. Most works agree on a standard period in which the Eastern Question was of importance, beginning with the First Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_2

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and ending with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire shortly after the end of the First World War, usually dated to the Treaty of Sèvres and the foundation of the state of Turkey, both in 1923. Scholars of the Eastern Question have in general been comfortable with these rather basic temporal and interpretive parameters, speaking of it as a bounded period with finite results.1 As a result, I argue, the very study of the Eastern Question has proceeded with the presumption that the matter is “over” or “solved,” i.e., with the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This has defined the field in the post-1923 period, when the three major British historians of the Eastern Question of the first half of the twentieth century, J. A. R. Marriott, R. W. Seton-Watson, and Harold Temperley, shifted to writing about the Eastern Question within the genre of general posterity, having written about it as an ongoing topic before 1923 and an ended, historical phenomenon after 1923.2 Other books and articles related to the Eastern Question have by and large made a line of demarcation before which it had shaped international politics and after which it was simply a memory.3 1 For works with these characteristics, see: David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia, 18281914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism (London: Methuen, 1977); G. D. Clayton, Britain and the Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli (London: University of London Press, 1971); M. S. Anderson, ed., The Great Powers and the Near East, 1774-1923 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); Arnold Toynbee, Turkey: A Past and a Future (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), notice the year the famous economic historian published this work, 1917, forming a metaphorical crossroads in between late Ottoman and modern Turkish history. 2 Seton-Watson’s major work on the topic, the already-noted Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics, is still one of the most useful, yet he characterizes the Eastern Question as having given over to nationalism as the defining issue in modern Turkey and the various independent Balkan states (see pp. ix, 560–561, 570). Throughout its reprintings, Marriott’s seminal study, first published in 1917, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy (Oxford, Clarendon, 1917), follows this formulation (i.e. “historical,” thus in the past, ended), and only in his epilogues for each subsequent edition does he make brief, prosaic nods on the present and the future of the Eastern Question. Harold Temperley’s work underwent a similar shift, as evidenced by his last project, a planned three-part work called England and the Near East, of which only the first volume was ever published, England and the Near East: The Crimea (London: Longmans and Green, 1936), in addition to works like, with Lillian Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), and, with Temperley and A. J. Grant, Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1789–1914) (London: Longmans, 1928). 3 Elie Kedourie, “Britain, France, and the Last Phase of the Eastern Question,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 29, no. 3 (1969): 189–197. Note the similarity of

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Of course, in contrast to this historiography we are still encountering on a regular basis the problems related to Europe’s “solution” to the Eastern Question.4 Moreover, beyond the actual effects of the Eastern Question, even as a historical phenomenon the last half-century has seen it left by wayside as the field has experienced major theoretical or interpretive shifts.5 It appears, then, that perhaps the “end” of the Eastern Question as a piece of history and a topic of study is related to a deeply inscribed, deeply flawed notion that in the post-Great War period, the prewar categories had been totally replaced by new ones. That is, from the 1920s onward, interest in the Eastern Question waned, as new (and reformatted) political issues—nationalism, communism, ailing colonial empires—took over public discourse and the experts on the Eastern Question themselves wrote about it as a completed episode or, as Seton-Watson put it, as one “altered…out of all recognition.”6 Research on the Eastern Question has followed this opinion: as a historical issue supposedly “solved” at some point, scholars have spent little time examining the Eastern Question alongside the wider aspects of British and European history to which it relates and which have become important to scholars in the years since the 1920s.7 And while this may

this title to a well-known 1968 book on the origins of Greek-Turkish relations by Harry J. Psomiades, The Eastern Question: The Last Phase: A Study in Greek-Turkish Diplomacy (Thessalonike: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1968); Morris Jastrow, Jr., “The Turks and the Future of the Near East,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 84 (1919): 30–40. 4 This is, in fact, the underlying issue in David Fromkin’s much-reprinted book, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 (New York: H. Holt, 1989). The same goes for Misha Glenny in his works on the Balkans, such as The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (New York: Viking, 2000)— also, see his review article, “Only in the Balkans,” on the work of Vesna Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, London Review of Books, April 29, 1999, 12–14. 5 A notable exception is Peter Jeffreys’ book, Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy (Greensboro: ELT Press, 2005). 6 Seton-Watson, 1. 7 For example, even M. S. Anderson, who wrote the most up-to-date comprehensive

study on the Eastern Question, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923, states in the preface that his book is predominantly an update of J. A. R. Marriot’s work on the Eastern Question written a half-century previously, adding the findings of more recent research to build on Marriot’s foundations. A. L. Macfie has more recently written a small book on

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help explain the Eastern Question’s general lack of presence in scholarship over the last several generations, it is these same critical ways of thinking about the nature of institutions and thought processes that have arisen in the same period that provide to us an opportunity to demonstrate how the Eastern Question has a deep connection to the history of the British Empire and to European history as a whole.8 A further problem worth noting is that the study of the Eastern Question is largely characterized by an emphasis on the British position, which is both understandable given the power of the Anglo-American academy and ironic given the focus of this study. This is not to say that exploring the British perspective on the Eastern Question by necessity limits the conclusions one might draw, but rather that taking into account research on Britain’s “competitors” in the Eastern Question is illustrative of the wider issues involved. If we are to accept that Russia was posited as Britain’s main opposition in overseeing the Eastern space, then work on the Russian component of the Eastern Question deserves a brief glance here. In the 1930s, the British historians B. H. Sumner and W. N. Medlicott worked to remove the conspicuous pro-British, Russophobic undertones that had marked earlier English-language scholarship. Sumner’s monograph, Russia and the Balkans, 1870–1880, did much to reveal the actual motivations behind Russia’s involvement in the Eastern Question.9 Sumner’s great accomplishment was to lift the veil of political intrigue draped over previous discussions of Russia’s stakes in the Eastern Question, actively avoiding “partisan spirit” to posit a clearer portrait of the domestic pressures and international commitments Russia had in the Balkans.10 Similarly, Medlicott attempted to deconstruct the belief that shrewd politics on the part of Britain had kept Russia from controlling the Eastern Question, but though useful it is a basic overview of the issue and sticks to most of the established parameters of the subject—see A. L. Macfie, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923, revised edition (New York: Longman, 1996). 8 Michelle Tusan has raised this question in her article, “Britain and the Middle East: New Historical Perspectives on the Eastern Question,” History Compass 8, no. 3 (2010): 212–222. 9 B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). 10 Alfred J. Rieber, “The Historiography of Imperial Russian Foreign Policy: A Critical Survey,” in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 415–416.

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the state of play in the Balkans after 1878.11 Instead, as Alfred Rieber writes, Medlicott argued that the “smaller states” in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire “could and would continue to defy the powers” in an attempt to maintain latitude of movement.12 The 1960s–1980s saw the development of Sumner’s and Medlicott’s new direction, especially via the influence of Charles and Barbara Jelavich’s work on Imperial Russian foreign policy. Barbara Jelavich’s A Century of Russian Foreign Policy: 1814–1914 and, especially, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914, showed that Imperial Russia’s foreign policy and diplomatic establishments were nowhere near as all-powerful and unified as Russia’s critics made them out to be.13 In her opinion, one has to understand the difference between Russia’s involvement in the Balkans and Russia’s power over the political and physical shape of the Balkans, a distinction she gives shape to by describing the limits of Orthodox affinities and how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists postured friendship with Russia so as to “exploit” Russian aid for specific national or regional ends.14 Likewise, L. S. Stavrianos showed how one must not assume that Russia held general sway over its Orthodox brethren: while Bulgaria might have looked to Russia for political and ideological direction, Romania was just as likely to rely on France while Serbia and Greece had complex foreign relationships in their own right.15 Over the same period, increasing scholars have spoken to Ottoman perspectives on the Eastern Question. One might imagine that this

11 W. N. Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After: A Diplomatic History of the Near

Eastern Settlement, 1878–1880 (London: Methuen, 1938). 12 Rieber, 415. 13 Barbara Jelavich, A Century of Russian Foreign Policy: 1814–1914 (New York: J. B.

Lippincott, 1964); Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 14 Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914, ix. This point is further borne out by Charles and Barbara Jelavich’s The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), especially in their discussion of how Russia attempted, and often failed, to tie together its foreign policy aims and the aims of the variety of national movements in the Balkans in the 1870s—see Chapter 10, “The Crisis of the Seventies,” on pp. 141–157. 15 L. S. Stavrianos, “The Influence of the West on the Balkans,” in The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 209–211.

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would have been the first area of inquiry into a topic by anyone who ever ascribed to the belief that the Ottoman Empire was in its death throes in the nineteenth century. But as indicated by the prevalence of English-language contributions to Eastern Question narratives, the Ottomans’ own view of their alleged demise remained illusive in the Western academic imaginary until relatively recently. Roderic Davison and Donald Quataert are among those who led the way in revealing to Anglo-American readers an Ottoman perspective on Western notions of Ottoman decline, as exampled by the former’s work on the Ottoman diplomatic establishment and the latter’s on Ottoman resistance to economic and political reforms in the late nineteenth century.16 Similarly, Ottomanists have increasingly made bold forays into matters previously considered solely Europe-authored, such as Candan Badem on the Crimean War, Mostafa Minawi on the Scramble for Africa, and Hüseyin Yılmaz on the Middle East as a created region.17 In another key study, Ussama Makdisi proposes that nineteenth-century Ottoman elites bifurcated their own domain into a civilized western (and Turkish) portion and an uncivilized eastern (and Arab) one.18 Building on earlier investigations of Ottomans’ self-awareness of Western stereotyping by Selim Deringil and Zeynep Çelik, Makdisi argues for an “Ottoman Orientalism” that both proceeded and diverged from the original Western

16 Davison’s Nineteenth Century Ottoman Diplomacy and Reforms (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1999) provides an ample summary of his work on this topic. An earlier article from 1976 critiquing the Western consensus view of Ottoman incompetence is also helpful—see “‘Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility’: The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji Reconsidered,” Slavic Review 35, no. 3 (1976): 463–483. A good starting point in exploring Quataert’s wide-ranging scholarship is his book, The Ottoman Empire, 1700– 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), while more specific engagement with Ottoman debates over reform can be found in Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: NYU Press, 1983). 17 See Candan Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War (1853–1856) (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Hüseyin Yılmaz, “The Eastern Question and the Ottoman Empire: The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century,” in Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, ed. Michael E. Bovine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 11–35. 18 Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–796.

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version.19 This view, as Makdisi notes, echoes Maria Todorova’s notion of “Balkanism” and that region’s own location as an “internal other” in the European ecosystem.20 Finally, research by scholars such as Michael Provence, Erik Jan Zürcher, and Mustafa Aksakal on the generation before 1914 paints a picture of the late Ottoman Empire as a place of crystallizing nationalisms born specifically out of Western interference and indigenous attempts at revival.21 By broadening and deepening the narrative, scholars like those just mentioned have sought to avoid the old traps associated with studying the Eastern Question solely as a problem of the international conference room.22 Indeed, even in works that specifically focused on the Eastern Question, such as in Barbara Jelavich’s The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Question, 1870–1887 , the Eastern Question comes across as much more than the mere decline of the Ottoman Empire; it was a venue for Great Powers to manage and, often, gain from that decline according to diplomatic conventions of the time.23 One thus wonders if perhaps taking such oblique approaches to the Eastern Question might guide us in answering some of the central questions posed in this book. Tellingly as to the direction of the field, a number of fascinating recent PhD theses expose the fruitfulness of an indirect, instrumental use of the

19 Ibid., 769–773. For Makdisi’s noted influences, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) and Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Also, see Nazan Çiçek, The Young Ottomans: Turkish Critics of the Eastern Question in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 20 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 21 See Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern

Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Erik Jan Zürcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908–1938,” in Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed. Kemal H. Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 150–179; Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 22 Indeed, on p. x of Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914, Barbara Jelavich notes that her book specifically does not follow the traditional narrative of the Eastern Question but proceeds along an alternative route. 23 Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Question, 1870–1887 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).

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Eastern Question.24 In this sense, I argue that the Eastern Question takes on new significances when viewed through the lens of Britain’s domestic political scene and the development of external policies predicated on territorial expansion and control.

The Eastern Question and the “New Imperialism” One of the major debates related to my research concerns the means and method by which the European Great Powers began to expand territorially in rapid fashion in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the so-called “new imperialism” of the 1880s on. For many years, the reigning thesis on this issue from the British perspective came from John Gallagher’s and Ronald Robinson’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, especially their 1953 essay, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” which explains how Britain preferred to extend its influence—or merely get its way— using “informal” tactics, such as putting economic or political pressure upon foreign states in order to make sure the British Empire was in the dominant position in the relationship.25 If such tactics failed, this theory goes, Britain would employ a “formal” solution, which meant a military engagement like the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War.26 This theory has many compelling components, yet as A. G. Hopkins and Freda Harcourt show, Robinson and Gallagher put too much emphasis on Britain’s response to external political events, overlooking

24 See Stoyan Vassilev Tchaprazov, “The Eastern Question, Western Europe, and the Balkans in Fin-de-Siècle Literature” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2009); Clemens M. Hoffman, “The Eastern Question and the Fallacy of Modernity: On the Premodern Origins of the Modern Inter-state Order in Southeastern Europe” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2010); Ali Benek, “A Reinterpretation of the Chanak Crisis Through the Lens of the Eastern Question” (PhD diss., Mississippi State University, 2016); William Frank Kelley, “Intellectuals and the Eastern Question: ‘Historical-Mindedness’ and ‘Kin Beyond the Sea,’ c. 1875–1880” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2017); Paula Ann Doyle, “The Eastern Question, Great Game, and Modern Hot Wars: Policy Lessons and Statecraft Implications for US Relations with Russia, Turkey, and Iran in the 21st Century” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2020); and Kyle Clark, “The Civilized Ottoman: Racism, Masculinity, and Honor During the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–78” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2023). 25 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review (New Series) 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15. 26 Ibid.

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how Britain’s own political and social scene influenced foreign policy decisions to take on an imperial flavor.27 Instead of thinking about the “new imperialism” and its politically- and economically-intertwined components as the result of world events that subsequently motivated British intervention and empire-building, Hopkins and Harcourt both argue that it was discourse within British society, from Cabinet meetings to public politics, that drove decisions to formally intervene, occupy, and incorporate territories into the Empire, despite information being available that supported informal resolutions.28 The “new imperialism,” then, can be seen in many ways to have been born out of the policies Britain employed in interacting with the foreign world and even in the governance of the metropole. This issue enables me to identify more precisely the similarities and differences between Britain’s foreign policy and imperial policy, both of which were at work in the Eastern Question in the 1870s. To be sure, foreign policy did not need to involve the Empire, as Britain’s foreign interaction was chiefly articulated in regard to its role as a major European state. By the same token, imperial policy did not necessarily have to be connected with Britain’s broader foreign policy; much of imperial policy, of course, dealt directly with the internal affairs of colonial development and administration. Nonetheless, although foreign policy (and its diplomatic arm) and imperialism are not one and the same, over the course of the nineteenth century Britain’s interaction in the foreign sphere increasingly became associated in British politics and society with the idea of protecting and extending Britain’s imperial interests. Events and dynamics associated with the Eastern Question played a key role in the manner in which this shift occurred, as it set the political groundwork for how this protection could be secured, i.e., the practice of territorial acquisition proceeded from existing processes in international politics. For example, Britain’s participation in the Berlin Congress of 1878 was conducted as an affair of foreign policy, right up until the moment that Britain, as a result of the highly-publicized international conference, took over Cyprus as an 27 A. G. Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882,” Journal of African History 27 (1986): 363–391; Freda Harcourt, “Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing,” The Historical Journal 23, no. 1 (1980): 104–109. 28 Hopkins, 374; Harcourt, 91–94, 97–104, 108–109.

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imperial protectorate, an action seen to serve both foreign and imperial policy needs.29 We can, additionally, invert this view: Britain’s longterm, consistent fears about Russia’s gains over the Ottoman Empire and Russian expansion in Central Asia—seen to threaten Britain’s power in India—without a doubt affected British foreign policy regarding Russia as a player in the European Balance of Powers during the 1870s and after.30 As scholars have recently questioned how this conflict, the socalled “Great Game,” reflected Britain’s problems and responsibilities in India and Central Asia, we might ask how Britons sought to use the Eastern Question as a venue for debate over this issue.31 In this context, we should seek to interrogate the notion that British imperial expansion from the last two decades of the 1800s was spurred on mainly by external forces that were “new” to the British worldview, which forced British policymakers to respond. Evidence, and recent research by Jonathan Parry, Sara M. ElGaddari, and Steven Richmond, shows that the “new imperialism” is linked to a much longer history of British interaction and intervention in world affairs, extraterritorially but as a global empire, and thus we must consider in what ways this tradition helped inform territorial expansion in the late 1800s, especially, my work argues, from the period encompassing the 1870s and onwards.32 29 See Chapter 7 of Holland and Markides’s book, “The Peculiarity of Cyprus,” on pp

162–188. 30 See Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992); also, Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington: Counterpoint, 1999). 31 See, for example, B. D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), especially Chapter 2, “The Myth of the ‘Great Game’” on pp. 34–60. 32 Walter G. Wirthwein notes in his book, Britain and the Balkan Crisis, 1875–1878 (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 12, that one of his goals is to look for foundations of the “new imperialism” in the 1875–1878 period. This is the only work I have found that specifically cites the “new imperialism” as a theme, although this aspect of his discussion is more of a subsidiary goal than a central one. Nevertheless, this precedent is important to note, as is Seton-Watson’s invocation of the term for his first chapter, “Disraeli and the New Imperialism,” on pp. 1–15 of his book, which he employs as an introduction to Disraeli’s return to power in 1874. For sources on British influence in the Middle East as a foundation for the emergence of the “new imperialism,” see Jonathan Parry, Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022); Sara M. ElGaddari, Britain and the Regency of Tripoli: Consuls and Empire-Building in Nineteenth-Century North Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2022);

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Moreover, broader debates over the history of British imperialism could benefit from an up-to-date analysis of the Eastern Question in British politics and society. There has long been a tension between whether economic motives or political ones primarily drove British imperialism.33 There is little doubt, however, that it is not possible to view the Eastern Question as proceeding along the lines of one of these forces without balance from the other. As Britain’s obsession with protecting the route to India shows, economic factors and political factors were so tightly intertwined that it might be inappropriate to separate them, even if this may seem expedient. There are works that weave the political and the economic together effectively, such as Peter Cain’s and A. G. Hopkins’ theory of “gentlemanly capitalism,” which states that the nineteenth century saw a progressively closer bond formed between the landed gentry and the financial elite of the City of London.34 This fueled the creation of a society wherein broad political decisions (wars, treaties, imperial budgets) were dependent on financial decisions (loans, investment, handling of imperial revenue) and vice versa.35 Cain and Hopkins call this an “invisible empire” in that nearly all of this process happened separate from actual discussions about imperial subjects.36 However, how “invisible” all of this really was might be in question. Indeed, we might democratize our view by involving the actual people who made up the workings of Britain’s political and financial institutions, such as Jon Agar has shown in his work on the growth, culture, and politics of London’s clerk corps.37 As the Eastern Crisis in particular involved Steven Richmond, The Voice of England in the East: Stratford Canning and Diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). 33 This conversation is affected by the influence of using theories of “political economy” to understand the British Empire, such as in Lance E. Davis’s and Robert A. Huttenback’s Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860– 1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a discussion of this technique, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 147–148. 34 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–1945,” The Economic History Review (New Series) 40, no. 1 (1987): 1–26. 35 Ibid., 9–11. 36 Ibid., 8–11. 37 See Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), especially pp. 52–55 and 59–63.

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conflicts over “the public’s” opinion of Britain’s diplomatic and imperial maneuvers, it makes sense to question how the British public defined itself according to the various regions, traditions, and livelihoods it contained. The fact that the growing clerk demographic eschewed class-based antagonism toward their employers (as opposed to much of the laboring class), and, moreover, tended to vote Tory, should motivate us to question if and how this dynamic may have helped shift debate about the Eastern Question into imperial territory.38 Nevertheless, I would caution that we cannot go too far into the economic motivations for imperialism in the Eastern Question without losing sight of the way in which the British populace interfaced with the problem in explicit ways. Namely, it is important to raise the issue of Britons’ awareness of the problems in question—a subject to which Bernard Porter’s suggestion that Britain experienced an “absent-minded” imperialism may contribute.39 Porter argues that British society was relatively unconcerned with empire at least until 1870s and 1880s, and even thereafter it was never the preeminent issue with which Britons were concerned.40 Porter may overstate the point by often painting British imperialism as totally covert, but there are many aspects of his interpretation that are compelling. Notably, the way in which the Eastern Question transitioned from a problem of foreign, diplomatic policy to one of imperial strategy during the 1870s matches the general shift that Porter (and others, like Robinson and Gallagher and Cain and Hopkins, before him) has commented on. Ironically, then, the legacy of a so-called “absent-minded” view of British imperialism may account for the treatment of the Eastern Question as an issue of Balance of Powers diplomacy that existed separate from empire, namely in that the source material with which historians are 38 Cain and Hopkins, 18. 39 See Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture

in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). It is worth noting that “absentminded imperialism” is not an idea solely of Porter’s invention, but it is the most relevant work that takes up and investigates the riff on J. R. Seeley’s observation that the British Empire had expanded in an “absence of mind”—see Seeley’s The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), 8. Peter Rivière took up the same topic in his book, AbsentMinded Imperialism: Britain and the Expansion of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Austin: Taurus Academic Studies, 1995), but Porter’s work is more wide-ranging and provocative. 40 Ibid., 18.

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presented makes it seem as if this divide were more distinct than it actually was. How the 1870s witnessed a transition toward a more mindful imperial society may provide insights into the wider field of imperial history.

The Eastern Question and “New” Diplomatic History As the Eastern Question has so often been treated in past scholarship as a piece of diplomatic history, the need to engage the recent developments within that field is vital. Diplomatic history (and its close partner, international history41 ) is one of the oldest sub-disciplines of history and is directly related to the development of many of the historical techniques we use in the modern period. Historians’ emphasis on primary sources, treating history like a science, and on placing historical actors within epochs that help define their actions owes much to the field, as formulated by scholars like Leopold von Ranke, considered the father of diplomatic history and international history.42 Yet in terms of method and theory, there is a good argument that in general these fields, though groundbreaking in their initial phases, have ultimately made up “one of the most conservative discourses within our conservative discipline [i.e. history].”43 Indeed, though historians like von Ranke gave shape to the reasons for a historical actor’s actions, that actor was almost invariably a “great man,” as great men were for a long time seen to be the primary makers of history. Von Ranke’s and his disciples’ emphasis on investigating the elite levels of international politics and diplomacy led to the formulation of what is known as the “realist” vision of international relations, which is based on the Primat der Aussenpolitik—the “primacy of foreign

41 The terms “international history” and “diplomatic history” are often deployed in confusing ways. For our purposes, we can see them as having roughly the same methodological and theoretical background, but they refer to different emphases: international history generally refers to the whole apparatus of foreign policymaking, while diplomatic history focuses on the interface wherein foreign policy is executed. 42 See Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990). 43 Patrick Finney, “International History, Theory and the Origins of World War II,” in The History and Narrative Reader (New York: Routledge, 2001), 390.

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policy.”44 Realists, whose perspective made up the primary viewpoint on diplomatic history until the 1960s and who remain powerful in the field today (and are fully capable of, to be sure, producing good publications on the Eastern Question, such as those by Miroslav Šedivý and Gabriel Leanca), generally have “long thought of inter-state relations as a realm apart from domestic politics.”45 Yet it is clear that there are powerful domestic causes of foreign policy decisions, and in the last half century, a great number of scholars of international relations and diplomatic history have shifted toward thinking about internal or domestic causes of foreign policy, or Innenpolitik, led by “new” diplomatic historians like Paul Kennedy and Arno Mayer. Mayer, for example, theorizes that to understand why and in what way war and other international strife has occurred in the history of the modern period, it is necessary to look at the domestic conditions that motivated a society’s elites to take action.46 He sees external policies as “reflexes” based on pressures from forces within.47 Kennedy’s work, which is more directly connected with the history of the British Empire than Mayer’s, links together the forces at work in Britain’s imperialism, diplomacy, and socioeconomic policy to show that Britain’s domestic concerns had a significant effect on Britain’s foreign and imperial activities.48 Jack Snyder echoes these opinions, seeing Britain’s external policies and initiatives as upheld by domestic political forces, whose leaders were ultimately concerned with securing strategic protection for British foreign and imperial interests in

44 Fareed Zakaria, “Realism and Domestic Politics: A Review,” International Security 17, no. 1 (1992): 179. 45 Ibid. On the modern realists mentioned, see Miroslav Šedivý, Crisis among the Great Powers: The Concert of Europe and the Eastern Question (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) and Gabriel Leanca, “The Ottoman Empire and Europe from the late Westphalian Order to the Crimean System: The ‘Eastern Question’ Revisited,” Estudos Internacionais: Revista de Relações Internacionais da PUC Minas 8, no. 4 (2020): 110–131. 46 Arno J. Mayer, “Causes and Purposes of War in Europe, 1870–1956,” The Journal

of Modern History 41, no. 3 (1969): 292–303. 47 Ibid., 295. 48 Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British

External Power, 1865–1980 (Winchester: Allen & Unwin, 1981); see also his chapter, “Britain as Hegemon?” in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 151–157.

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a manner that could garner widespread support, from both the elites and the body politic.49 Understanding the influence of domestic forces on international politics and the execution of policy via diplomatic channels is therefore essential to understanding how, why, and from whom these policies issued. At the same time, it is still necessary to take into account how the structure of the diplomatic apparatus itself changed (or stayed the same) over time and the rules of the international system affected the formation and execution of policy, as Raymond Jones and Fareed Zakaria have respectively cautioned.50 Domestic causes must be included in explanations of external activity, but one must frame precisely how such a dynamic worked and to what degree it actually effected policy, as diplomacy was still carried out in many ways separate from or counter to domestic concerns, sometimes intentionally so. Britain’s experience of the Eastern Question and of other “Eastern” matters is deeply related to this issue, and accordingly both the claims of the “new” diplomatic history and the important caveat regarding the power of the international and diplomatic systems need to be examined. Since R. W. Seton-Watson’s definitive work on diplomacy, British domestic politics, and the Eastern Question, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (1935), little work has been done that directly tackles the issue of British domestic sphere’s role in policymaking regarding Eastern matters specifically.51 There are a few notable exceptions to this rule. For example, in the early 1960s Richard Shannon investigated the Bulgarian Agitation and domestic political figures, but he explicitly focused on the “personal” element of these actors and went no farther than the end of 1876.52 In the mid-2000s, Jonathan Parry included an incisive inquiry into the 49 Snyder, 154. 50 Raymond A. Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914 (Waterloo: Wilfrid

Laurier University Press, 1983), 9–10; Zakaria, 197. 51 Seton-Watson’s two contemporaries, Harold Temperley and Lillian Penson, spent some time on this as well—see note above. 52 Shannon, v–vi. Howard Malchow has also documented the leadership structure of

several British pressure groups whose concerns were related to British policy regarding the East, such as the Eastern Question Association, the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, the Anglo-Armenian Association, and the Indian Reform Association, although Malchow does not put forth an analysis of the movements themselves—Howard LeRoy Malchow, Agitators and Promoters in the Age of Gladstone and

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Eastern Question in his excellent book on Liberal patriotism, although in his inquiry the Tory version of British patriotism appears more in intaglio than relief.53 Gary Bass, for his part, wrote a section on the Agitation and the Eastern Crisis in British politics in society in his popular 2008 book, Freedom’s Battle. However, Bass thinks that Britons’ agitation for humanitarian causes was successful in bringing the Liberals back to power in 1880 and ushering in an era of interventionism based along Gladstonian lines.54 I argue that this assessment is backward: the style of intervention in the post-1880 period was based directly on the failure of Gladstone in affecting change within the domestic political system during the 1870s. Even when he returned to power in 1880, his actions bespoke a more independent, imperial policy than his own beliefs and aspirations ever would seem to have allowed. In any case, there is simply too little work on the Eastern Question’s connection to the relationship between the forces at work in the metropole and British external policy. Apart from Stéphanie Prévost’s research, works specifically of the Eastern Question’s historical import have not typically engaged the rise of the political press and the British reading public—an issue that is especially important for considerations of political and cultural history post-1855, the year that Parliament repealed the tax on newspapers, which had been to this point prohibitively expensive for most people. Combined with the 1867 Reform Act, which doubled the electorate, and the continuing reforms in state-funded education, the advent of cheap newspapers changed the political face of Britain, making areas of discourse that had previously been confined to the economic and sociopolitical elite, like foreign and imperial affairs, matters of public debate. Of course, there had been points in the past in which public involvement in Britain’s external actions had been significant, such as during the Greek War of Independence and the First Opium War from

Disraeli: A Biographical Dictionary of the Leaders of British Pressure Groups Founded Between 1865 and 1886 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983). 53 See Parry’s chapter, “The Eastern Question and Its Consequences, 1875–1886,” on pp. 323–386 of The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 54 Bass, 236–237.

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1839 to 1842, in which the radical, Chartist Northern Star led the charge against the Whig Government’s interventionist policies.55 But the scale and variety of public debate grew to new and unprecedented heights after 1855, while the extension of the franchise in 1867 gave the public voice a new bite. By the 1870s, the role of the press in guiding political debate over Britain’s external policies had given a new flavor to “public opinion” that was less based on representing political factions and more on the assumption that it behooved papers to direct their rhetoric at a broader audience than its core adherents. As Simon Goldsworthy has shown, one of the leading Liberal papers in the 1870s and 1880s, the Darlington Northern Echo edited by W. T. Stead, saw an opportunity in print media that built on and amplified methods of preaching and other forms of oratory, broadcasting its view of the Eastern Question wholesale and with great effect.56 The Bulgarian Agitation was a test case for this practice, and such new forms of print journalism contributed to how the bulk of Britons came to see themselves as having a stake in matters that had previously been the province of the political and social elite.57 Later, during the Russo-Turkish War, Britons became obsessed with news from the war, allowing the populace to take part in a foreign conflict via a venue that was readily available, stimulating, and cheap.58

55 See Shijie Guan, “Chartism and the First Opium War,” History Workshop, no. 24 (1987): 17–31. The British Library notes that the Northern Star had its highest circulation the year the war began, selling 48,000 copies per week; thereafter it dropped off—see “Northern Star,” British Newspapers 1800–1900, British Library, http://newspapers11.bl. uk/blcs/NorthernStar.htm. Despite the Northern Star’s leading role in presenting British opposition to imperialist policies, Paul French notes that the press at the time mostly supported the Government—see Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 43. 56 Simon Goldsworthy, “English Nonconformity and the Pioneering of the Modern Newspaper Campaign: Including the Strange Case of W. T. Stead and the Bulgarian Horrors,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 3 (2006): 387–402. 57 Ibid., 388–389. 58 The high-selling penny papers, like the Daily Telegraph or Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper,

would cost about $.50 in 2021 money. These far outsold the papers intended for a more firmly middle-class audience, like the Pall Mall Gazette and The Times, which were more expensive; these examples cost at this time 2d ($1.00) and 3d ($1.50), respectively. Conversion source is from the MeasuringWorth Foundation: https://www.measur ingworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/.

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Given the broader importance of investigating the domestic sphere’s involvement in Britain’s foreign and imperial affairs, I look at my focus era and subject as a productive place to engage in a larger debate about British democratization.59 If we consider the evidence that throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century the Eastern Question was a public affair, during its crises an obsession, then it is vital that we integrate the domestic political and cultural forces that made it so.60 This growing public concern had a political effect: as British society became progressively more literate and democratic, pressure from the body politic had a greater effect on the shape of external policy.61 Moreover, as time went on the distinction between Britain’s foreign and imperial interests became less and less clear, as a greater and greater proportion of domestic society appears to have followed the Disraelian proposition that a strong foreign policy was one that was organized around a strong global empire.62 The connection between the areas of domestic society, the structures of the diplomatic system, and Britain’s Eastern policy is hence very important to understanding the larger impact of the Eastern Question and the Eastern Crisis on the trajectory of Imperial British history.

The Eastern Question and Victorian Politics If domestic pressures did indeed drive external policy, recent debates about the dynamics of Victorian politics are relevant to my inquiry. As an issue discussed in the halls of Parliament as well as in the pages of the political press, the shape of the Eastern Question in the British mind necessarily conformed to attributes whose relevance proceeded from other places and histories in the British milieu. By the same token, the Eastern 59 For a suggestion of this shift in general terms, see Porter, 164–169. 60 Bass, 239–242; also, see Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–

1878 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979). 61 See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). 62 See John M. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); also, Howard Malchow, Gentleman Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 350–356. Also, see note above, regarding Malchow’s work on the leadership of British pressure groups.

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Question could be invoked or leveraged by politicians and their press organs to back up a broader political platform. Indeed, when Gladstone wrote Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East in the autumn of 1876, he was not only responding to the particular massacres that motivated the work, but he was also portraying the Tory Government’s response to the Bulgarian Atrocities as evidence that it was generally unsuitable as the leader of Britain’s political structure. Likewise, when Disraeli arranged for the transfer of Cyprus to British control, this act was not just a proposed “solution” to the Eastern Question. Rather, it was calculated to resonate with that portion of the British populace that would find such an act to be evidence that the Tories should clearly continue to run the country. As Britain was by the 1870s a nation that determined its leaders by the election of individuals representing a political platform, one may view the Eastern Question through the prism of political language and rhetoric employed more generally. The scene of the Eastern Crisis in particular was defined both by existing norms in political dialogue and by great changes in the kind of rhetoric politicians used to promote their parties’ position and denigrate their rivals. Jon Lawrence has shown how rhetoric promoting the Liberals as the “people’s party” began to wear thin during the late 1860s and early 1870s, and the Conservatives made inroads into traditionally Liberal constituencies during Disraeli’s Second Ministry from 1874 to 1880.63 Even after the Liberals returned to power in 1880, popular Toryism had developed such a strong rhetorical basis and organizational apparatus that it contributed to the later promotion of the socialist, Labour Party position (i.e., as a better counter-balance to the Tories than the Liberals) at the century’s end.64 Although, of course, the Liberals remained a significant force for decades, the tactics and language they used to promote their position necessarily changed to meet new conditions of Britain’s political space. The Eastern Crisis, as Seton-Watson observed, saw British leaders using the Eastern Question as a venue to wrangle over who should control

63 Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91–98. 64 Ibid., 110–111, 122–127.

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Britain’s political future.65 I argue that despite rancorous animosity between the factions, the resolution of the Eastern Crisis saw the promulgation of a political ideal mating imperialism with moral responsibility, which entered into and altered British political rhetoric. Thereafter, the Liberals and Tories fought over the direction and depth of such policies, but the basic validity of British imperialism was taken for granted. As Jonathan Parry notes, Liberals could on the one hand cringe at the word “imperialism” itself, while still advocating for “the global assertion of British power.”66 To be sure, anti-imperial values and slogans in the period covered by this study remained in Liberal quivers for use in attacking the Tories’ imperial ideals, and Liberal leaders certainly offered substantive political alternatives to the Disraeli Government’s chosen course. For example, British politics still felt the legacy of an anti-interventionism along the lines of Richard Cobden, who had seen British expansion in a colonial, official capacity as ruinously expensive, tending toward a culture of militarism, and ideologically unseemly.67 Accounting for the fact that the open, majoritarian influence of such beliefs had been overshadowed by six years of Gladstonian liberalism between 1868 and 1874, the feeling that “sinister economic forces” were opposed to liberal free trade and democracy lurked in politics throughout the rest of the Victorian period.68 Beyond the economic aspect, which had in the early part of the nineteenth century been the principle brand of anti-intervention politics, Cobden (and his associate, John Bright) represented a pacifist, internationalist political view that would appear in the Eastern Crisis in the form of peace movements during the Russo-Turkish War.69 Still, by the 1870s the shape of Victorian anti-intervention politics had grown far beyond Cobden’s

65 Seton-Watson, ix. Moreover, he notes that the Eastern Crisis should be seen as a competition over competing “visions” for Britain’s global future rather than merely a “great controversy along party lines.”. 66 Parry, 323. 67 See Peter Cain, “Capitalism, War and Internationalism in the Thought of Richard

Cobden,” British Journal of International Studies 5, no. 3 (1979): 229–247, especially pp. 244–246. 68 Ibid., 247. 69 For the connections and distinctions between the economic and internationalist

views, see Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (London: I.B. Tauris, 1968), 5–7.

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mostly economic arguments to include an element of involving Britain in foreign disputes if doing so was considered the “moral” thing to do.70 In this way, Britain’s response to the Eastern Question was prejudiced by assumptions of how to approach foreign conflict. Just as Liberals accused Disraeli and the Tories of giving preferential treatment to the Ottomans, they argued for giving favor to certain groups in Britain’s interaction with the world. Maura O’Connor has convincingly argued for the influence of Italian nationalism (with its mouthpiece, Giuseppe Mazzini, and its totem, Giuseppe Garibaldi) in Victorian society and politics, noting that this transformed Britain’s diplomatic establishment to be more directly reflective of British culture.71 Likewise, the Eastern Crisis saw Liberals use some of the same language they had used in regard to Italian unification in regard to Balkan nationalism, urging the same type of diplomatic tactics as had been employed in the former case. The Liberal alternative to the Tories’ support of the traditional Ottoman power structure was to identify and support those Ottoman subjects who had a “natural” right to self-rule. As Britons attempted to understand and confront the various Ottoman Christian nationalisms, this belief developed into a salient feature of the Eastern Question. However, with regard to the most prominent example of this dynamic during the Eastern Crisis, namely the agitation in Britain over the 1876 Bulgarian Atrocities, Stoyan Tchaprazov has shown that the moral element of the Eastern Question was always more important to proBulgarian Britons than any national element.72 Consequently, Bulgarian independence never came to be as important to Britons as it was to Bulgarians.73 Perhaps, though, one might reconcile the moral and the national by thinking of British society in terms of blocs, in which moralists and friends of foreign nationalisms could cast themselves in common opposition to the pragmatic, traditionalist Tory establishment.

70 Ibid., 17–18. 71 Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), especially Chapter Five, “The Cultural Politics of Diplomacy,” on pp. 117–148. 72 Stoyan Tchaprazov, “The British Empire Revisited Through the Lens of the Eastern Question,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (2007), http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/017443ar. 73 Ibid.

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In this regard, one of the most compelling takes on Victorian politics for the period in question comes from Eugenio F. Biagini, whose excellent work on late Victorian liberalism and popular democracy provides a key layer of the foundation on which this book rests.74 Biagini sees the late Victorian period as defined by a set of general liberal themes, which ran throughout and helped define responses to specific issues on both the elite and popular level.75 Gladstone’s tenure as the Liberal leader (which continued through his “retirement” phase from 1875 to 1880) witnessed the integration of liberal philosophical beliefs about liberty and morality into the politics of popular reform. During the 1870s, as Biagini shows, the Liberals experienced a reorientation around Gladstone’s charismatic call for a Britain that represented general humanitarian beliefs both at home and globally.76 This new political emphasis proved popular and workable enough to propel him to victory over Disraeli in 1880, but it also led to disenchantment among Liberals who were not moved by Gladstone’s reliance on “moral pathos.”77 Not all members of the Liberal Party, then, saw Gladstonian liberalism as the only or the best kind. Thus, in understanding the political scene of the decade I focus on, we must consider its place in a longer view of the period leading up to the crisis over Irish Home Rule from 1885 to 1886, which saw antiHome Rule Liberals, the Liberal Unionists, split off from Gladstone over his support for decreasing British control over Ireland—an outgrowth of his humanitarian beliefs that had proved so popular only half a decade earlier.78 Indeed, Biagini thinks that the Bulgarian Agitation was a “trial run” for the rhetorical strategies Gladstone employed in the Home Rule debates.79 But while the bulk of Liberals could support or at least countenance Gladstone’s friendship with national movements when it was

74 See Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 75 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 4–8. 76 Ibid., 385–387. 77 Ibid., 423–424. 78 Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 353–357. 79 Ibid., 40–41.

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abstract and “foreign,” as in relation to the Eastern Question, when it came to Ireland this was for most a bridge too far.80 Nevertheless, humanitarian values remained central to British politics long after Gladstone’s defeat on Home Rule.81 In fact, humanitarianism may have been essential to the politics of imperialism, as advocates of the moral values regarding human life did not necessarily promote such beliefs to the exclusion of empire. As Bernard Porter has argued, even as the empire grew in the 1880s and 1890s “the growth of liberty remained the central theme, to which the empire was grafted on: the latter presented as a means of extending liberty, through the spread of freedom and enlightenment, beyond Britain’s domestic boundaries, either through settlement or by conquest (always provoked) and rule.”82 Ironically, Gladstone’s success at promoting a politics of humanitarianism provided some of the popular, pretty language in which imperial maneuvers could be cloaked. In all reality, Disraelian politics of glorious imperial pride were not so irreconcilable with those painting Britain as a selfless advocate for the global unfortunate.

The Eastern Question, British “Interests,” and Gladstone vs. Disraeli It is also crucial to draw special attention to one of the most important pieces of political language that Britons used to express their stake in the Eastern Question in the 1870s, namely the almost ubiquitous deployment of a terminology centered on Britain’s “interests” in the problems of the Eastern Question and the regions it affected. To be sure, this is in a broad sense certainly what the Eastern Question did center on, but ironically there is very little discussion of what these interests were and how they structured the relationship between the British Empire and Eastern political entities. To some degree, this haziness may be attributed to two facts: first, the bulk of literature on the Eastern Question has treated the subject as a matter of diplomacy and international politics and thus, in a Rankean sense, the nature and importance of these interests are implied directly by the rigorous actions of British representatives to protect them; 80 Ibid., 164–166. 81 Ibid., 357. 82 Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 241.

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second, perhaps those in the primary material whom we see using the term British “interests” were themselves unaware of the real shape and extent (or lack of extent) of such interests and felt that the protection of them, no matter how nebulous their identity, was a more important line of dialogue than questioning the details. Indeed, at least one contemporary drew attention to this very gap between language use and language meaning: in regard to a wide-ranging debate in Parliament in June of 1875 about the Ottoman Empire’s economic problems and this issue’s effect on British interests, it was recorded of William Cartwright, a Liberal MP, that “carefully as he had listened to the debate, he had not heard anyone state what the British interests in Turkey were.”83 He believed “it was essential that some attempt should be made to define those interests.”84 Tellingly, there appears to have been no attempt made to address this question directly in the remainder of the debate that day. Many questions present themselves on this topic, yet I am particularly concerned here with how the use of the language of British “interests” factored as a component of the opinions posited and responses proposed by the different factions of Victorian society taken up with a resolution to the Eastern Question. This offers a useful insight into the debate regarding the dynamics of the all-important Gladstone vs. Disraeli battle, as both argued for the protection of British interests but in very different ways and upon very different ideological grounds: Disraeli thought that a system that integrated the military power of the Empire with that of trade was necessary, while Gladstone saw free trade and friendly relationships among the Great Powers—or an external policy of “civilisation and humanity,” as he put it85 —as the way forward for peaceful British prosperity.86 This was all part of a broader war between the Liberals and the Conservatives over political control and over the public mind, with the

83 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 225, col. 207 (18 June 1875). 84 Ibid. 85 Qtd. in Seton-Watson, 566. 86 See Paul Adelman, Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics, third edition

(New York: Longman, 1997). Another nice distillation of these views can be found in Stephen J. Lee, Gladstone and Disraeli (London: Routledge, 2005), especially Chapter 5, “Foreign Policy,” and Chapter 6, “Imperialism and Empire,” on pp. 85–123.

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successes and failures Gladstone and Disraeli achieved for their respective parties.87 Yet with the fall of the Disraeli’s Conservatives in 1880 and the rise of Gladstone’s Liberals, Britain did not see the end of a strong imperialminded governmental establishment (Disraeli’s vision) and the advent of a limited empire with foreign policy centered on the fostering of European relationships (Gladstone’s winning response), but the exact opposite.88 Pro-Gladstone writers in the tradition of John Morley, like Ann Pottinger Saab, would have us believe that post-Eastern Crisis British imperialism was not a product of Gladstone’s humanitarian vision but existed in explicit opposition to it.89 Not only is this warped by bias, it is not very logical: Gladstone’s return to power in 1880 did not stop—and might even have fueled—the nascent growth of a well-defined liberal vision of imperialism such as that espoused by Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Rosebery.90 Part of the answer to this quandary, I think, can be found in understanding how the language of “protection” operated in political debates, with British “interests” in the East being one of the major contested ideas. In other words, the question here is whether or not, as William Cartwright’s observation suggests, the obsession over protecting these “interests” can be seen as indicative of not only Britain’s various political, military, and economic investments, but also of certain rhetorical tools wielded by all the various political factions to prove the validity and intelligence of their policies in a comprehensive sense. Inasmuch as Gladstone and his supporters held a vision of the world in which Britain stood for humanitarian principles, it may prove useful to track the presence of this kind of thinking in matters related to Britain exerting its authority in places, like the East, thought to be in need of 87 See Bass, Chapter 22, “Gladstone vs. Disraeli,” 266–296; Seton-Watson, 545–550. 88 Indeed, Freda Harcourt traces the social imperialism of the 1880s, which Gladstone

in part oversaw, to Disraeli’s earlier attempts to link together the “cherished attributes of liberal society” and the popular appeal of imperial strong-arm tactics—see pp. 108–109 of “Disraeli’s Imperialism, 1866–1868: A Question of Timing.”. 89 See Ann Pottinger Saab, Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria, and the Working Classes, 1856–1878 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 90 Even another Gladstonian, H. C. G. Matthew, concedes that the tendrils of postGladstone liberal imperialism reached back into Gladstone’s tenure as leader—see The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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Britain’s moral support—the “burden” of empire which stood as a major theme of the “new imperialism.” The question, then, is whether the imperial ideals of the Disraelian type and the moralizing project of Gladstone’s combined in the subsequent formalization of a foreign policy centered on imperial protection and expansion in the 1880s.

The Eastern Question and “the East” Last, but by no means least, any revision of the traditional view of the Eastern Question requires integration of the academic debate over the last two generations with regard to Europe’s conceptualization of “the East.” The critical perspective on the East–West connection is closely connected with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a critique of the way the West has used the history, languages, and cultures of Eastern places to support the West’s self-affirmation of its inherent superiority and the unique expression of its own history, languages, and cultures.91 Further developments on Said’s thesis are truly too numerous to justly summarize. Said’s view has become essential to any deep understanding of the historical dynamics that have existed between two areas of the world with such clear distinctions yet such a close and historical connection. Considering the kind of language employed in the primary sources (and the bulk of the secondary, as well) that I have examined about the Eastern Question, which time and again refer to a notion of “the East” as a place of disorder in need of Western (re)ordering and “Eastern” peoples as incapable of orderly self-rule, the Orientalist critique often rings true. The above-mentioned work on “Ottoman Orientalism” by Ussama Makdisi only further cements the pervasive influence of East–West dichotomies in modern Western discourse. For far too long after 1978, however, scholars who came across the Eastern Question either honed precisely to the theoretical trajectory of Said’s model or ignored it completely. Hence, in Orientalism’s wake, the bulk of inquiries into the Eastern Question either fitted it into the framework of the Saidian Orientalist critique as merely one more example of Western domination over the East, or, alternatively, treated it as a standalone set of diplomatic episodes like their Eastern Question forebears 91 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). His later work, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), developed upon the ideas he raised in Orientalism.

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had.92 Unfortunately, the initial reaction to Said’s impact appears to have replicated the binaristic division of East from West that was (and still is) perpetrated by Western political and cultural forces.93 Thankfully, though, a third-way approach to the Eastern Question eventually began to emerge, with the first of such works appearing in the 1990s and early 2000s and then—via scholars like Michelle Tusan, Holly Case, Davide Rodogno, and others noted in the last chapter— more frequently in the 2010s and 2020s.94 A signal text in this regard is Lucien Frary’s and Mara Kozelsky’s edited volume, Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered, whose many and varied chapters both reflect and contribute to the new source of energy in the old field of Eastern Question studies.95 Over my own generation-long study of this topic, the Eastern Question thus shows promise of returning to the fore as fruitful area for continued

92 A. L. Macfie’s book on the Eastern Question, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923, first published in 1988, probably goes the furthest of any focused study in integrating new works and methods, yet his work is still generally directed at the diplomatic angle. 93 Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, “Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism,” History and Anthropology 18, no. 2 (2007): 135–151; see especially their explanation of this problem in general on p. 136. 94 Separate from the later works already cited, the Atlantic Studies on Society in Change (or, the “East European Monographs”) series distributed by Columbia University Press includes several titles in which the Eastern Question plays a central, closely-defined role, such as: Jelena Milojkovi´c-Djuri´c, The Eastern Question and the Voices of Reason: Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Balkan States, 1875–1908 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2002), and Zdenko Zlater, Between the Double Eagle and the Crescent: The Republic of Dubrovnik and the Origins of the Eastern Question (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1992). Later, several articles appeared in the 2000s utilizing the Eastern Question either as an explanation or as a trope for sociopolitical developments in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or the Near and Middle East, such as: Richard N. Schofield, “Old Boundaries for a New State: The Creation of Iraq’s Eastern Question,” SAIS Review 26, no. 1 (2006): 27–39. Finally, other articles have used it to contextualize some deeper element of the Western imagination, using the Eastern Question as, again, a rubric under which a host of European thought-processes can be placed, such as: Peter Jeffreys, “Cavafy, Forster and the Eastern Question,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19, no. 1 (2001): 61–87; Aida O. Azouqa, “The ‘Eastern Question’ and Disraeli’s Political Imagination in Tancred,” Human & Social Sciences 26, no. 1 (1999): 225–242; also, see Paul Auchterlonie, “From the Eastern Question to the Death of General Gordon: Representations of the Middle East in the Victorian Periodical Press, 1876–1885,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 28, no. 1 (2001): 5–24. 95 Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky, eds., Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

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study—a fact certainly spurred on, however delayed, by the appearance of the Orientalist critique. My book contributes to this dialogue by showing how the Eastern Question produced a complex set of representations of Britain’s relationship to the East, namely in that British society put forth a variety of opinions regarding the different Eastern entities involved in the problem, rather than just applying an overarching set of perceptions upon anyone residing within the Eastern expanse. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the example of the public uproar in Britain surrounding the 1876 Bulgarian Atrocities and the runaway success of Gladstone’s pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, as mentioned above. On the one side of this issue, Turcophobic, pro-interventionist “Atrocitarians” posited the idea of a battle between a Muslim other and a set of Christian “brethren,” as Gladstone put it,96 while, on the other side, an array of pro-status quo conservatives, fearful of the extension of Russian influence in the area, supported—at least outwardly—the Ottomans’ right to adjudicate unilaterally the disputes within their Eastern domain.97 In other words, Gladstone’s taxonomy of Easternness was different from that of his opponents, meaning that there were diverse, often competing strains of Orientalist thought that flowed throughout the complex public and private dynamics of the Eastern Question. Hence, discourse about the Eastern Question was a space wherein Britain engaged the notion of Easternness, occasioning Britons to put forth different beliefs about the East as a concept and a place and about the role Britain should have in overseeing Eastern activity. Furthermore, if we take the Eastern Question—and its important role in Victorian society during the Eastern Crisis—as intimately connected with Britain’s rise as an imperial culture, this space was also one that allowed, as we shall see in the remainder of this book, Britons to form ideas and opinions regarding their country’s general role in the world (as guide, as force, as disinterested party, as enemy) and ponder the possible outcomes of Eastern Question policies and such outcomes’ impact on imperial concerns.

96 Gladstone, 25. 97 Macfie, The Eastern Question, 37–40.

CHAPTER 3

“The Eastern Question Cannot Settle Itself”: From Bulgaria to India and Back Again

A Ball in Dublin On the night of March 13, 1876, Dublin Castle played host to a fancy dress ball. The theme of the night was the character quadrille, with guests coming dressed in costumes representing cultural or historical figures, characters from drama and literature, or important institutions of the realm. There was a “Shakespearian” quadrille, followed by a “Waverley” group with figures from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, trailed by a “Venetian” quadrille. But it was the next one that, processing into the jam-packed St. Patrick’s Hall, captured the greatest attention of the correspondents in attendance writing for, among others, The Times, The Graphic, the Illustrated London News, and the Dublin Evening Mail. As the latter put it: “the last quadrille was the most eccentric. It was organized by Lady Michel, wife of the General Commanding the Forces in Ireland, and well carried out by the artistic skill and inventive genius of Colonel Hope

“The Eastern Question cannot settle itself”: Illustrated London News, 16 September 1876, col. C, p. 258. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_3

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Crealock. It assumed the assumed the most extraordinary proportions, [bearing] the strange title of ‘the Eastern Question.’”1 “Eccentric” to the paper’s representative, perhaps, but not to the quadrille’s leader: Lady Michel’s husband, Sir John, had served as the chief of staff of a British-led Ottoman unit in the Crimean War and led Britain’s pursuit of one of the leaders of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, while her father, Horace, served as Britain’s quartermaster general in India and died on campaign against the Maratha Empire in 1843.2 And the subject was even less unusual to Crealock, who like Sir John had fought in the Crimea and India and would two years later publish a popular book on the Eastern Question.3 Between Lady Michel and Crealock, they certainly had plenty of actors, events, images, and ideas they could dream up to provide a range of Orientalist pleasures and anxieties for their audience to consume, the retinue’s members, as the Illustrated London News wrote, “personifying different nations of the East, together with peace, war, plenty, violence, and other characteristics brought into striking contrast.”4 The Illustrated London News ’s pricier rival, The Graphic, noted several of those contrasting personifications and characters included by Lady Michel and Crealock: “Hibernia, India, Egypt, the Suez Canal, Russia, Turkey, War, Peace, Slavery, Freedom, & c.”5 In juxtaposing images of places that ran in a sequence from Ireland to India and from the greatest moral goods to the most depraved human failings, the effect implied by the quadrille’s design neatly illustrates the kaleidoscopic quality of the Eastern Question in mid-Victorian society: “the East” could be found in nearly every corner of the world and nearly any recess of the mind. The wood engravings in the Illustrated London News corroborates The Graphic’s account. In first a broad view and then in a set of details, the 1 Dublin Evening Mail, 14 March 1876, col. E, p. 2. Crealock is misidentified as a colonel by the paper, despite being a major-general from 1870. See below for reference. 2 See C. P. Stacey, “Michel, Sir John,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11 (Toronto/Quebec: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003), http://www.biogra phi.ca/en/bio/michel_john_11E.html. 3 See E. I. Carlyle, “Crealock, Henry Hope (1831–1891),” rev. M. G. M. Jones, in

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http:// www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/6659. 4 “A Fancy Dress Ball in Dublin,” The Times, 14 March 1876, col. A, p. 10. 5 “Fancy Dress Ball at Dublin Castle,” The Graphic, 1 April 1876, col. A, p. 4. The

Graphic cost 1d more than the 5d Illustrated London News.

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artist depicts a diverse array of pantomime caricatures of people or things the partygoers thought represented the East, their bodies draped in soft fabrics, their heads sporting piles of fake hair and beards, and their white faces, arms, and hands hidden behind layers of burnt cork to drive home their Oriental transformations.6 In their write-up of the ball, the Penny Illustrated Paper rather mildly declared the Eastern Question a “fanciful appellation” for a costume theme.7 But perhaps it was less fanciful a choice than the other, more remote and fictionalized quadrilles of the night, given the cultural and political climate in British society at the time. Quite apart from being just a product of Lady Michel’s and Crealock’s imaginations, the Eastern Question was lately on British minds again. Ever since Herzegovinian Christians had risen up in rebellion in June 1875, decrying the imposition of new taxes by the Ottoman government, the newest threat to Ottoman stability had Britain worried. British and European fear that economic strife in the East would combine with the war in Balkans to destabilize the entire region. Ottoman and Egyptian problems had increased the level to which British politicians and the public actively connected their country’s interests with Eastern affairs— the “volcano” of the Eastern Question, as the former Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Stratford de Redcliffe put it in January 1876, threatening to “throw all Europe into a state of hurtful agitation, if not into one of general hostilities.”8 It is no surprise, then, that the Eastern Question theme was such a hit at the ball: the “striking contrasts” that the audience felt embodied the Eastern existence satisfied a desire to give a tangible image to pieces of a critical, yet abstract problem—“political ingredients,” as the Illustrated London News said, adding up to a recipe that Victorians had to master to tackle the Eastern Question. This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by an American attendee, Cornelia Adair, a Texas rancher who used her wealth to establish a reputation as a socialite in Dublin and London.9 Adair 6 “Notes at the Fancy-Dress Ball, Dublin Castle,” Illustrated London News, 25 March 1876, pp. 292–293. See Fig. 3.1 for image. 7 “Grand Fancy-Dress Ball at Dublin Castle,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 18 March 1876, col. C, p. 179. 8 “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 3 January 1876, col. F, p. 6. 9 On Adair, see Nancy Baker Jones, “Adair, Cornelia Wadsworth, Handbook of Texas

Online, https://www.tshonline.org/handbook/entries/adair-cornelia-wadsworth.

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Fig. 3.1 “Notes at the Fancy-Dress Ball, Dublin Castle” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

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provided, both in person and via the Illustrated London News ’s correspondent, a complex, wide-ranging visual description of the components signified by the waterway that formed the vital passageway for British ships and goods between India and the metropole: Mrs. Adair was “the Suez Canal,” wearing a head-dress of Egyptian fashion, formed of pearls and turquoise beads, with a tiara of diamonds; a long flowing robe of rich cloth of gold, to represent the desert, traversed by wavy bends of azure satin, embroidered with pearls, to typify the blue waves of the Mediterranean passing through the sands of the desert and bearing the wealth of the Indies; a red satin under-skirt embroidered with Egyptian designs, to represent the Red Sea; the corsage of blue satin, to represent the Mediterranean Sea, girdled with roses and lilies, for England and France; the neck and arms covered with Egyptian jewels; and a long flowing veil, enveloping the whole figure, of tissue of gold, like a cloud of gold dust. At her girdle was a golden key, with a label attached, “Suez Canal, four millions;” in her hand was a long wand fan, composed of ostrich feathers.10

With such an overwhelming display of opulent Orientalist references, one wonders whether Oscar Wilde, slipping back to his hometown from his quarters at Oxford, was inspired by Mrs. Adair’s dress in writing his 1891 play Salome, in which King Herod attempts to seduce the titular character by offering increasingly luxurious gifts—from pearls enveloped in gold thread, to a robe made of ostrich feathers, to his gold-beaked, purpledfooted peacocks feasting on gilded grain!11 Impossible to know—but, in any event—Wilde no doubt heard of the party and its Eastern Question centerpiece: it was the event of the season, it seems. The Illustrated London News reported that Lady Michel’s quadrille was so large that it took over Dublin Castle’s throne room for itself, giving the Eastern Question control, at least for one night, over the center of royal power in Britain’s nearest imperial possession.12

10 Illustrated London News, 25 March 1876, col. B, p. 291. 11 Wilde first wrote the play in French in 1891, and it was translated into English in

1894. 12 Illustrated London News, 25 March 1876, col. B, p. 291.

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Within several months, however, the same theme would likely have been seen as a rather profane entertainment, so much had Britain’s appreciation of the Eastern Question and the British Empire’s Eastern responsibilities changed after reports arrived that Ottoman irregular troops had massacred thousands of Bulgarian Christians in May and June of 1876. These “Bulgarian Atrocities” gave rise to a movement in Britain advocating a change in British policy vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire, something that was resisted by the Conservative Government and its allies. In this chapter, I focus on the conflict between those Britons who preached humanitarian intervention on behalf of the Bulgarian Christians and those who advocated a strict adherence to the existing policy of support for Ottoman integrity. It is not my intent to tell the story of the backdrop and progress of this “Bulgarian Agitation,” which has been aptly done in the past, but rather to offer a fuller picture of how the theme of empire appeared in the debate on British policy regarding the Atrocities and on later events. Given imperialism as a conspicuous theme later in the Eastern Crisis, this episode helps us establish the source of imperial reasonings for British involvement in the Eastern Question and “the East” at large.

The Eastern Question’s Slavic Decade Although the axis around which this chapter rotates is the explosion of public interest in the fate of Bulgarian Christians during the Eastern Crisis, it is important to guard against assuming such concerns over the fate of the Bulgarians were a constant in British society. Bulgaria specifically was not a major component of the British worldview before the 1870s; one doubts if even the placename would have rung a bell in the mind of the average newspaper reader. As the decade dawned, though, the recent memory of the bloody end of the Cretan Revolt had reinvigorated those in Britain even remotely possessed of a philhellenic spirit, with the effect of recasting the Eastern Question as a matter of championing or denying support to any Ottoman Christian movement for autonomy or independence. Ironically, given the West’s Greek-centered, Levantine notion of the Ottomans’ Christian underclass writ large, the 1870s would end up being a non-Greek, Slavic decade in British society’s rendering of Eastern affairs. For those who sympathized with Christians laboring under the socalled “Turkish yoke,” debate over the Eastern Question was a vibrant

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space of education in the political and ethnoreligious map of Southeast Europe. Such knowledge, though recently acquired, led those newly enlightened of the Ottoman system of government in the Balkans to issue a countrywide call for solidarity with Britons’ Christian brethren in “Turkey-in-Europe.” This advocacy relied on influencing those in positions of power, for whom the adoption of an explicitly anti-Ottoman policy would disrupt the international status quo. Despite the brutality of the Ottoman suppression of the Cretan Revolt, that war was not enough to change the narrative. It would take the deaths and mutilations of over 12,000 Bulgarians in 1876 to push Britain’s political establishment to consider a major shift in the British-Ottoman relationship. In the early 1870s, one starts to see British authors and the reading public engage with Balkan-focused written and illustrated content. Content related to the South Slavs’ ethnic cousins to the north provided an essential reference point for discourse on Eastern Christians-inbondage, particularly those who lived in the lands seized by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century. The failed 1863 Polish Uprising was kept fresh in the British public’s mind by a variety of pro-Polish, anti-Russian advocates who had sought exile in London, Paris, and elsewhere, including in a village north of Istanbul that was purchased by the Russian foreign minister-turned-Polish rebel, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, and populated by nationalist exiles, some of whom converted to Islam as a form of assimilative Russophobic solidarity with the local Ottoman establishment.13 As we shall see later in this book, the Polish eagle would be raised in London more than once in support of the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against the specter of Russian aggression—a dagger in the side of Russians’ Panslavic mythos. What is more, these Balkan and Slavic issues came to be intertwined with matters that pertained to areas farther south and east, especially those that related in any way to Russian and British imperial interests and aspirations from the Mediterranean Sea and the Levant to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Each issue that could remotely be placed under the category of the Eastern Question could therefore slide toward some other similarly categorized issue along the slippery byways crisscrossing Westerners’ expanding mental map of world affairs.

13 On the history of Polonezköy, see Neal Ascherson, Black Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 166–169.

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If, for instance, Russians were observed performing maneuvers in the Caucasus, then Britain’s Russophobes could question whether this meant an invasion of Anatolia via the Black Sea, a horde of Cossacks sweeping horsebound through Arabia and Persia to crush the Raj, or perhaps both. If an outbreak of violence against Christians in Syria occurred, then it followed for British Turcophobes that the Muslim offenders’ counterparts in Herzegovina—a thousand miles away—might be inspired to attack their Christian neighbors too. As any student of nineteenth-century history should be able to tell you, grandiose hypotheticals about nebulous “questions” were the name of the day. Holly Case’s work shows that a question-asking and questionanswering culture characterized the period, revealing a swath of unexpected national affinities and aversions.14 For instance, in our case, the Polish Question and Eastern Question had significant overlap in that both Poles’ and Ottomans’ shared a history of conflicts with the Russian Empire. So, Polish support for the Ottoman Empire made sense, even though any patriotic Pole at that time would have also believed that the Polish people were defenders of Christendom against Muslim threats, mythologized by King Jan III Sobieski’s victory over the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683. At the same time, an epistemological environment inhabited by a dozen giant questions and innumerable tiny answers is a perfect one to inject anxiety into the discourse. In such a context, seemingly concrete diplomatic developments acted as civilized, orderly islands floating above a milky, roiling sea of angst and abstraction. Indeed, it seems likely to me that visions of diplomatic safe harbors inspired the later tendency of historians to treat the Eastern Question solely as something determined by the outcome of conversations between great men in smoky conference rooms. It is no wonder, then, that British editors attempted to satisfy the full range of audience emotion regarding foreign and imperial affairs, especially after the wave of small, niche papers following the repeal of the Stamp Act subsided and left a cast of media juggernauts vying for the largest circulation. So it was that, in the uncertain period that encompassed the last phases of the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, British newspapers capitalized on

14 See Holly Case, The Age of Questions.

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the public’s desire for information that confirmed their darkest predictions and assuaged their worst fears. In mid-January 1871, for example, on the very same page that it forecast mass starvation in a British-allied Paris besieged by its newly confederated German foes, the London Globe declared Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s “pacific wishes” for a postwar return to the Concert system as sincere and heartfelt.15 A reader, whose eyes could easily drift back and forth to disturbing scenes of starving French children, thus saw in another column that Bismarck’s call for a new conference on the Eastern Question showed that he understood that the war’s impact on the balance of power would inevitably lead to problems in guaranteeing the Treaty of Paris’s demilitarized Black Sea, given that the French government that had endorsed that policy in 1856 no longer existed.16 In other words, historic tragedies and geopolitical uncertainty loomed, but great men had their fingers on the pulse of Europe—no matter that they might, with their other fingers, be choking the life out of one of their continental counterparts. Perhaps all would work out in the end. To be sure, the Morning Post ’s transcript of the first session of this conference painted a scene of orderly—and even cordial—international relations. The conference was convened in London on January 17, significantly and auspiciously a day before the German Empire was declared beneath French paintings of defeated Germans in the Hall of Mirrors in occupied Versailles, with Bismarck orchestrating the naming of Prussia’s Wilhelm I as Deutscher Kaiser in the spiritual center of French martial and imperial power. The issue at hand in the Black Sea conference was a note that Russia’s long-serving foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, had previously circulated regarding the war’s impact on the question of whether that sea would remain demilitarized. The Ottomans’ British ambassador, Musurus Pasha, opened the meeting by calling for Lord Granville to take the chair as both the current foreign minister of the host nation and for his notably unflappable demeanor.17 After a unanimous vote named Granville as president of the conference, he then proposed a protocol that would

15 The Globe, 14 January 1871, col. A, p. 1. 16 A republic was declared in Paris by Léon Gambetta on September 4, 1870, two days

after the French defeat at the Battle of Sedan. 17 Morning Post, 18 March 1871, col. E, p. 5.

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ensure that all the parties would adhere to the understanding that “it is an essential principle of the law of nations than no Power can free itself from the engagements of a treaty” without the say-so of the other signatories.18 This too was agreed to unanimously. It seemed that all was going to plan in reforging the Concert of Europe, as had been painstakingly (even if imperfectly) done in 1856. The resulting agreement, the Treaty of London, was both a reaffirmation and a significant modification of the Treaty of Paris. After two months of hard work, the representatives agreed on March 13 that the clauses of the Paris Treaty that related to the naval demilitarization of the Black Sea were nullified, thus allowing both Russia and the Ottoman Empire to deploy naval fleets there. This seemed to benefit the Ottomans and the Russians equally, but arguably satisfied the thrust of Gorchakov’s circular more so because, before the conference, the closest seagoing Russia fleet was in the Baltic whereas the closest Ottoman fleet was in the Aegean. Russia had both “her reward” and the “good-will of the other European Powers,” the Illustrated London News joyfully declared.19 On the other hand, the second article of the 1871 Treaty allowed the Ottomans to open the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to its allies if the 1856 Treaty were to come under threat in the Porte’s view. “In other words,” as the Liberal-aligned Daily Telegraph put it, “the fleet of England will be within call to keep the peace.”20 This allowed the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean allies to gang up against a resurgent Russia in the Black Sea if push came to shove. And to some, such a rearmament was already underway: a week after the treaty was signed, Westminster’s Tory workingmen’s association voiced, as The Globe reported, its “severe animadversion” to the treaty and its meeting’s speakers claiming that 84 iron Russian merchant vessels in the Black Sea were ready for rapid conversion into warships.21 Still, all seemed resolved at least for the moment. Even rumors in the press and in Parliament of a secret treaty between Germany and Russia had no purchase against the sense that diplomacy had, once again, won

18 Qtd. in ibid. 19 “The Black Sea Conference,” Illustrated London News, 18 March 1871, col. A, p. 2. 20 Daily Telegraph, 14 March 1871, col. D, p. 4. 21 The Globe, 22 March 1871, col. D, p. 6.

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the day for peace in Europe.22 Flipping over a cover page depicting Prussian soldiers celebrating their new empire by crowning themselves with Roman laurels picked from Paris’s Tuileries Garden,23 readers of the Illustrated London News heard that a “pacific policy in the East” had not only been protected but, the author assured, advanced “into a haven of lasting tranquillity.”24 Such tranquility, as it turned out, only lasted four years. Profound sociopolitical anxieties often emerge from small, nagging doubts planted earlier in the public consciousness, slowly germinating before blooming into the existential fears of the moment. Just two days before the Treaty of London was signed, a short review was published in the Naval & Military Gazette, East India and Colonial Chronicle on a new English translation of an 1869 Russian book that would later prove to be so popular a volume as to be reprinted to meet British public demand in 1876.25 A portent of the obsession with Eastern affairs that would soon grip the country, Opinion on the Eastern Question by General Rostislav Fadeyev expressed the tension between status quo conservatism and expansionist Panslavism in Russian society and thus in the formulation of policy.26 The Naval & Military Gazette chose to highlight two key revelations of public opinion in Russia, notable given that a commentary on such a contentious subject passed Russia’s notoriously draconian Bureau of Censorship. First, Fadeyev was not optimistic about the Panslavic dream of resurrecting the Byzantine Empire by means of Russia conquering Istanbul and rebuilding Constantinople from the ashes. To him, this was a “double-edged weapon” that would mobilize Russians and their foes alike.27 Second, he considered calls to solve the Eastern Question by bringing about the fall of the Ottoman Empire as attempts to conceive the inconceivable, whereas the “Question of the East 22 See “The Secret Treaty,” Hampshire Independent, 9 March 1871, col. E, p. 4;

Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 204, col. 1603–4 (9 March 1871). 23 “Self-Crowned Victors: A Sketch in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris,” Illustrated London News, 18 March 1871, col. A, p. 1. 24 “The Black Sea Conference,” Illustrated London News. 25 “Literary Notices,” Naval & Military Gazette, East India and Colonial Chronicle,

11 March 1871, col. C, p. 8. 26 Rostislav Fadéeff, Opinion on the Eastern Question, trans. Thomas Michell (London: Edward Stanford, 1871). The name Fadeev is usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet as “Fadeyev” today. 27 “Literary Notices,” Naval & Military Gazette. In Fadeyev’s book, see p. 22.

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of Europe” involved the more plausible goal of uniting all Slavic peoples and Russia’s unmatched leadership in that quest.28 Another India-focused journal, the weekly Friend of India out of Kolkata, similarly felt that the chief value of Fadeyev’s book was that it offered a window into the minds of Russia’s Slavophiles, i.e., those who rejected Western models of state and society in preference for those they imagined to be Russia’s indigenous ones.29 The paper noted that Fadeyev’s words should be considered carefully by the British Empire’s subjects, as Russia’s “Panslav party” was “likely to have great power with the Grand Duke, who belongs to it”—the Grand Duke here being Tsar Alexander II’s son and heir, Tsesarevich Alexander.30 There is no doubt that at this time the Tsesarevich was enamored of the Panslav ethos and movement, given that one of his closest advisors from the age of 16 onward was a leading Panslav, Konstantin Pobedonostsev.31 Pobedonostsev, originally appointed by Alexander II in 1861 to tutor the younger Alexander, was an enthusiastic promoter of Panslavism throughout the 1860s and 1870s.32 He rode the Panslavic wave up to and throughout the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, only abandoning the movement, like many other politically ambitious Panslavs, amid the crackdown the tsar made on the press and on public discourse following Russia’s Pyrrhic victory in that war and the 1878 Treaty of Berlin’s considerable scaling back of Russia’s war gains from the Ottoman Empire.33 When the Tsesarevich ascended to the throne as Alexander III in 1881 to replace his father—who had been at last, after many failed attempts, assassinated by the socialist-terrorist collective, People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya)—it was Pobedonostsev who would write the new tsar’s proclamation announcing an end to reform and the reassertion of 28 “Literary Notices,” Naval & Military Gazette. In Fadeyev’s book, see pp. 103–104. 29 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy,

vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 164 and 185. 30 “The Eastern Question from a Russian Point of View,” Friend of India, 1 June 1871, col. B, p. 8. 31 Wortman, 179–181. 32 Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early

Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120–121. 33 See Astrid S. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 97–100.

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autocracy.34 In the 1870s, then, Panslavism certainly had friends in high places, even if it later fell out of vogue. As small papers often do, the Friend of India was able to shine a light on certain insights and potentials that were prone to rapid generalization in the relentless churn of the London news cycle. Quite the contrary to the post-Crimean sensationalism found in the metropolitan press regarding the risks and rewards of containing Russian imperialism, the paper perceived Panslavic zeal as less of a threat to British interests than a net positive. “The pamphlet makes no reference to India,” the review concluded, “but it indicates clearly that for many years to come Russia’s great difficulty will be in relation to Germany and the Baltic Provinces, and Austria and the Danubian provinces.”35 Of Russia’s “one great plan for extending herself in Central Asia,” Britons need not worry, as “Russian trade will be considerably modified by the Suez Canal, which will afford Russia an opening for her commerce in the East,” such that Russia’s leaders were relieved of the “expense, delay, and uncertainty of territorial acquisitions.”36 For those who feared that Russia was laserfocused on turning the Mediterranean into a “Russian lake” (rather than a British one) or breaching the Khyber to ravage fair India, the potential of a Russian Zeitgeist that prioritized the jealous embrace of that empire’s nearby Slavic kin over its Muslim, Christian, and Hindu neighbors to the east ironically provided the British Empire bit of comfort. In the following three years, a number of issues would first tarnish and finally eliminate this sanguine vision of advancing Eastern calm, at first via small and subtle mentions in British discourse and eventually by means of nearly wall-to-wall coverage in the press and Parliament. The first two of these issues directly related to Bulgaria, helping plant the seed for the later feeling of recognition and fellowship with Bulgarian Christians’ condition that would be of such incidence in British society in 1876. First, there was the official establishment in February 1872 of a Bulgarian Orthodox church independent of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—an action that followed intense turmoil created in the Eastern Orthodox Church by Sultan Abdülaziz’s firman granting

34 Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 101. 35 “The Eastern Question from a Russian Point of View,” Friend of India. 36 Ibid.

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Bulgaria its own autocephalous exarchate in March 1870.37 As Denis Vovchenko shows, the Sultan and his advisors believed that this act would help distract those in Bulgaria who called for political autonomy and disrupt their alliances with other Christian ethnicities.38 In the British press, which frequently covered divisions within and between the Church of England, the Scots Kirk, the Catholic Church, and the islands’ various Nonconformist groups, a schism in the Orthodox community was a foreign point of reference in Britain’s own vibrant religious debates. To Britain’s reporters, an issue of particular interest (and perhaps suspicion, given the stubborn perseverance of anti-Catholicism among Britain’s Protestant establishment) was the Vatican’s apparent schemes to use Balkan religious instability to increase their influence in the region’s Christian communities.39 Interspersed among images of French Algeria and Queen Victoria’s travels, the Illustrated Times (owned by, and former rival to, the Illustrated London News 40 ), reported that, though the intraOrthodox debates were “long and anxious,” a local correspondent from the Levant Times predicted peace: “Greeks, Armenians, Protestants, and Mussulmans will concur in rejoicing,” the local reporter said, that the Pope had been rebuffed in his attempt to convert the Bulgarians to Catholicism.41 Such premonitions of anti-Catholic unity were misguided: The Times noted a year later that clashes between Christians and Muslims in Montenegro and Bosnia showed that “the difference of religion” espoused by the adversaries was “the external sign there of social and political difference.”42 This was an accurate, though understated, portent of a not-too-distant future.

37 For an explanation of this turmoil, see L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 371–375. 38 Denis Vovchenko, Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians, 1856–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 150. 39 On the impact of Catholic missionaries in Bulgaria, see Thomas A. Meininger, Ignatiev and the Establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, 1864–1872: A Study in Personal Diplomacy (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1970), 22. 40 On the relationship between the Illustrated Times and the Illustrated London News, see Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 304. 41 “The Bulgarians and the Porte,” Illustrated Times, 2 March 1872, col. C, p. 3. 42 “Austria and Turkey,” The Times, 11 November 1873, col. A, p. 12.

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Second, the appointment and tenure of Ahmed Sefik ¸ Midhat Pasha as the Ottoman Empire’s grand vizier in mid-1872 drew notable comment in the British press. He was already known as a competent Ottoman administrator with connections across Europe, serving as a symbol of successful Ottoman reform by presiding over a set of innovations in tax-collecting and public works as the first vali (governor) of Bulgaria, following the Ottomans’ establishment of the vilayet system of provincial organization in 1864. Overlapping in many values and goals as those in the Young Ottoman movement (Yeni Osmanlılar), whose calls for fusing constitutional government with Islamic principles had by the 1870s driven its leaders into exile, Midhat Pasha’s cosmopolitan reputation and success in Bulgaria symbolized the insurgent appeal of reform among a considerable cross-section of the Ottoman intelligentsia.43 As The Globe reported, “great rejoicings have taken place in Osmanli society” on the news of Midhat Pasha’s elevation, spurring “an outburst of public feeling in this capital without precedent in modern times.”44 Both of Abdülaziz’s nephews (and, later, his successors in turn), Murad and Abdülhamid, were early Young Ottoman affiliates, leading to the question of whether a breakthrough in Ottoman reform was on the horizon.45 In this vein, a Turcophilic 1872 book by J. Lewis Farley, as reviewed in The Graphic, showed that some Britons remained optimistic that “the aspirations of [the Ottoman Empire’s] most enlightened statesmen” would win the day—whether under Midhat Pasha or someone even newer on the horizon.46 A more jaundiced view than this came from an Indian paper, The Englishman’s Overland Mail, which asserted that the problem was that the grand vizier served at the whim of the sultan, such that if Midhat Pasha were “to attempt a higher interpretation of his duty, and to

43 On Midhat Pasha’s relationship with the Young Ottomans, see Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Conflict in the Balkans (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 86–88. 44 “The New Turkish Ministry,” The Globe, 9 August 1872, col. C, p. 7. 45 See p. 403 of Cemil Koçak, “Transformation through Constitution: Young Ottomans

and the Kânûn-ı Esâsî of 1876,” in Dimensions of Transformation in the Ottoman Empire from the Late Medieval Age to Modernity, ed. Seyfi Kenan and Selçuk Ak¸sin Somel (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 399–438. 46 “The Reader,” The Graphic, 6 July 1872, col. B, p. 9; also, see J. Lewis Farley, Modern Turkey (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1872).

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seek not the smile of the Sultan, but the regeneration of Turkey, what a Hercules-labour would await him!”47 Clearly, things were not so simple as anyone would have it. That Abdülhamid II, as sultan from 1876 to 1909, would both reject constitutionalism and adopt Islamic syncretism as a way of suppressing dissent among non-Muslim Ottoman shows that there were multiple, contradictory visions of reform and revitalization that belie any simple view of an unbroken line of slow-but-sure, incremental progress in the so-called “Tanzimat era.” At the same time, we must appreciate the moment and not just the later-revealed future. Known to be an opponent of Panslavism (and thus wary of Russian influence in Bulgaria), Midhat Pasha served in Bulgaria until 1868 before being recalled to Istanbul to serve as head of the Council of State, which discussed and agreed on proposals to send to the Sultan. However, he was soon sent by Grand Vizier Mehmed Emin Âli Pasha, with whom Midhat Pasha did not see eye to eye, to serve as vali of Baghdad.48 This move was supported by leading Panslav and Russia’s ambassador in Istanbul, General Nicolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, who had earlier taken notice of Midhat Pasha as a resistor of Russian influence in Bulgaria.49 Yet although being sent to Baghdad was intended as a way of marooning him in the Arabian hinterlands, Midhat Pasha had several victories in Baghdad, including the reassertion of Ottoman authority in Najd and Hasa (today, central and northeast Saudi Arabia) and an arrangement wherein Kuwait’s leader would fly the Ottoman flag to mark the empire’s power in the Persian Gulf.50 Even though the latter success threatened British interests in the region, Midhat Pasha’s work on both sides of the Ottoman Empire had attracted notice in European capitals, including London. As The Times opined, Midhat Pasha was, despite the challenges (particularly economic ones) facing him, “one of the best

47 “Turkish Politics,” The Englishman’s Overland Mail, 27 September 1872, col. B,

p. 2. 48 Koçak, 412. 49 See pp. 162–163 of Roderic H. Davison, “Midhat Pa¸sa and Ottoman Foreign

Relations,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 5 (1986), 161–173. 50 On Midhat Pasha’s time as vali of Baghdad, see Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 17–24.

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provincial administrators that Turkey possesses” and “a man of the best intentions.”51 Close observers further noted that Midhat Pasha’s return to Istanbul and promotion symbolized a potential rift between Ignatyev and the Porte’s leadership, after Ignatyev had enjoyed years of success in advancing Russian interests while remaining in the good graces of top Ottoman officials. Indeed, Midhat Pasha’s immediate predecessor as grand vizier, Mahmud Nedim Pasha, was known to be so in Ignatyev’s pocket that the citizens of Istanbul called him “Nedimov” and joked that he was just a minion of “Sultan Ignatyev.”52 The Catholic weekly The Tablet deemed Mahmud Pasha an “instrument of Russian intrigue,” unwittingly furthering Ignatyev’s goal of sowing division between Catholic and Orthodox Ottomans for Russian gain.53 As the Pall Mall Gazette reported via a letter from Pera (the European quarter of Istanbul), even Ignatyev’s counterparts had been blind to the reputation the Russian ambassador had in the city: Mahmoud Pasha was only a puppet; the real director of his policy was the Russian Ambassador, General Ignatieff, who has during the last two years prepared the ground with extraordinary astuteness for the machinations of the Panslavists. The inefficiency of the diplomacy of other States was most characteristically shown by the English Ambassador, Sir Henry Elliot, to the Grand Vizier on his reforms—congratulations which England will long not be able to think of without regret.54

Therefore, despite general misgivings about the scale of the job, many in the British press thought that Midhat Pasha’s technocratic bona fides and pragmatic attitude could make him a good partner for British politicians and businessmen to work with. This was particularly the case in the long-discussed idea of a railway that would provide a faster route across Ottoman Arabia, providing an overland mirror of the time and expense

51 The Times, 13 August 1872, col. C, p. 7. 52 See Vovchenko, 150; Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–

1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 283; also, M. Sükrü ¸ Hanio˘glu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 84. 53 “The Fall of Midhat Pasha,” The Tablet, 2 November 1872, col. A, p. 5. 54 “The New Grand Vizier,” Pall Mall Gazette, 14 August 1872, col. B, p. 9.

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saved via sea that was afforded by the Suez Canal’s opening three years earlier. As The Times reported, Midhat Pasha had “vigorously taken up” the opportunity to work with British companies to build such a rail line, and that “considering the importance for England to secure a double and more rapid route to India, it is hoped that Midhat Pasha’s efforts for its realization will be strenuously supported at home.”55 The Railway News agreed, noting that it was the Ottoman and British Empires that would “benefit the most” from the reestablishment of Mesopotamian commerce representative of “the brightest period of ancient history of the country traversed” by a track leading across the same route once trod by forces of Sargon, Alexander the Great, and the Caesars.56 As it happened, that plan fell through on the sudden removal of Midhat Pasha by Abdülaziz in late October 1872. The Times commented acerbically that although, of late, “the public or even the statesmen of this country” had decided to ignore the comings and goings of Ottoman leaders, it was worthwhile to pause and consider the larger consequences of the sultan’s ability to place his own personal interests above those of his empire, especially in terms of Abdülaziz’s quest to change the traditional order of succession to favor his own son, Sehzade ¸ Yusuf Izzeddin, over his oldest nephew and official heir, Murad.57 The Pall Mall Gazette wondered whether this rapid reverse of the fortunes of Midhat Pasha, “the warm advocate of an alliance with Western powers,” meant a return to Russian power in Istanbul, Austrian inroads, or a new opportunity for Germany.58 “No matter how excellent his conduct,” The Tablet predicted, Midhat Pasha’s dismissal had “[destroyed] almost every hope of the regeneration of Turkey. Mohammedanism has worn itself out by its excesses, and the putrefaction of inherent vice already precedes the catastrophe.”59 The previous year’s rose-tinted glasses had dimmed. More bad news was to come in Britons’ consumption of Eastern Question content, as Alexander II mounted a campaign in early 1873 to subdue the last state to defy Russia’s goal of taking all of Central Asia 55 “Railway to the Persian Gulf,” The Times, 7 September 1872, col. C, p. 7. 56 “The Railway to India,” Railway News, 21 September 1872, col. A, p. 12. 57 The Times, 1 November 1872, col. D, p. 9. 58 “Occasional Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October 1872, col. A, p. 8. 59 “The Fall of Midhat Pasha,” The Tablet.

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not claimed by Persia, Britain, or China: the Khivan Khanate. Khiva was already present in British discourse, in particular due to the splash made by Arminius Vámbéry’s Travels in Central Asia, which launched its author to celebrity status in Britain and across the continent after the book came out in 1864 from the publishing powerhouse, John Murray.60 Equally Anglophilic and Turcophilic, Vámbéry was convinced that Russian actions in Central Asia were directed at harming both the British and Ottoman Empires.61 Born in Hungary and a language expert in service to the Porte, Vámbéry had made a trip throughout Central Asia between 1861 and 1864, disguised the whole time as wandering dervish. Much of Vámbéry’s narrative closely hones to the classic Orientalist theme of the East as a place of contrasts, at times almost in a perfect caricature of that genre. Early in his journey, while observing Persian slaves being led in chains by their Turkmen captors, the author’s “heart bled at the horrid sight; and so I had to harden myself to these most striking contrasts of virtue and vice, of humanity and tyranny, of scrupulous honesty and the very scum of knavery.”62 By the time Vámbéry got to Khiva, his heart had hardened sufficiently so that it seemed surreal opposites were all he could see. The land was lush and yet barren, its “fine meadows and rich fields” separated from the capital by several miles of desert, “as if to mark completely here, too, the sharply-defined contrast between life and death.”63 Nearly all of Vámbéry’s observations end up being something like this. Khiva’s Khan, Sayyid Muhammad, looked like “an enervated, imbecile, and savage tyrant” but then kindly offered him “twenty ducats and a stout ass” to fund and carry him on his journey.64 Delicious food came in filthy vessels, and there so much of it that he wished to swap “this deadly luxury for wholesome poverty.”65 Punishments in Khiva included the ritual humiliation of elderly prisoners of war, their eyes stabbed out and, 60 Ármin Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia, Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian Sea to Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand (London: John Murray, 1864). 61 David Mandler, Arminius Vambéry and the British Empire: Between East and West (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 96. 62 Vámbéry, 61. 63 Ibid., 121. 64 Ibid., 130. 65 Ibid., 131.

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after each gouge, the knife wiped clean “upon the white beard of the hoary unfortunate.”66 But here there was still another contrast upon a closer look, it seemed: this unhinged performance was not just a random act of “wanton cruelty” but done under the supervision of officials bonded by state authority and proceeding exactly according to religious law.67 An engraving at one point shows Khivan treasury officials impassively counting up a growing pile of heads as men with bags dump them out, in order that the khan could make sure to that the bounty payments matched the final tally of heads received and, more importantly, provide each decapitator with an accurate receipt.68 With a winning formula to hand that captured and retained audience interest by serving up unfamiliar places in familiar packages, authors and

Fig. 3.2 “Receiving Payment for Human Heads—Khiva” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

66 Ibid., 138. 67 Ibid., 139. 68 Ibid., 140–141. See Fig. 3.2 for image.

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publishers used Russia’s 1873 campaign as an opportunity to reproduce the kind of success enjoyed by Vámbéry and John Murray. The subject of a truly vast spate of pamphlets and books, the fall of Khiva kept the Eastern Question in the news and in the minds of Europeans in the short space between the end of the war and the outbreak of the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878. To the many books in English and Russian were added other in nearly all the major European languages. German speakers, for example, could engage the topic via Petr Ivanovich Lerch’s Khiva oder Kharezm: Seine Historischen und Geographischen.69 French writers, in particular, seem to have been both enthralled and impressed by the latest stage in Russia’s Central Asian imperial program. In one striking example, an extremely matter-of-fact chronicle of the campaign by Maurice-Henry Weil ends with a sudden judgment of the inevitable: Today, the Russians are masters of the steppes, and, from the polar sea to the borders of Afghanistan, all of Asia recognizes the authority of the czar. Success will not only inspire in Russians a new confidence in their army, but it will also singularly facilitate their future progress. Masters of the Aral Sea, in possession of lower Amu-Darja [i.e. the Oxus River], they can, at any moment, enter the khanate, without having to cross the steppe and the desert. They have only but to improve the navigation of the Amu-Darja, and we can say that, today, they have acquired a solid foundation for their future conquests in Central Asia.70

So much for the Great Game being solely an Anglo-Russian fantasy! Indeed, one of the most intriguing works of the Khiva craze was Le Khiva en Mars 1873, by the pan-Islamist activist Ali Suavi who, in exile in Paris and on request from his friends there, translated his comments in Turkish into French to further disseminate his views on the impact of yet another Christian power’s victory over a Muslim one.71 Later dying in a failed coup against Abdülhamid in 1878, Suavi saw the Porte as having sold out the Khivan Khanate to keep things on an even keel with the Russians.

69 Petr Ivanovich Lerch, Khiva oder Kharezm: Seine Historischen und Geographischen (St. Petersburg: H. Schmitzdorff, 1873). 70 Maurice-Henry Weil, L’expédition de Khiva (Paris: Amyot, 1874), 65–66. 71 See, especially, pp. 88–89 of Ali Suavi, Le Khiva en Mars 1873 (Paris: Chez

Maisonneuve, 1873).

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Of the “Uzbeks of Khiva who are of our religion, of our race, of our Ottoman family,” he concluded bitterly, “in what state of suffering do we see them? Nobody cares about it. Me, I am weak. What can I do?”72 Works in English appear to have been the most numerous, inspiring translations of those books into other languages to meet demand. Vámbéry’s book, for example, was translated in 1873 into Italian by Modesto Gavazzi for the Milanese publisher E. Treves, to attract Italian readers interested in Khivan history.73 And in 1875, the Ottoman publisher Basiret Matbaası released a translation one of the biggest hits of the Khiva craze in English,74 namely Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva, by Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, an American war correspondent whose career kicked off in the Franco-Prussian War and who would later go on to be the first journalist, under the masthead of the London Daily News, to publicize the Bulgarian Atrocities to the world in 1876.75 This is not a coincidence but a resonance, showing that the East was a not only a mental but occupational collectivity among those who dined out on Orientalist fare.76 That he would die in Istanbul just before the 1878 Berlin Congress, not long after boasting that his work had fatally injured the Ottoman Empire, is a rather on-the-nose exhibition of Disraeli’s quip in his novel Tancred that “the East is a career.”77 MacGahan’s narrative itself—a kind of paint-by-numbers adventure yarn of the fish-out-of-water variety—is far less striking than the presentation of it by his publisher, Sampson Low, which opened the volume 72 Ibid, 89. 73 Arminius Vambéry, Viaggi di un Falso Dervish nell’Asia Centrale da Téhéran a

Khiva, Bokhara, e Samarcanda, per il Gran Deserto Turcomanno, trans. Modesto Gavazzi (Milan: E. Treves, 1873). 74 Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, Hive siyahetnâmesi ve-tarih-i (Istanbul: Basiret Matbaası, 1875). The above is a modern Turkish transliteration of the Ottoman Turkish title, which is not reproduceable as a font in current word-processing systems. 75 Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874). 76 This bears out Edward Said’s “created consistency” theme in his Orientalist critique, where he also cites this quote from Disraeli as an indicative rendering of broader feelings among Western intellectuals. For an analysis of Said’s view of Disraeli’s formulation, see Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, and Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), 156–161. 77 See Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred: Or, the New Crusade, vol. I (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), 289.

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with a macabre frontispiece in the form of an engraving of one of a pair of paintings by the celebrated Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin, who both fought in the war with the Russian army and captured his experiences on canvas.78 Retitled The Trophy in Sampson Low’s production, the facsimile of Vereshchagin’s After Success shows two Khivan soldiers happily holding up a severed Russian head.79 The men are near-black in skin color and physiognomically a sort of mashup of Bedouin Arab or Muslim African stereotypes, even though the ethnic base of the Khivan Khanate was Uzbeks, Turkmens, and Kazakhs, none of whom typically display any of the physical characteristics depicted by Vereshchagin’s color original or the black-and-white replica used by Sampson Low. More significantly, though, the publisher declined to repurpose After Success ’s companion piece, titled After Failure. The latter image shows the poignant mix of emotion felt by the artist and veteran of the conquest. A Russian soldier, not much different looking from the neck up than the disembodied head in After Success, stands over a pile of Khivan soldiers, on top of which the head-holder from the first painting lies dead—a bullet hole straight through his forehead.80 The Russian calmly lights his pipe, beneath a blue sky filled with descending crows. Sampson Low deemed lip-smacking Oriental villainy a more marketable trope than the ghoulish post-battle stillness endured by the European victors. MacGahan’s book was not only wildly popular on its own, but it also presaged the later fervor for Balkan-focused topics that would soon emerge out of the undercarriage of Britons’ evolving mental map of the East. This was particularly the case in terms of the tendency in nineteenth-century analyses of international relations toward imagining smaller conflicts accreting in such a way that an epic, zero-sum battle between overlapping imperial powers was inevitable and loomed ever closer. At the end of his book, MacGahan dismisses Russia’s victory over the Khivan Khanate as implying a threat to the Raj, declaring that “I am not of those who believe in a traditional policy of aggression on the part of the Russians in Central Asia…Nor do I believe that the Russians have 78 On Vereshchagin’s time in the Khivan Khanate, see David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Le Turkestan russe: une colonie comme les autres?,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale, no. 17/18 (2009), 179–209. 79 MacGahan, i. See Fig. 3.3 for image. 80 Vasily Vereshchagin, “After Failure,” Oil on Canvas, Hermitage, St. Petersburg,

Russia.

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Fig. 3.3 “The Trophy. From a design by Verestchagin” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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any immediate designs on India.”81 This was a bold claim for someone trying to attract a British audience, given that suspicion of Russia certainly had proved itself to sell well in the post-Crimean era. But entrenched discourses are hard to totally escape, and MacGahan falls quickly into the groove cut by the same Russophobes he dismissed just a few lines earlier. Like Weil argued, MacGahan believed that the fall of Khiva was the end of something, but it was also the beginning of something else—for the region and the world: [The Russians] are steadily advancing toward India; and they will sooner or later acquire a position in Central Asia which will enable them to threaten it. Should England be engaged in a European war, and not show herself sufficiently accommodating on the Bosphorus , then, indeed, Russia would probably strike a blow at England’s Eastern empire.82

MacGahan, by his adverbal constructions and slippery conditionals, tells a story that essentially goes: “There is nothing to worry about now, and if you are worried then you are a fool. But you are also a fool if you think that this result means anything other than another step toward all-out war.” In other words, he tells them to calm down and also prepare for the worst—a perfect illustration of the kind of alternately soothing and doomsaying approach that had proved to sell big in the newspapers. The irony of all of this interest in the Khivan campaign, the burblings of increasing tension in the Ottoman government, and the sense that something big was just around the corner was that, when it came down to it, Britain’s political establishment and the public still put foreign and imperial policies on the backburner in preference for issues closer to home. Indeed, when Gladstone decided to call for a general election in January 1874, the focus of his campaign for a renewed mandate was not particularly focused on external affairs, but rather on his party’s achievements in reforms in the home isles.83 This was probably a mistake on Gladstone’s part, and he likely sensed as much a few years later when he thundered his way back into the center of British discourse by targeting 81 MacGahan, 425. 82 Ibid. Emphasis added. 83 On the calculus of Gladstone’s strategy for the 1874 election (and its drawbacks), see Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of British Political History 1815–1914 (London: Routledge, 1994), 189–191.

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international affairs during the Eastern Crisis and in his return-to-glory campaign in the 1880 general election. At the time, though, as it turned out the Conservatives had a better grip on the rising angst among voters related to Britain’s performance in the world beyond the metropole. Gladstone’s confidence that his foreign and imperial policies spoke for themselves gave the Tories an opening to attract those Britons who had a creeping feeling that the outside world was getting more disorderly and dangerous. Ultimately, Gladstone did not have the sense for the niche but essential role that the perception of Britain’s mastery of matters overseas played in attracting votes. In addition to significant dissent in the Liberal ranks on education policies related to religion, the income tax, and restrictions on trade union organizing, the Tories had plenty to work with in bringing an assault against the Liberal platform on foreign and imperial policy: from Britain’s embarrassment in trying to avoid a resolution of the Alabama Claims, to Gladstone’s wait-and-see response to the Franco-Prussian War, to the return of fleets to the Black Sea without any specific provision for British rights, to the inability of British leaders to act as a stabilizing influence in Spain’s seemingly endless civil wars, and to another phase in the British Empire’s conflict with the Ashanti Empire in West Africa that was ongoing during the course of the election. The external world seemed, at the time, to be invading domestic life. Despite winning the popular vote, the Liberals lost 145 seats and the Conservatives gained 79. Along with 60 seats going to Ireland’s new Home Rule League, the Tory position was buoyed by the Liberals’ decision to not contest more than a hundred seats. Disraeli’s Second Ministry began on February 20, 1874. Just a little over a year later, the first uprisings among Christians in Herzegovina against the Ottoman Empire broke out. Now came the test of whether the Tories’ ability to manage the world matched their promises.

Before Bulgaria: The Press, Politics, and the Eastern Question The Eastern Question had long possessed the capability to, in stunningly quick order, motivate political and public anxiety—a “grim spectre” that raised its head from time to time to challenge British policymakers, as

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the Illustrated London News termed it in January 1876.84 This specter took on a clearer, if still complex shape as the situation developed. As the rebellion in Herzegovina continued and the financial troubles of Egypt and the Ottomans mounted, the British public became more and more anxious about the state of affairs in the East and among the European Great Powers. In response to the building crisis, the most prominent Liberal paper, the Daily News, urged that it was time for a rearticulation of Britain’s responsibilities regarding the Eastern Question and those affected by it, claiming in November 1875 that Britain should no longer concern itself with the maintenance of Ottoman integrity and should instead think of Britain’s Eastern Question as “simply the keeping open of our highway to the East,” which might be made sure by Britain being given control of Crete.85 And although Disraeli’s famous purchase of the Khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal—an act that delighted and dismayed his supporters and opponents respectively—that same month was intended to promise a certain kind of protection, sources like the Northern Echo took a cautious and anti-unilateral approach to the next phase, urging British policymakers to be careful, given “the present ticklish condition of affairs,” about assuming the “thunder-clap” felt in Europe at the purchase would have a positive effect on inter-European relations.86 Increasingly, Liberals came to believe that the Eastern Question had no firm solution absent a change in British policy regarding the Ottoman Empire, something that required a closer relationship with the other European powers. Yet to abandon the Ottoman Empire to its fate meant, in the Conservative view, the complicity of Britain in consigning the Ottoman Empire to its destruction at the hands of its neighbors, especially Russia. But a comparable level of Turcophilia did not balance Britain’s Russophobia. Those who advocated continued Ottoman support were, with some exceptions, usually not particularly Turcophilic; rather, they advised moderation. As such, news sources associated with those friendly to the peace between Britain and the Ottoman Empire attempted to suppress the public’s anxiety by dismissing “speculation,” as The Times put it in January 1875, by any who saw the reopening of the Eastern Question

84 Illustrated London News, 1 January 1876, col. C, p. 74. 85 Daily News, 22 November 1875, col. G, p. 4. 86 “Nearing the Crisis,” Northern Echo, 16 December 1875, col. F, p. 2.

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“in every dispute, great or small, which affects the East.”87 The strongly Tory Pall Mall Gazette went a step further, repudiating assertions that the Ottoman Empire was nearing its end, and that the British public should put its trust in the Cabinet to confront the “faint uneasiness” among the body politic regarding threats to Britain’s imperial interests.88 As the author unequivocally stated: “To a great extent [the Cabinet] has a mastery of affairs. The fact that the necessities of the Empire are clear is itself a guarantee of that.”89 Again, this kind of opinion seems less a reflection of broadly felt proOttoman values than a feeling that a change to the status quo would negatively impact British political and economic interests. Indeed, The Times ’s correspondent in Istanbul, Antonio Gallenga,90 was exceptionally Turcophobic by his own admission, sardonically quipping that of “the Turks” he could “hardly be charged with having ever flattered them.”91 Yet at the same time, The Times consistently tried to put a stamp of caution upon debate over the Eastern Question, the same correspondent flatly stating in November 1875 that far from a tangle, the Eastern Question “is, as it ever was, amazingly simple to any one who will look at it by the light of plain, common sense, divesting it of all popular passion, unravelling it from all diplomatic circumlocution and rigmarole.”92 But the simplicity of the problem sans the rigmarole did not change the fact that it was fast becoming apparent to the press in general that the Eastern Question was now being “raised in a more threatening form than it ever before assumed.”93

87 The Times, 22 January 1875, col. A, p. 9. 88 “The Eastern Question,” Pall Mall Gazette, 18 November 1875, col. A, p. 1. 89 Ibid. 90 Antonio Carlo Napoleone Gallenga (1810–1895). Gallenga, born in Italy, was The Times ’s special correspondent in Istanbul between 1875 and 1877 and was a noted essayist and travel writer in Victorian Britain. See “Gallenga, Antonio Carlo Napoleone (1810–1895),” Toni Cerutti in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com.floyd.lib.umn.edu/view/ article/10306. 91 “Turkey,” The Times, 28 April 1876, col. A, p. 11. 92 “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 30 November 1875, col. A, p. 6. 93 The Times, 16 November 1875, col. B, p. 7.

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Public opinion also involved a demonstration of the understandings and values Britons had vis-à-vis the East, its inhabitants, and its cultural and religious identity. Even prior to reports on the Bulgarian Atrocities, newspapers, as we have already seen, portrayed the East as a corrupt and backward place, with the Ottoman government abusive of its Christian inhabitants and unfit for modern rule. The Ottoman Empire was repeatedly compared unfavorably to Europe and was almost invariably seen as not having the ability or inclination to carry out the business of modern governance like the leaders of “civilized States”—that is, European ones.94 On the balance, Turcophobia prevailed in a cultural sense, even if in a diplomatic sense it might have appeared the opposite given the traditional support the British government lent to the Ottomans. Gallenga’s acerbic description of the vast packs of semi-wild dogs in Istanbul as “[exhibiting] less variety than is observable in the crowd of beings that here count as men” shows that “moderate” organs like The Times could employ negative Orientalist stereotypes without feeling it belied the paper’s sober diplomatic language in other articles.95 To this particular instance of a negative and racist view of the Ottoman Empire, we can add the frequent description of it in the press as a place of Muslim “fanaticism,” “misrule,” and “barbaric,” “uncivilized,” or “stranger” races—favorite terms for supposedly foregone conclusions. That these malefactors persevered in enforcing their will upon the majority Christian Balkans was viewed as especially profane, an insult to a place the Illustrated London News called “some of the fairest regions of the continent.”96 Although in reality most of the Balkans were “less known than Timbuctu” to Britain, as S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles Brophy had observed several years earlier, the idea that oppressed Eastern Christians were rising up against a tyrannical and fanatical Muslim ruling authority was a legible idea.97 It played into what Maria Todorova has called the “imputed ambiguity” of the Balkans, wherein Britons could

94 The Times, 6 January 1876, col. A, p. 9. 95 “The Dogs of Constantinople,” The Times, 7 January 1876, col. A, p. 7. 96 Illustrated London News, 8 January 1876, col. C, p. 26. 97 S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy, Twelve Years’ Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria: Being a Revised Edition of “A Residence in Bulgaria” (London: Chapman and Hall, 1877), v.

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liken the place and its peoples to Europe while at the same time denigrate it as foreign and corrupt.98 To be sure, for many in Britain such allusions to Balkan Christian heroes evoked the brand of romanticism that had inspired British support for the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence: defiant, noble, freedom-loving Christian peasants against a dark, foreign horde. The wellknown historian E. A. Freeman personified this line of rhetoric, writing numerous articles during the 1870s that denounced the Ottoman Empire and its ruling classes as black marks upon history and expressing his contempt for those who supported it in Britain. In December 1875, Freeman directed his fire at these dual enemies: We were told one and twenty years back that our interests were so pressing, that the Russian bugbear was so frightful, that we had no time to listen to the claims of oppressed nations, even when we had ourselves doomed them to oppression… [When] a plain duty calls on us to help the cause of our suffering brethren, I at least can find no time for nicely calculated questions of interest.99

Published in John Morley’s Fortnightly Review, Freeman’s “true” interpretation of the Eastern Question hinges on the belief in the fundamental and irredeemably inferior nature of the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim rulers in relation to their oppressed Christian subjects, with British financiers evilly perpetuating an abominable racial and religious hierarchy: Happily one sordid form of interest will now be driven to hold its peace. The Turk has, fittingly enough, played the Turk with his creditors as well as with his subjects. Englishmen were not ashamed to lend their money to the barbarian, knowing that every penny which they lent could be used only in propping up the foulest of tyrannies, and in enabling a sensual despot to spend yet more on his luxuries and his vices.100

Although Freeman occupied the extreme end, even his opponents shared a measure of his viewpoint. Conceding that “Mr. Freeman would find 98 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17–18. 99 E. A. Freeman, “The True Eastern Question,” Fortnightly Review, 18 (new series), no. 108 (1 December 1875), ed. John Morley (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), 766. 100 Ibid.

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that ninety-nine out of every hundred of his countrymen agree with him in thinking that the rule of the Turk in Europe is an odious tyranny,” the Pall Mall Gazette offered that it was not the Ottoman Empire as a ruling authority that was the problem, but rather it was the “disease” of religious fanaticism that infected its Muslim population at the expense of its Christian subjects.101 The disease needed to be cured with the “medicine” of reform and not territorial “excision” or “surgery,” as the author concluded, or else the whole body including its Christians would die.102 The answer to Freeman’s hatred of the Ottomans was not to aggrandize “the Turk,” but to claim the necessity of keeping order in what was thought of as a preternaturally chaotic and violent part of the world—a case of hating the despotic “Turkish” sinner, while loving the sin of the state he ruled. Indeed, Parliament’s outlook on the Eastern Question reflects this paradox, and the distance between the parties was not always great. “The East” was ever a place defined by a “vast group of questions,” as Conservative MP Sir Matthew Ridley put it as Parliament began its session on February 8, 1876, “the extreme importance of which to our Imperial interests it is perhaps impossible to over-estimate.”103 Ridley urged endorsing a list of Ottoman reforms arranged by Count Gyula Andrássy of Austria, the so-called “Andrassy Note,” which would better acknowledge the social and legal status of Christians in the Ottoman Empire.104 For Ridley, this “friendly intervention” in Ottoman affairs would ensure both the maintenance of the Crimean system while protecting of British interests.105 The Liberals did not disagree in principle, but for them those interests included a judgment about which elements of the Eastern Question could

101 “Two Views of the Turkish Question,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 December 1875, col. A, p. 1. 102 Ibid. 103 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 54 (8 February 1876). In this era,

Parliament generally met from early February to the middle of August and then was in recess until the following February. Given this, the first major phase of Parliamentary discussion on the Eastern Crisis did not happen until February of 1876, as the war in Herzegovina was less than two months old when the 1875 session ended on August 13, 1875. 104 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 57 (8 February 1876). 105 Ibid.

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be solved and which ones were incapable of resolution if Ottoman policy remained static in spite of reforms. Indeed, the leader of the Opposition, Lord Hartington, responded to Ridley’s claim by stating that, with the increasing animosity between Christians and Muslims and the growing Ottoman bankruptcy, “Turkey has embarked upon a career of maladministration and extravagance which if persisted in, must defy all the efforts of European states to save her.”106 Yet the Liberals’ heritage in the “Crimean system” (that is, the international support for the basic integrity of the Ottoman Empire) via the Liberal hero of the Crimean War, Lord Palmerston, meant that Hartington was sure to say that Britons must be patient for any Ottoman reforms they desired to have an effect.107 Hartington understood the public’s impatience, however: not all reform was effective, and not all actions that Britain took vis-à-vis the East might lead to the real protection of British interests as Ridley claimed. Hartington felt that Parliament, as the representative voice of the British electorate, should have been asked if it were wise for Britain to buy out the Suez Canal, as it appeared to “mix us up in an extraordinary manner with the finances of the Khedive.”108 He further was not convinced by a public statement made by Foreign Secretary Lord Derby at the University of Edinburgh in December that no British protectorate of Egypt was in the offing, asking the assembled MPs whether they agreed that the purchase “[looked] something very like a financial Protectorate over Egypt?”109 This was a prescient comment, not only as regards Britain’s eventual takeover of Egypt in 1882: the next generation would see British policy further blur the line between financial and official “protection” of foreign lands. Politically, Hartington drew on the idea that the Opposition’s role was to advocate those aspects of public opinion that ran counter to the chosen policy of the sitting Government. In his view, the Conservatives were leading the country into imperial entanglements via noblesse oblige, and they risked losing the faith of the electorate and leading to public anxiety. Derby would have disagreed on this matter based on the same recognition of the power of opinion, but on a different guiding principle. The same

106 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 80 (8 February 1876). 107 Ibid. 108 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 86 (8 February 1876). 109 Ibid.

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day he made the public address that Hartington refers to, Derby attended an Edinburgh workingmen’s meeting that, by his count, held over 2,000 in the audience, delivering a speech that he wrote “was well received from first to last.”110 In contrast to Hartington’s thrust, Derby told the audience that calm and confidence in the Government was the proper response, if not the duty, of the voters at all times, and “that there is no reason why workingmen should not be conservative in regard to politics, since they have…nothing more to get or to expect from agitation.”111 For Derby, the business of government rested upon the assent of the people to the authority of those in power—period. Though perhaps informative on a broad level, public excitement should not be the driving force of policy, even when it was in support of the Conservatives’ policies. Indeed, having concluded that the Suez Canal transaction was “universally popular” among the public and “a complete political success,” Derby mused that this involvement of the public’s will made him uneasy, saying: It shows the intense desire for action abroad that pervades the public mind, the impatience created by long diplomatic inactivity, and the strength of a feeling which might…take the form of a cry for war. It shows also what guess-work the management of an English administration is. A few years ago, such a proceeding as the purchase by the State of shares in a foreign company would have been thought absurd, and the minister who proposed it ruined in public opinion.112

Derby had a well-earned reputation as reticent and indecisive, commonly ignoring letters when a definitive answer might have closed the door on an avenue of action.113 Indeed, this trait went straight to the top: during the height of the Bulgarian Agitation, Queen Victoria complained to the Duke of Richmond that Derby did not write to her often enough to

110 Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, A Selection of the Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby (1826–93): Between September 1869 and March 1878, ed. John Vincent (London: Royal Historical Society, 1994), 17 December 1875, p. 259. Hereafter, references to this source will follow the form, “Derby Diaries, date, pg.” 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 29 November 1875, 257. 113 Marvin Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and

Gladstone (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 33–34.

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keep her apprised of Eastern affairs.114 But it is clear he felt strongly that policy was the domain of sitting ministers, not the body politic. Conversely, Disraeli characteristically welcomed surges of public opinion and formulated many of his actions, as with the Suez Canal, to fit with his cachet as a well-known and “potent myth-maker” in British political society.115 Derby would later become very critical of Disraeli for this quality, writing in October 1876 that Disraeli favored “bold strokes and unexpected moves” even if they ran “serious national risks,”116 an attribute T. A. Jenkins calls a “theatrical urge” to act on the stage of Victorian society.117 This evidence would appear to be at odds with the idea that Disraeli represented a strictly Realpolitik mindset. Rather, he accessed and influenced the mentalité of British popular opinion when it served his interests and, as a counter-tactic, ignored popular commotion or purported to stand above it when it did not mesh with his ideas. When in October 1875 Disraeli wrote that “public worries are nothing; they are not the things that do the mischief,” such an opinion is in contrast to his joyful feeling in November that The Times was “staggered” by the news of the purchase of the Canal shares, Disraeli triumphantly claiming, “I believe the whole country will be with me. The Faery [i.e. Queen Victoria] thinks so.”118 Disraeli always dabbled in the public-elite gray area and used that space effectively. Indeed, The Times declared the day after Disraeli wrote this line that managing the Suez was an essential component of any answer to the Eastern Question, effectively supporting the buy-out.119 These

114 Richmond to Cairns, 22 October 1876, PRO 30/51/3, f. 114. Richmond, who served as lord president of the Council in Disraeli’s Cabinet, was a close friend of the Queen, having sat on the Privy Council since 1859. 115 Blake, 587. 116 Derby Diaries, 24 October 1876, 337. 117 T. A. Jenkins, Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism (London: Macmillan, 1996),

123. 118 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 16 October 1875, and Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 26 November 1875, in The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Volume One, 1873–1875, ed. Marquess of Zetland (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929), 384 and 402, respectively. Hereafter, references to this source will follow the form, “Correspondence direction, date, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. I , page.” 119 The Times, 27 November 1875, col. A, p. 9.

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were acts that Disraeli calculated to resonate with a significant portion of Victorian society’s values and worldview. Hence, to deny that Disraeli acted according to the morals, ideologies, and values of the time because his actions angered those people associated with the Liberals would be to deny that Conservatives had a moral and ideological vision of their world. In fact, Disraeli’s political actions (and his successes) were based on espousing one kind of British ideology—a fully value-driven alternative to the Liberal worldview. Far from being just about the bare details of power and protection, this ideology emphasized ancestral values, glorified the imperial, and, crucially, played on the desires of any in the middle and working classes who felt they wanted to live in Disraeli’s England: the “Imperial country,” the “land of liberty, of prosperity, of power, and of glory,” as he described it at the end of his famous Crystal Palace speech in 1872.120 On the other side, Liberal leaders strove to find a way to impugn the Government while themselves acceding to public opinion. Hartington and the Liberal leader in the Lords, Lord Granville, were notably moderate, as they were worried about creating too much trouble about Eastern issues if the public or the press supported the Conservative position.121 Gladstone, the “retired” leader, did not pursue the issue of the Suez Canal in Parliament very far beyond questioning the original intelligence of the action.122 He conceded that the country seemed for it, even if his close friend and former home secretary, Robert Lowe, indicated in Parliament that the triumphalist message sent by the Government was not the same as saying that the purchase gave Britain a preeminent place in the company that controlled the Suez Canal.123 Gladstone agreed with Lowe but was unwilling to say publicly, writing privately to Granville that no matter the conditions of foreign support or involvement the purchase was “an act of folly” and that the premise offered by the Government

120 Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 2, ed. T. E. Kebbel (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882), 534–535. 121 Granville George Levenson-Gower, 2nd Earl of Granville (1815–1891). Granville was leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords at this time and had previously served twice as foreign secretary, from 1851 to 1852 and from 1870 to 1874. He would serve again in this role in Gladstone’s Second Ministry from 1880 to 1885. 122 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 606–607 (21 February 1876). 123 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 574–577 (21 February 1876).

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that the canal might otherwise be closed because of Egypt’s troubles was as likely as “the closing of the London & North Western” railway.124 At this point, Gladstone held back from criticizing the Government too directly, and despite his animosity to the Conservatives—and Disraeli in particular—gave a very sober congratulations to the Government for having banded with the other European states to sign on to the Andrassy Note.125 However, as he would write to Granville later, Gladstone felt the Liberals must continue urging that Britain had a stake in directly ensuring that the Ottoman Empire took up the reforms of the Andrassy Note, as this was the original intent of accepting the Ottomans into the Concert of Europe following the Crimean War.126 Gladstone was not in charge of the party officially, though, and he faithfully acceded to the authority of Hartington and Granville even when he urged them in private that the opposition to the Conservatives over Eastern matters should be firmer.127 It is significant that, prior to the Bulgarian Agitation, Gladstone kept as quiet as he did—an uncharacteristic repose that belied his inner urge to bend things to his view of them. He continued in his contrived passivity even after news arrived in May that the French and German consuls were murdered in Salonica (Thessaloniki) by a Muslim mob and Disraeli ordered the British fleet to Be¸sik Bay, in the Dardanelles. Gladstone did not take public action on the matter despite other Liberals’ indignation, nor did he make noise on any diplomatic matter.128 Gladstone, Hartington, and Granville hesitated to denigrate the Government if doing so

124 Gladstone to Granville, 28 November 1875, in The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1868–1876, Volume II, 1871–1876, ed. Agatha Ramm (London: Royal Historical Society, 1952), 474. Hereafter, references to this source will follow the form, “Correspondence direction, date, Gladstone and Granville, 1868–1876, Vol. II , pg.” 125 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 227, col. 105 (8 February 1876). 126 Gladstone to Granville, 9 June 1876, Gladstone and Granville, 1868–1876, Vol. II ,

486. 127 Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865–1898 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999), 159–164. 128 A review of Hansard from this period reveals no real significant or combative involvement from Gladstone on these issues—see Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 228–230.

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would injure the presentation of the party platform or would conflict with public spirit. There is no way that the Liberal position could exist without attention to the realities of politics. They knew that they relied on a coalition of groups and sub-groups: they had to satisfy everyone from Radicals, to Nonconformists, to provincial manufacturers, to the old Whig elite, to Home Rulers. Its strength-in-numbers identity could be a weakness that, as Hartington wrote in a letter to Sir William Harcourt, a Radicalturned-Whig, could cause “many embarrassments” at the hands of the “mischievous policy” of the Conservatives unless the diversity of the party was acknowledged and managed.129 Gladstone had had, by this point, a tumultuous relationship with many of these groups and their leaders. The Nonconformists were notably at odds with Gladstone’s formulation of the Liberal platform, given Gladstone’s staunch support of the Church of England’s integrity.130 A number of Radicals had felt let down by what they considered imperialistic actions taken when Gladstone was prime minister from 1868 to 1874,131 while Liberals from the Whig tradition often thought that Gladstone’s appeals to the working (rather than middle) classes was wrongheaded and his attempts to begin shifting authority to Ireland via the 1870 Irish Land

129 Letter from Hartington to Harcourt, 17 January 1875, qtd. in A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, Volume I (1827–1886) (London: Constable & Company, 1923), 289. During the Eastern Crisis, Harcourt would eventually regard Gladstone with contempt for influencing the party’s direction while out of leadership, although they later reconciled. 130 Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 163. 131 For example, John Bright, a major Radical leader, twice broke with Gladstone over

actions he saw as imperialistic (in 1870 over Gladstone actions to block Russia from remilitarizing the Black Sea, and in 1882 over Gladstone ordering the bombardment of Alexandria), leaving his positions in the Cabinets. See “Bright, John (1811–1889),” Miles Taylor in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com.floyd.lib.umn.edu/view/article/3421.

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Act and 1873 Irish University Bill even more wrongheaded.132 Yet enigmatically he was still considered by the other Liberal leaders to be the best suited to hold all the factions together, even when out of power and even when he embarrassed the moderates or mortified one fringe of the party by supporting another.133 How do we explicate Gladstone’s curious ability to both unite and stratify British society? Biographers in the triumphalist tradition, like John Morley, and explicitly Gladstonian historians, like Seton-Watson, have attributed this to Gladstone’s unique identity in British politics and society as a moral representative of the British heart and mind. That may be, but it does not explain in substantive terms whether the people responded to Gladstone’s particular sensibilities and so emulated them, or if he responded to their concerns and feelings and took them on politically, or if he followed the ebb and flow of political thought and took political opportunities specific to the situation. Colin Matthew was probably right that, given the religious and cultural conviction with which Gladstone ingenuously carried himself, “understanding is probably more fruitful than explaining” how the bonds of his ideals dictated his political involvement.134 Yet just as Disraeli might not have been so steeped in the Tory realpolitik tradition of policymaking as were some of his Conservative colleagues, so Gladstone, like any successful politician, clearly understood the necessity of tempering his idealism for the pursuit of attainable goals within the political power structure of the moment.

132 E. J. Feuchtwanger, Gladstone (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 166–171. For many Whigs, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Henry Reeve, may have put it best when he wrote to Harcourt in early 1874, right before the end of Gladstone’s First Ministry, that “The Radicals may flounder and bluster as they please, but they will not get very far without [the Whigs]…Gladstone was a Tory, and is a Radical: but he never was a Whig at all,” letter from Reeve to Harcourt, January 9, 1874, qtd. in Gardiner, 265. Famously, Hartington, the most prominent Whig in the House of Commons, would eventually split with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, taking on leadership of the Liberal Unionists with Joseph Chamberlain in 1886. 133 Patrick Jackson, The Last of the Whigs: A Political Biography of Lord Hartington, Later Eighth Duke of Devonshire (1833–1908) (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 52–54. 134 H. C. G. Matthew, in his introduction to The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence. Volume IX: January 1875–December 1880, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), xxv.

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The Liberals’ own brand of Realpolitik appears to have shaped their response to Eastern issues up to the first months of 1876.135 But as more and more news of uprisings and violence in the Balkans and Anatolia surfaced in late spring, the impression of what issues and values Britain’s foreign policy should be predicated upon began to change significantly. Following news of the Salonica murders, the tone of public opinion began to shift to a more precise confrontation of Ottoman activities and Britain’s Eastern policy. When reports appeared in the British and European press in late June saying that Ottoman irregular forces had killed more than 12,000 Bulgarian Christian civilians in May and June, the stage was set for a battle that would permanently alter British politics and society.

The Shift in Opinion: Murder, Massacre, and Muslims If the Bulgarian Atrocities had never occurred or had never come to light, one wonders whether the period between 1875 and 1878 would ever have later come to be called, in capitals, the “Eastern Crisis.” History would likely have played out very differently, no matter what further events ensued, particularly given the role they played in spurring wider international support for an autonomous Bulgarian state—a state that would figure centrally in European affairs for the next two generations. And, even from the standpoint of times in which the massacres occurred, the rest of the Eastern Crisis bore the stamp of their influence, whether in diplomatic negotiation, war, or popular discourse about the problem. Notably, the place the Ottoman Empire, its rulers, and its inhabitants played in the British worldview clearly defined the way in which Britons framed the massacres, helping determine political debate over the proper official response. In this sense, negative Orientalist stereotypes and tropes helped define the next phase of the Eastern Crisis, shifting the nature of the Eastern Question in a new direction. As the opening vignette of this chapter shows, even as late as the spring of 1876 it was possible in British society to treat the Eastern Question as merely a matter of interest and perhaps an opportunity for playful commentary. Even when Sultan Abdülaziz was deposed by a group of reformist government ministers in late May, the British press

135 Seton-Watson, 29.

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took the deposition as generally positive for the outlook on the Eastern Question despite the uncertainty the coup promised. Indeed, The Times acknowledged that the event was “to the great satisfaction of the whole population,” though it wondered whether Abdülaziz’s successor, the Young Ottoman fellow traveler Murad V, would be inclined or able to affect reforms promised by the coup’s most notable leader, Midhat Pasha, newly returned from Baghdad.136 Moreover, it remained to be seen what the change meant with regard to Russia, which via Ambassador Ignatyev continued to enjoy significant influence at the Porte. If this “new view of the Oriental question” meant that the Ottoman Empire would “attempt to play a more independent part than hitherto,” the influence Russia had with the old regime would have to be reestablished or, failing that, different measures would have to be taken.137 Thus, The Times concluded, “some anxiety prevails as to the next movements of Russia.”138 Still, as Murad appeared to be “better informed” and reform-minded than his predecessor, The Times hoped that the coup indicated a “cessation of that capricious despotism which has made Turkish Government a thing of intrigue and corruption for so many years.”139 However, Murad would only rule for three months before he himself was deposed (due to what appears to have been a nervous breakdown), being replaced by his younger brother, Abdülhamid, in September.140 At the time, though, on the balance the British public and Parliament appear to have seen the coup toppling Abdülaziz as promising new stability. However, Murad came to the throne right as the tone of British public opinion was beginning to change: the press began to focus more closely on the actions of the Ottoman Empire and its leaders, while finding a “lasting solution” to the Eastern Question became a more critical 136 “Deposition of the Sultan,” The Times, 31 May 1876, col. B, p. 7. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 The Times, 31 May 1876, col. B, p. 11. 140 As the summer progressed, it became clear that Murad had problems of his own.

An alcoholic who drank to calm his anxiety, it quickly became known that despite his positive qualities Murad was almost a complete physical and mental wreck, leading the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Tenterden, to write that “the Sultan’s health seems a very bad job. What with drink and madness these Sultans are a poor lot.” See Tenterden to Russell, 26 July 1876, FO 918/64, f. 77–78.

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concern. At this point, it was the formulation of the Berlin Memorandum that fell into the latter category. The Berlin Memorandum was ostensibly a proposal by the Dreikeiserbund (the alliance of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) to end the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Herzegovinian insurgents, yet for those in Britain it appeared to be about much more than that. The Daily News wrote that there were rumors that Germany and Russia might use the negotiations as a pretense for making Herzegovina into a Russian vassal state at the expense of Austria, the other regional leader, and that such a scheme was plausible given the “usual behavior” of Russia in the Balkans.141 The Pall Mall Gazette went further, connecting Queen Victoria’s recent acquisition of the title of “Empress of India” with Russia’s recent advances in Central Asia and the responsibility of the British government and diplomatic apparatus to be more attuned to the influence of Russia in matters related to the Eastern Question and Britain’s possible weakness in confronting this influence.142 One expected the Pall Mall Gazette to be hawkish: Russophobia was a feeling that was effectively used by the Conservatives to gain support for hawkish policies. Yet given that the Daily News was so opposed in every other way, it is significant that at this point fears over the threat Russia posed to the Ottoman Empire and the East as a whole were more or less cross-political. The Daily News, however, did not see the debate going on in Berlin as likely to stop Ottoman decay: it was rather evidence of “another step towards the end,” an eventuality of which Liberal elements in Britain were more and more certain.143 One “step” toward Ottoman chaos increasingly commented on in Britain was the matter of Muslim-Christian conflict within the Ottoman domain. The fact that the Salonica murders in May had been perpetrated by a Muslim mob appears to have set the stage for the massacres in Bulgaria to produce such an explosively passionate response in British in June. The perception that the perpetrators in the Salonica case were motivated primarily by “Muslim fanaticism” could be used by advocates of a change in British policy regarding the Ottoman Empire to argue that the Ottoman government was unable or unwilling to keep their

141 Daily News, 9 May 1876, col. B, p. 5. 142 “Audacity and Inactivity,” Pall Mall Gazette, 16 May 1876, col. A, p. 1. 143 Daily News, 9 May 1876, col. B, p. 5.

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Muslim population in check. Certainly, there were exceptions: The Times offered that the Ottomans felt that their “race and creed” were subject to special “indignities” in international negotiation, and for this reason, the Ottoman government understood the necessity of punishing their Muslim subjects if that was necessary to secure diplomatic closure.144 Yet it was the inversion of this view that began to play an increasingly prevalent role, as when Stead’s Northern Echo stated that while Salonica was a diverse city religiously and ethnically, “the Mussulmans, although in the minority, [possess] the upper hand and as usual [make] up in bigotry what they want in numbers.”145 Moreover, for the Echo the Ottoman government was not in a position to stop the “blind, unreasoning, and sanguinary” fanaticism of Islam, and its identity made it an abettor and encourager of the crime.146 In other words, it was the unnatural, oppressive status of Muslims ruling over majority Christian territories in the Balkans that was the source of the murders, and only the immediate intervention of the European Powers would avert their prophecy that “Europe may become too hot to hold the Turk much longer.”147 The Daily News concurred, wondering if army conscripts, “full of fanaticism” and ruled by the Muslim religious establishment, might not even attack the large communities of Western Christians living in Istanbul—the long-established “Frank colonies”—if conditions of unrest continued.148 In fact, it was not just the Liberal papers that took up the subject of Muslim fanaticism. The Pall Mall Gazette killed two domestic political birds with one stone: it accused Liberal papers of irresponsible sensationalism while at the same time naming Islamic fanaticism as one of the most important issues facing Britain’s foreign and imperial policy.149 And although The Times claimed “the days are past for a jihád,” it acknowledged the gravity of the consequences of Muslim-Christian hatred to European interests in the East.150 Hence, it seems that the issue hinged less on the significance of Eastern affairs as such, but rather in the sense 144 The Times, 9 May 1876, col. B, p. 9. 145 “Some Foreign Troubles,” Northern Echo, 10 May 1876, col. F, p. 2. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., col. A, p. 3. 148 “The Panic at Constantinople,” Daily News, 18 May 1876, col. B, p. 6. 149 “Mussulman Fanaticism,” Pall Mall Gazette, 17 May 1876, col. A, p. 1. 150 The Times, 13 May 1876, col. C, p. 11.

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of how Europe’s popular reaction to inter-religious conflict in the East might affect the status of the British-Ottoman relationship. For the Liberal organs, a strong, even disruptive effect on the Crimean policy was preferable in this sense, while for the Tory mouthpieces the question was how to turn the problems into an opportunity to advance (or at least protect) the British position in global affairs. Both of these goals hinged upon gaining support among prominent politicians and the body politic, but in both cases “Muslim fanaticism” was the commodity that was fought over. The translation of external affairs into the cultural and intellectual language of domestic politics and public opinion illuminates how the widely-held negative opinion of Islam was actualized within the construct of party politics and foreign affairs. In fact, this might also help explain the curiously sedate response to the overthrow of Sultan Abdülaziz at the end of May and the Government’s rejection of the Berlin Memorandum shortly thereafter: the replacement of Abdülaziz—the personification of the “opulent pasha” Orientalist trope—and the firm, independent appearance that Disraeli intended to present by refusing to sign on to the Memorandum (which he reported to the Queen as the Dreikeiserbund’s “mockery” of the Concert,151 and which he called the “obnoxious Note” in private152 ) was seen by most politicians and news media as satisfying general public opinion within the context of Britain’s domestic politics.153 Indeed, Disraeli wrote with satisfaction to his friend and confidante, Lady Chesterfield, simply that Abdülaziz’s fall was “in favor of English influence and interests.”154 Likewise, the press’s reaction to Abdülaziz’s deposition was relatively placid, with the normally mordant Gallenga of The Times immediately assuring his readers that Istanbul was in “perfect tranquility” over the change.155

151 Cabinet Report to the Queen, “Disraeli’s Memo on His Eastern Policy,” 16 May 1876, enclosure to CAB 41/7/10. 152 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 11 June 1876, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 63. 153 See Swartz, 35. 154 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 30 May 1876, in The Letters of Disraeli to Lady

Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Volume Two, 1876–1881, ed. Marquess of Zetland (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929), 59. Hereafter, references to this source will follow the form, “Correspondence direction, date, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , page.” 155 “Deposition of the Sultan,” The Times, 31 May 1876, col. B, p. 7.

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The Illustrated London News called the fall of Abdülaziz an opportunity for a “wise and peaceful settlement of the Eastern Question,” and published flattering front-page engravings of Murad and the principal coup leaders.156 Likewise, the public appears to have bought the Tory line that the rejection of the Berlin Memorandum was good for British interests and that the ordering of the fleet to Be¸sik Bay was done for the protection of the Christian population in Istanbul from Muslim mobs—a specifically Liberal goal espoused by its leaders and rank alike.157 The agreement of diplomatic reports with popular opinion thus could be looked at to make Disraeli’s unilateral, hawkish acts appear as those of an internationalist, even humanitarian leader—acts that the body politic ate up, not despite but because of their fears over the Ottomans’ inability or disinclination to keep their fierce Muslim subjects in order. But when reports began to appear at the end of June that portrayed a picture of a vast and brutal suppression of Christian Bulgarians who had risen up in solidarity with Herzegovina, these issues matched only too well with those raised by the murders. The crucial twist, then, was that news of Ottoman-authored massacres suddenly inverted the previously favorable view the public had taken of Disraeli and his policy. This was due in part to the news reports’ effect in dramatically bringing to light a fundamental disconnect between official policy and a large segment of the public’s opinion on the Eastern Question that had previously not been considered very important by the political establishment, namely those that held deeply anti-Muslim and pro-Christian sentiments. For them, the 156 Illustrated London News, 3 June 1876, col. C, p. 530; portraits on covers of Illustrated London News, “Murad V, The New Sultan of Turkey,” 10 June 1876, p. 560, and “The Assassination at Constantinople,” Illustrated London News, 24 June 1876, p. 601. See Figs. 3.4 and 3.5 for images. 157 See Granville to Gladstone, 20 June 1876, Gladstone and Granville, 1868–1876, Vol. II , 487. Also, on May 9th Sir Henry Elliot wrote to Derby that, “My colleagues believe that the presence of ships of war at Be¸sik Bay might be a protection to the Christians here, and would give them confidence.”—see Elliot to Derby, 9 May 1876, FO 881/2903, no. 1. Disraeli reported to the Queen that the Cabinet had decided that the move was not in conflict with the 1841 London Straits Convention or the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which prohibited any non-Ottoman naval force in the Dardanelles Straits. The Cabinet felt that making a “friendly representation” to the other Powers to take part in the assembly of ships in Be¸sik Bay would be enough to ensure that Britain’s actions were “beneficial” to the international situation—see Cabinet Report to the Queen, 2 June 1876, CAB 41/7/12.

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Fig. 3.4 “Murad V, The New Sultan of Turkey” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

official British policy of protecting Ottoman integrity had always been an abomination, and the reports of the Bulgarian Atrocities gave wider public and political credence to values that were formerly subordinate to the values of those who advocated a firm adherence to the status quo.

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Fig. 3.5 “The Assassination at Constantinople” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

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This shift was problematic for the powers-that-be, given the actual diplomatic tactics by which Britain protected Ottoman integrity, which involved advice, pressure, and demands for the Ottomans to keep their populace docile, regardless of religion. Since the start of the insurrection in Bulgaria had begun in April, the pressure that Britain’s Ambassador to Istanbul, Sir Henry Elliot, put on the Ottomans was in line with this official policy and was carried out according to the tactics that had been considered successful for the last generation. In other words, Elliot had been tasked with urging the Ottomans to put down the revolt as soon as possible with as little destruction as possible, which was considered an appropriate response given that the initial reports from British agents had been solely concerned with the violence perpetrated by the Bulgarian Christian insurrectionists.158 But when the first feature articles began to appear on the actual effects of the particular way the response demanded of the Ottomans was carried out, the reaction among the public threw into question the very morality of Britain’s Eastern policy. Even more, it made the Government and its foreign agents, especially Elliot, appear to be complicit in the Ottomans’ brutal tactics, especially their decision in May to deploy the notoriously unpredictable irregular Ottoman troops known as the bashi-bazouks , who ended up committing the greatest acts of violence and whose image became intimately and infamously connected with the Bulgarian Atrocities. Up until then, the popularity of the Government’s Eastern policy had rested on the notion that it was being carried out to keep British interests safe. Now, it seemed that such a value conflicted with another British concern that was popular, yet not to that point publicly preeminent: namely that of protecting the Christian populace from Muslim fanatics. True, the public had by and large not objected to similar acts of suppression in the past; massacres of Ottoman Christians in Syria and Lebanon in 1860 and the Ottomans’ suppression of the 1866–1869 Cretan Revolt may have made many Britons angry, but such events produced relatively

158 See, for example, Elliot to Derby, May 9, 1876, plus enclosed report from ViceConsul Depuis, Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of Turkey, and the Insurrection in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Turkey, no. 3), 1876 (1531) LXXXIV. 255, no. 255; also, Elliot to Derby, 15 May 1876, plus enclosed report from Vice-Consul Depuis, ibid., no. 289.

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equivocal suggestions on policy.159 Yet in 1876, the reports of violence against the Bulgarians were so provocative and horrifying as to shift the emphasis away from Britain’s role in protecting Ottoman stability toward the question of formulating a direct response and resolution to Muslim-Christian hatreds in the East. The first article to give a full report of the Bulgarian Atrocities, written by the Daily News ’s Istanbul correspondent, Edwin Pears, appeared on June 23 and immediately set the tone for the ensuing news coverage and, indirectly, for the later Agitation movement.160 His described gruesome reprisal killings, blaming the bashi-bazouks and the ineffectual Ottoman establishment that had sent them forth.161 Moreover, Pears felt that a misguided British diplomats had led the Ottomans to believe that “England has determined to help the [Ottoman] Government to put down the various insurrections,” or, as one Ottoman paper promised its readers, “England…will defend us against Russia while we look after our rebels.”162 In consequence, Pears believed that by not acting against “these barbarities” in league with the other Powers, the British Empire would betray its duties “to an oppressed people and humanity” and lose “credit” in the international sphere, something he noted as a clear risk to British interests.163 The Northern Echo immediately took up the story too, focusing more attention on the horrific descriptions of the violence than on the international repercussions, leaving its readers with the troubling report that great numbers of Bulgarian Christian women had been “carried off as legitimate prizes by the Bashi-Bazouks.”164 Further, the Echo,

159 For details on Britain’s reaction to the Syrian/Lebanese massacres, see Bass, 184– 186 and David Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 116–117; for that on Crete, see Rodogno, 122–126. 160 There had been several short reports mentioning reprisals in Bulgaria that appeared before this, but no full reports—see Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 38–39. 161 “The Assassinations at Constantinople: Moslem Atrocities in Bulgaria,” Daily News, 23 June 1876, col. F, p. 5. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. The latter quote is Pears’ version of the opinion of an article in unnamed

“Turkish journal.” 164 “Moslem Atrocities in Bulgaria,” Northern Echo, 24 June 1876, col. B, p. 3.

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following the Daily News ’s line, extended its critique of the Government to the Opposition, implying that Disraeli’s ease at instituting his policy in the East was partly due to the “extreme moderation of the Liberal leaders.”165 Perhaps epitomizing the rapid shift toward public indignation was the high-circulation Liberal weekly, Reynolds’s Newspaper,166 which in a front-page article condemned the “the Turks” as a sensuous, plundering, “effete” race of “squatters in Europe,” who had proved with utter finality that they deserved “execution” at the hands of the Christians.167 Indeed, rather than insurrectionists, the Balkan Christians should be viewed as exercising their “sacred right of rebellion,” and Britain should support with all its possible power the Ottoman Christians’ right to take the region from the Ottoman “idler” and apply their innate “energy and enterprise” to make the Balkans the “garden of the world.”168 Later, Eugene Schuyler, the American Consul-General in Istanbul, claimed the bashi-bazouks had committed sodomy during the massacres, further magnifying the imagery of effete Easterners gone fanatical.169 Sensing their complicity in the events that led up to the massacres, Conservative politicians and the Tory press immediately attempted to calm the debate. After the matter of the massacres was brought up by Liberal MP E. W. Forster in Parliament, who referred directly to the Daily News reports,170 the Pall Mall Gazette was so conspicuously sober about the issue as to be nonchalant, declaring that it “would be a weakness of a fatal kind” to swerve from Britain’s established Eastern policy 165 “Our Policy in the East,” Northern Echo, 24 June 1876, col. E, p. 2. 166 The Chartist and Radical journalist, G. W. M. Reynolds, founded Reynolds’s News-

paper in 1850, and it generally followed the line of other Radical journals and was especially popular with manufacturing workers. Its weekly circulation had reached 350,000 by 1860 and in 1876 was somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000. See Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 23–24; also, W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition: Volume One: The Rise of Collectivism (London: Routledge, 1983), 169. 167 “The Last Kick of the Sick Man,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 2 July 1876, col. A, p. 1. 168 Ibid. 169 “The Bulgarian Atrocities—Mr. Schuyler’s Preliminary Report,” Northern Echo, 30 August 1876, col. C, p. 3; “The War in the East,” Liverpool Mercury, 30 August 1876, col. D, p. 7; “Mr. Schuyler’s Preliminary Report on the Moslem Atrocities,” Leeds Mercury, 2 September 1876, col. B, p. 4. 170 See Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 230, col. 424–426 (26 June 1876).

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over the matter as it would unnecessarily quicken the calamity of the Ottoman collapse.171 Indeed, the paper had declared just a few days earlier that those immoderate Liberal forces arrayed against the Government’s policy in the Eastern Crisis were dangerously mistaking “emotions for principles,” and placing the British Empire in a place of peril should it abandon its independent, self-concerned, and preeminent role of the Eastern Question to band with Russia against the Ottomans.172 The Era, for its part, defended the Government’s policy as dynamic and masterful, claiming no one could say Britain had been “irritatingly diplomatic” in its protection of the Ottomans’ borders from “thieves” who would take advantage of the insurrections.173 For The Era, it was Russia that everyone should look to as the aggressor and encourager of the bloody conflicts, as it was “oiling the guns of the Devastation” and waiting to claim the remains of the destruction.174 The Times, however, began to deviate from its traditional role in supporting the ruling Government, and Gallenga’s coverage from Istanbul effectively reiterated the Daily News ’s reports and bolstered their hold on the British public mind.175 Undoubtedly, the involvement of The Times, Britain’s most widely respected newspaper, as a voice that was sympathetic to the burgeoning Atrocities campaign went a long way in making the campaign considered relevant for the average news consumer. The anger of the public increased as they perceived that the Government, especially Disraeli, did not appear to be very concerned with the reports. There does not appear to have been any significant discussion of the massacres in the three Cabinet meetings, on June 26, July 24, and August 7, that met in the remainder of the summer following the first public reports in the Daily News, despite the fact that the press 171 “The Alleged Massacres in Bulgaria,” Pall Mall Gazette, 27 June 1876, col. A, p. 5. 172 “The Policy of the Government in the East,” Pall Mall Gazette, 24 June 1876,

col. A, p. 1. 173 “Topics of the Week,” The Era, 2 July 1876, col. C, p. 9. The Era was a popular Conservative weekly noted for its coverage of racing, theater, and other interests of the London elite. 174 Ibid. 175 See Gallenga’s appended section of the article, “The War” in The Times, 8 July

1876, col. A, p. 12. On p. 53 of Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question SetonWatson claims that The Times had originally put an article on the massacres forth for publication on June 23, the same day Pears had. Seton-Watson says that the article was “for some reason withheld from publication.”

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and public grew more and more concerned about the Government’s role in responding to the issue over this period.176 Indeed, while the first meeting was too early for the reports to have had much salience in public discourse, certainly by the July 24, let alone August 7, it should have resonated if Disraeli and his Cabinet ministers found it important to discuss. Yet the July 24 meeting dealt almost exclusively with domestic issues,177 while the bulk of Disraeli’s report of the August 7 Cabinet meeting was concerned with Disraeli’s elevation to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield.178 As for Derby, there is no comment in his diaries on any discussion of the massacres in these meetings.179 Given Derby’s otherwise assiduous recording of Cabinet proceedings and his detailed reflections about Bulgaria elsewhere, he undoubtedly would have noted it if the subject been discussed in any significant way. Of course, Queen Victoria (to whom Disraeli’s reports were directed) did not need to know all things that went on in the Cabinet, but Disraeli’s and Derby’s silence is nonetheless evidence that Disraeli did not feel that the fast-growing public outcry was the most pressing issue facing the Cabinet—the elite decision-makers—at the moment.180 176 A review of Disraeli’s Cabinet reports to Queen Victoria from this time reveals no direct mention of the Bulgarian Atrocities until the Fall. See CAB 41/7/14–15. 177 For reasons unknown, Disraeli did not write his customary letter to the Queen on the subject of the July 24 Cabinet meeting, although he noted to Lady Bradford that the meeting was “stormy” but “halcyon” in the end—see Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 25 July 1876, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 70. Derby makes no mention of foreign affairs, let alone anything about Bulgaria, claiming that the meeting was “chiefly on the state of public business,” especially the Education Bill being debated in Parliament at the time—see Derby Diaries, 24 July 1876, 312. 178 For Disraeli’s discussion of issues related to his (and others’) peerage, see Cabinet Report to the Queen, 7 August 1876, CAB 41/7/15. As an operational note related to this, I do not refer to Disraeli as “the Earl of Beaconsfield,” or “Beaconsfield,” in mentioning him after the date of his elevation (as is the common convention for other figures). He remains referred to by his regular name for clarity and consistency with recent convention in discussions of Disraeli, although direct quotes that name him as “Beaconsfield” are left unchanged as his name and title are otherwise interchangeable. 179 See Derby Diaries, 26 June 1876, 24 July 1876, and 7 August 1876, 305, 312, and 316 respectively. 180 In fact, Disraeli even wrote that Victoria had indeed been asking him for information regarding the massacres, with her questions based specifically upon her reading of the Daily News ’s reports—see Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 13 July 1876, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 69–70.

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There is perhaps another explanation, however, which might offer a better insight into the growing influence of the public voice in political matters. Much has been made by scholars of Disraeli’s dismissal of the reports as “imaginary atrocities,”181 “coffee-house babble,”182 and of his offhanded rejection of evidence for the torture of Bulgarian Christians by saying the Ottomans “generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.”183 However, it appears Disraeli was less concerned about whether or not the reports were true, but instead whether it mattered to the public. In this, Disraeli miscalculated by thinking his influence with the public was greater than it actually was, and it seems possible that his casual way of confronting the situation was a calculated move designed to diminish the importance of the massacres in the public eye—using the power of his personality in hope that the issue would drift away. Derby reported that by early August, when it became clear that the issue was not going to blow over, Disraeli began to blame the Foreign Office and Sir Henry Elliot “for misleading him about the massacre,” as if he would have been just as indignant as the public was had he been given a corresponding official report that confirmed those of the principal eye witnesses to the destruction and killings.184 Derby blamed Disraeli’s anger on the fact that the latter had “got into some trouble with the House by making too light of the affair in the first instance, and lays on his informants, the blame of his own careless way of talking.”185 It is clearly more likely that it was not that Disraeli felt it unnecessary to listen to the public, but rather he thought that he could manage public opinion as he had in the past. When the tail began to wag the dog, he blamed his own agents as a distraction from the failed oversight of the Government and tried to draw on his public cachet as a strong, independent administrator. Clearly, though, one could no longer call the reports Liberal “inventions” for the purpose of inter-party intrigue, as he 181 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 231, col. 215 (31 July 1876). 182 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 231, col. 203 (31 July 1876). 183 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 230, col. 1182 (10 July 1876). For example,

Bass focuses on the “too-pithy” nature of Disraeli’s responses and how this angered the Opposition—see pp. 262–263 of Freedom’s Battle. Likewise, Seton-Watson calls attention to Disraeli’s “flippant tone” and how the Opposition made use of it—see pp. 54–55 of Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question. 184 Derby Diaries, 8 August 1876, 316. Emphasis added. 185 Ibid., 317.

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had throughout July, if the public and the press as a whole had by August accepted similar reports and similar commentary as realistic.186 By the same token, it also made sense that the Liberals were emboldened by public pressure on Disraeli for a response, and they used the opportunity to put their own pressure on the Government in a general sense. Another intriguing insight into our understanding of the ideas behind Britain’s response to the Bulgarian Atrocities appears in how proBulgarian Britons sought to compare the events in Bulgaria with the 1857 Indian Rebellion, specifically the destruction of the Bulgarian town of Batak and the massacre of the British at Cawnpore. The Rebellion and the massacre at Cawnpore were vital symbols in subsequent Victorian mythology, imperial or otherwise—a “torrent of blood and tears…matched, we may say, by the torrent of representations of it,” as Christopher Herbert has put it.187 In these post-1857 representations, the Rebellion was made out to be a major chapter in the longer history of “unspeakable,” “most terrible” acts suffered by the blameless at the hands of the savage.188 This was a way that Victorian society dealt with a traumatic and unprecedented event, but it also had powerful and long-lasting discursive effects.189 I would argue that this trait appears in the BatakCawnpore connection: it followed an established model of those from the East posing a danger to those from the West, and in this case, the Christian identity of the Bulgarian peasants led Britons to satisfy the provisions of the discursive model by symbolically embracing the Bulgarian Christian into the Western bosom as full members.190 The bashi-bazouks , then, are the Muslim Easterners, bent on violence toward their natural opposites. Given the hold of the Indian Rebellion on the Victorian mind, it would be surprising if it did not surface in relation to another, newer episode in

186 For Disraeli’s early skepticism and suspicion see, for example, Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 13 July 1876, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 69–70. 187 Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3. 188 Ibid., 226. 189 Ibid., 226–227. 190 Moreover, Bulgaria’s proximity in location and its Orthodox identity might also be connected with Greece and its rebellion against the Ottomans in the 1820s; Britain’s role in this dispute and the romance of Lord Byron’s death for the Greek cause were not easily forgotten, nor were the romantic descriptions of Ottoman savagery against the noble Greek freedom fighter.

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the anthology of Eastern fanaticism and violence versus Western Christian moderation and peace. And, the metaphor followed, the British had to care: they had intimate experience with Muslims and knew the horrible consequences of mishandling Easterners’ innate fanaticism. Indeed, Pears alluded to an Indian connection in his very first report, saying of the bashibazouks that during the Crimean War “the reputation of more than one Indian officer was destroyed because it was found impossible by men even with Indian experience to keep order among these irregular troops.”191 The crucial word in this quote is, as indicated, “even,” because Pears invoked Britain’s imperial connection with the allegedly disorderly and violence-prone Easterner to make sense of the type of people the bashibazouks were. Namely, they were worse than their Eastern brethren in India who, given the reference to the Crimean War, the reader knew had been at that time just a year away from transforming from loyal British soldiers to traitorous rebels. Hence, the Ottomans’ use of the bashi-bazouks —made up of “gipsies,” “gaolbirds,” and the “dregs of the Turkish and Circassian population”192 —in Bulgaria offered a sort of depraved and sinister mirror of Britain’s involvement with the peoples of India: if the reader thought the future Indian renegades fighting in the Crimean War were bad, the bashi-bazouks were even worse and less controllable. Liberal papers and politicians led the way in invoking the memory of Cawnpore, with Stead’s incendiary Northern Echo at the forefront.193 The Echo took a dramatic tack, saying “Never since the days of the Mutiny, when the massacre of Cawnpore startled our people into a frenzy of indignation and grief, have Englishmen had such good cause for intense emotion.”194 Significantly, searching the past for other barbaric events the Echo offered a further Indian example, citing Edmund Burke’s description of Hyder Ali’s Descent upon the Carnatic during the Second Anglo-Mysore War as one of the few apt comparisons to the Bulgarian

191 “The Assassinations at Constantinople: Moslem Atrocities in Bulgaria,” Daily News, 23 June 1876, col. F, p. 5. Emphasis added. 192 Ibid. 193 See: “The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria,” Daily News, 24 August 1876, col. C,

p. 2. 194 “England and the Bulgarian Atrocities,” Northern Echo, 11 August 1876, col. F,

p. 2.

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Atrocities.195 The Examiner, a weekly edited by William Minto—known as a staunch critic of Disraeli’s imperial policy196 —also searched for comparisons, calling the Atrocities “one of the bloodiest chapters in the book of Time.”197 In addition to Cawnpore, the Examiner offered the Reign of Terror, Jean-Baptiste Carrier’s famous Noyades (drownings) at Nantes in 1793, and the “Iron Duke” of Alba’s “Council of Blood” against Dutch Calvinists, curiously adding “such atrocities are never committed save in the name of religion or liberty.”198 Beyond the editorials, Liberal MP Sir George Anderson, one of the presidents of 1876 Co-Operative Congress, observed in Parliament that though Cawnpore had provoked an immediate “call of vengeance” in Britain, when similar acts were committed in Bulgaria at the rate of “10 or 20 times over in one town alone,” the same Britons “stood by, and did nothing.”199 Henry Fell Pease, a prominent member of the great Quaker Pease family, similarly claimed that the Cawnpore analogy was apt but insufficient in magnitude of the crime, declaring at a public meeting in Darlington in late August that such “unprecedented barbarities, in comparison with which what we have heard of Cawnpore and the incidents of the Indian Mutiny” required an official policy of restricting Ottoman behavior using, in a telling phrase, the “strongest moral force available.”200 Another writer (anonymous except for the initials “S. E. D.”) went even further, saying that even though Cawnpore served as a “byword among us for all that is cruel,” it was nothing in comparison with the “bestial fury” wrought upon the people of “an industrious, orderly town” like Batak—the same barbaric East vs. civilized Europe device that, despite clear evidence of the

195 Ibid. Minto was also a leader-writer for both the Daily News and, paradoxically, the Pall Mall Gazette. 196 Alexander Mackie, “Minto, William (1845–1893),” rev. Sayoni Basu, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb. com.ezp2.lib.umn.edu/view/article/18815. 197 “The Bulgarian Atrocities,” Examiner, 12 August 1876, col. B, p. 901. 198 Ibid. 199 Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 231, col. 727 (7 August 1876). 200 “The North Country and the Atrocities—Great Indignation

Meeting at Darlington—Recall of Sir Henry Elliot Demanded—Speech of Mr Backhouse, M.P.,” Northern Echo, 26 August 1876, col. A, p. 4.

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bashi-bazouks ’ needless killing of Bulgarian Christians, served as a standard, catch-all refrain both for the nature of “the Turks” and for defining Britain’s role in the management of the East.201 The venerable totem of Cawnpore was thus deployed as a call for action, for doing something, for intervening in a moral or physical way, for using Britain’s power to stop something Britons found (or should find) abhorrent. Disraeli’s “supineness” on the Atrocities, as Pease called it, was then patently un-English, un-British, un-European, and uncivilized.202 Of course, all of these “alien” identities conveniently fit with those which Disraeli’s more vocal critics often ascribed to him because of his Jewish background and his Eastern-themed novels.203 Indeed, Disraeli’s leading role in declaring the Queen “Empress of India” earlier that year had served to emphasize his Eastern deviance and unEnglishness, with the Echo calling it at the time the plan of a scrounging, “obsequious courtier” rather than a “plain dealing” servant of the Crown.204 This line was taken also in a more direct form in a famous Punch cartoon that depicted Disraeli as the Eastern villain Abanazer exchanging an Indian crown for Victoria’s British one.205 Thus, after the Atrocities became known, the idea that Disraeli’s motives regarding the Ottoman Empire were “true to his creed of Asian mysteries,” as E. A. Freeman sneered during the Agitation, was sure to have some bearing on those who had felt this way in the first place.206 Really, it made complete sense that Disraeli’s opponents would call for intervention on the side of the Bulgarians, as in their mind an innately East-centric Disraeli and his party proxies insisted on an Ottoman

201 S. E. D., letter to the editor, Daily News, 24 August 1876, col. D, p. 2. 202 “The North Country and the Atrocities,” Northern Echo, 26 August 1876, col. A,

p. 4. 203 Anthony S. Wohl, “‘Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi’: Disraeli as Alien,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 375–411. 204 “Mr Disraeli and the Royal Titles Bill,” Northern Echo, 22 March 1876, col. F, p. 2. The “plain dealing” servant of the Crown was in this case Joseph Whitwell Pease, Liberal MP for S. Durham and cousin of Henry Fell Pease. 205 “New Crowns for Old Ones!,” Punch, 15 April 1876. See Fig. 3.6 for image. For a discussion of this image, see Anthony S. Wohl, “‘Ben JuJu’: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon,” Jewish History 10, no 2 (1996): 102–103. 206 See p. 415 of E. A. Freeman, “Present Aspects of the Eastern Question,” Fortnightly Review 20 (new series), no. 118 (1 October 1876), 409–423.

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Fig. 3.6 “New Crowns for Old Ones!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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alliance for ulterior, mysterious motives rather than plain ones. By the time the Atrocities had gathered the attention of the great Liberal leaders (chief among them Gladstone, who blamed “Judaic sympathies” for the Government’s actions207 ), the Cawnpore rhetoric served to reflect the next logical step, amplifying the imperial connection with a veiled threat of action with regard to Bulgaria. Hugh Childers, who had been Gladstone’s First Lord of the Admiralty and would be appointed his War Minister when the Liberals returned to power, evoked the memory of Cawnpore in a speech to the Wesleyan Missionary Society on September 26, reviewing the kinds of events that had motivated the use of Britain’s might in the past: And what roused the country to a man to put down the great Indian Mutiny? Not the great political questions connected with the rebellion of the native troops, but such atrocities as culminated at Cawnpore…Let it be well remembered that England abhorred and would not allow cruelty, and it was cruelty, and that that alone, which had led the English people to adopt such a determined tone with respect to the atrocities committed on the Christians in the East of Europe.208

In other words, it was shameful actions committed against white civilians in India that motivated a general concerted response, not the partisan quibbling over the nature of the British-Indian relationship. In Bulgaria’s case, it was Britain’s general outrage over Christian deaths at the hands of the Ottomans’ bashi-bazouks that should force British policy to shift from supporting the Ottoman Empire, not some equation in the cold, cynical calculation of the British Empire’s material interests. The only difference between the two was first that the Bulgarian Atrocities—where no British subjects were involved—was worse than the quintessential massacre in the Victorian mind, and second that in 1857 the British government had done something and in 1876 it had not. 207 Letter from Gladstone to L. Glückstein, printed as “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 13 October 1876, p. 7, col. F. Derby called this a “strange letter, which nobody understands,” commenting that it was not clear if Gladstone meant Disraeli, the Rothschilds, or the “Telegraph people,” meaning Joseph Moses Levy and his son Edward Levy-Lawson, who owned the Daily Telegraph—see Derby Diaries, 13 October 1876, 333. 208 Contents of speech reported in “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 27 September 1876, col. A, p. 6.

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In this sense, the Cawnpore metaphor shows that what was being fought over was what sociopolitical grouping had the right to determine how Britain would go about managing Eastern affairs. The question of whether or not Britain had a place in that role was not up for discussion. When the old Radical John Bright met the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Northcote, in a railway carriage in the fall of 1876 and told Northcote that Britain should let “natural forces” prevail, Bright employed a type of anti-imperialism that was an anachronistic contrast to the new idea of Britain’s “moral force” in the world, as Pease had neatly put it.209 It was clear to most Britons that they had earned their Eastern stripes at Cawnpore and in the Rebellion at large, and that it was thus appropriate to use this experience and Britain’s international rights to construct a policy that was good for all Britons, their imperial subjects, and any external group they deemed worthy of protection. What was unclear was how to reconcile the conflicting views Britons held regarding what the solution to the Eastern Question exactly entailed and what kind of role Britain’s empire should take in the resolution of the problem.

Two Eastern Questions, Two Empires The 1876 Parliamentary session was due to end on August 15 and as the month wore on it soon it became clear that there was no chance that Disraeli and the Tories could stabilize the political situation in Britain without shifting the Government’s policy. As Derby wrote, “the events in Bulgaria have destroyed entirely the sympathy felt in England for Turkey.”210 The Government’s problems were compounded by the fact that not only were the Liberals unified against the Conservatives’ management of the country’s Eastern policy, but much of the populace in general had begun to express publicly their outrage over the Bulgarian Atrocities and advocated some kind of official action specifically in support of the Bulgarians’ cause. The tone set in the news media by the Daily News and the Northern Echo also began to spread: by mid-August The Times 209 Qtd. in Andrew Lang, Life, Letters, and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, First Earl of Iddesleigh, new edition (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1891), 288. This quote is from a memorandum Northcote wrote in September 1880, several months after the Liberals took over, called “Some Notes on the Foreign Policy of the Late Government.” 210 Derby Diaries, 29 August 1876, 321.

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had followed the trend, to the point of suggesting the Cabinet and Sir Henry Elliot were engaged in a cover-up of the massacres rather than, as the Government claimed, a search for more information.211 The public’s growing distrust meant that eventually the Government would have to formulate an official response to the Atrocities, which conceivably implied a policy shift regarding the Eastern Question. However, what Britain’s policy shift would be and to what degree Britain should officially acknowledge a switch toward sympathy with the Bulgarians was in question. Only the most politically marginal of the Liberals (or iconoclasts, like Lord Stratford de Redcliffe212 ) were willing to advocate outright support of the Bulgarian insurrection against Ottoman authorities, as to do so was in direct defiance of the Crimean system and implied support for Russia’s calls to intervene and drive the Ottomans from Europe. Liberal leaders saw no future, internal or external, in following Russia’s lead. Neither Hartington nor Granville would countenance the idea of allying with Russia against the Ottoman Empire directly; both inherited the legacy of Russophobia engendered by the horrors of the Crimea, especially Hartington.213 Despite the growing market for Turcophobic, anti-Muslim sentiment in the Liberal and moderate press and political organizations, the leadership could not afford to venture down such a path unless absolutely politically viable, lest it backfire and end up giving more power to the Conservatives. It was not just cynicism that made the Liberals cautious, however, but basic reality: any major external policy change had to pass the tests of both the domestic and the international political environments, something that the Liberal leadership was neither able nor necessarily inclined to do. Public pressure was one thing, but official political action quite another. Gladstone, though, had a well-known ability to mate internationalist action with domestic sentiment, even if this quality at times ran counter to Britain’s official obligations in the international sphere. This was not a trait wholly derived from Gladstone’s personal sense of global political ethics, but rather was the result of his strong ability to judge what 211 The Times, 8 August 1876, col. B, p. 7. 212 Lord Stratford did not affiliate officially with any party in his capacity in the House

of Lords—see Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe: From His Memoirs and Private and Official Papers, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888), 455–456. 213 For Hartington’s feelings on Russia, see Jackson, 76–77.

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the most important members of the body politic—whether in terms of the Parliamentary/Cabinet elite or the so-called “upper ten thousand” of British society—would support or, at least, allow.214 Indeed, his support as prime minister for Russia’s remilitarization of the Black Sea in 1871 was just such a move: he calculated that it would have benefits for Britain’s role in international affairs while not directly threatening the British Empire’s Eastern interests nor the Liberals’ position in domestic politics. Two weeks after the end of the session, he noted to Granville his feeling that Parliament had not appropriately discussed the problem or decided on a course of action.215 Hartington chafed at this implication, complaining to Granville that it was Gladstone’s own decision to stand back from the debates in Parliament on the massacres.216 But, while Parliament had been in session, Gladstone deemed that it was not time yet to call for a reckoning, and as an experienced politician, he knew that the Opposition had a better chance of affecting radical change if it were done outside the official debate in Parliament. In that vacuum between sessions, he and the rest of the party could mobilize the growing call for change into a more effective political tool, effectively employing populist political tactics that bypassed Parliamentary protocol. Of course Hartington, a Whig, would be upset at this, but for the “People’s William” a large print-run pamphlet was in no way out of line. On September 6, within a week of writing to Granville with his plan—much of which was spent propped up in bed due to his regular complaint, lumbago217 —Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East had been written, printed, and distributed for sale to the general public. The original 2,000 copies of the pamphlet sold out immediately; within a month it would sell over 200,000 copies.218 Despite its popularity,

214 See Kennedy, 39. 215 Gladstone to Granville, 29 August 1876, The Political Correspondence of Mr.

Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1876–1886, Volume I, 1876–1882, ed. Agatha Ramm (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 3. Hereafter, references to this source will follow the form, “Correspondence direction, date, Gladstone and Granville, 1876–1886, Vol. I , pg.” 216 Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865–1898, 171. Shannon cites here Hartington’s letter to Granville from September 3, 1876, in which Hartington claimed Gladstone misrepresented the opportunity for discussion as less than it actually was (for this letter, see Granville Papers, 30, 29/26). 217 Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1995), 399. 218 Ibid., 400.

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however, there were those who expressed disappointment or confusion with Bulgarian Horrors: Gladstone merely reiterated the Liberal position that the Bulgarian Atrocities exposed the Ottomans’ lack of ability to control their fanatical elements and that Britain’s role in the protection of the Ottoman Empire’s integrity had to be reassessed to address this weakness, especially in the sense of supporting autonomy for Bulgaria and other Ottoman provinces in the Balkans.219 What he contributed was the expression of these issues using a characteristically Gladstonian voice of “righteous indignation,” where the drama of the massacres and his anger over them were articulated as having inspiring a sincere outpouring of emotion and outrage at the crime. Venues like Stead’s Northern Echo were already doing this, but they lacked the widespread credibility that Gladstone had among the populace at large. But the violence of the pamphlet’s language, especially that leveled against Ottoman Muslims as a people and a “race” (the “advancing curse” and “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity,” as he called them220 ), was not balanced by a comparably violent foreign policy recommendation. As Derby wrote, the idea of autonomy was not revolutionary even if the language Gladstone used was: “a tame conclusion for so vehement an invective.”221 Richard Shannon said that Bulgarian Horrors “contained no revelations,” yet was “supremely representative” of popular feeling in its very lack of ingenuity.222 Gladstone, in Shannon’s opinion, was not “exciting popular passion,” but rather “popular passion [excited] Gladstone.”223 There is indeed evidence that Gladstone was personally moved; this was not just a cynical political act. I would, however, add that viewing Bulgarian Horrors as derivative rather than innovative only makes sense if viewed first from the perspective of those for whom the Atrocities had been mapped out with the fullest knowledge available at the time (i.e., MPs, peers, and other members of the political elite). It is not precisely accurate with regard to the awareness of the problem and the proposed solutions among the public at large. In a sense, the pamphlet need not have included any revelations, as it was a vehicle for bringing the issue 219 See Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, 26. 220 Ibid., 9. 221 Derby Diaries, 7 September 1876, 324. 222 Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 110. 223 Ibid.

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to a wider audience and putting the stamp of the Liberal Party upon the growing political pressure movement. Bulgarian Horrors ’ appeal also had a cultural facet, in that reading and discussing it in the context of popular society meant accessing and exploiting the popular British mentality related to the topic, hence the emphasis it placed on painting the Ottomans as a violent, irreligious, foreign horde on European soil. These themes appealed to a large portion of Victorian society; negative Orientalist images, as the Batak-Cawnpore metaphor exhibits, were very much in vogue. It is therefore not really that important what Gladstone’s motive was, as the result was an expectation that decisive political action would follow his charismatic call for it. Writing something turns significance over to the reader, and British readers sympathetic to the feeling in Bulgarian Horrors immediately thought the pamphlet (and its quotable phrases) inspired rapid and revolutionary change even if such proposals went beyond or contradicted the author’s original intent. After Bulgarian Horrors was published, hundreds of public meetings were held across Britain, all of which included speeches modeled on the vigor of Gladstone’s pamphlet or, conversely, preached adherence to whatever the Conservative Government decided was the best course of action. In both cases, these meetings drew up, voted on, and sent petitions to the Queen and to the Foreign Office. These speeches and petitions portray what might be called a “second” Eastern Question. If the prevailing definition of the Eastern Question—now connected explicitly with the Conservative Government—referred to the problems surrounding the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the manner in which Britain should engage the issue in order to protect its interests, the second Eastern Question held that Britain had a role in making sure Christians in the East were liberated from the rule of non-Christians or by some other foreign, despotic force.224 Further, while the former Eastern Question was managed via diplomatic channels, the solution to this new version of the Eastern Question

224 A debate over this same issue occurred at the beginning of the Crimean War,

in which critics of siding with the Ottomans voiced as one of their reasons that it was not right to champion Muslim rulers of Christian subjects as this was, ipso facto, despotic. Anti-Russian Britons answered that Russia was more substantively despotic than the Ottomans were—see Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 149–151.

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required direct involvement of Britain and the other Great Powers, given the revolutionary nature of an action that would divest the Ottoman Empire of most of its population and the bulk of its economy. Accordingly, the second Eastern Question implied a new interpretation of the British Empire’s role in the world that was neither the typical Disraelian “glorious empire” type nor the existing “empire of free trade” espoused previously by the bulk of the Liberals. This was a moral vision of empire, and the East was a place deemed in need of Britain’s moralizing powers. Early on, petitioners calling for action on behalf of the Bulgarian Christians had established a general format for public meetings, first stressing that the meeting was intended to, as in one example, “give expression to the sympathy felt for the people of Bulgaria in the shameful atrocities which they are suffering at the hands of their inhuman enemies the Turks and to press upon the Government of this country the duty of doing everything in its power to put a stop to such horrid cruelties.”225 Henry Fell Pease’s term “unprecedented barbarities” often replaced “cruelties,” while the phrase “horror and indignation” was a nearly ubiquitous inclusion in the petitioners’ premise. Nearly all demanded that Sir Henry Elliot be removed and replaced. It was also common for the petitioners to raise the issue of British Christians’ solidarity with Bulgarian Christians and other Ottoman Christians, linking Christian religious and political freedom with the Eastern Question: “civil and religious liberty to the inhabitants of the provinces of Turkey” was vital to any final “solution to the Eastern difficulty.”226 As Gladstone’s pamphlet gave political credence to popular activity, the issue of the Eastern Question’s solution became more publicly prominent, transforming an elite activity into what the petitioners assumed to be the interest and responsibility of the average Briton. This led to the rendering of the Eastern Question and the British policy according to what petitioners cared about, regardless of whether it was congruent with the realities of policymaking. Indeed, a number of petitions prominently stated that the “practical independence” of Bulgaria and the other Balkan provinces was essential for any “firm and lasting settlement to the Eastern Question,” a goal much more drastic than autonomy and

225 Petition from public meeting at Middlesbrough, 31 August 1876, FO 78/2551, f.

15. 226 Petition from public meeting at Exeter, 4 September 1876, FO 78/2551, f. 45.

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in contrast to the policy held by all Governments (including Gladstone’s) since the Crimean War, which stressed protection of the essential integrity of the Ottoman Empire.227 To say that any solution to the Eastern Question, which as a policy issue had always dealt with the potential effect of Ottoman disintegration, had to come with the precondition that the Ottoman Empire be divested, by coercion if necessary, of its Balkan territories exhibits the fact that for the Agitation the Eastern Question referred to a very different set of issues than for the political authorities. For the Agitation, the plight of Ottoman Christians was the Eastern Question, and the protection of them from Muslim Ottoman abuse and the support of their independence was the solution. Britons’ cultural fascination with the perceived negative qualities of “the Turks” and, conversely, the perception of Christian righteousness were vital components in determining what petitioners felt were the relevant facts. Notably, the petitions contrasted the idea of Christian liberty with the religious and political environment engendered by the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, a “corrupt and moribund State which is a disgrace to Europe and to Civilisation,” as one petition stated.228 Another petition was more blunt, calling the Atrocities “the inevitable consequences of Mahometan rule over a Christian people, which is at all times a dire oppression.”229 This view was shared by the “Women of Coventry,” who drew attention in their petition to the “women, maidens, and infants” who were raped, abducted, and killed, urging the Government to find some way of stopping these acts “not only in Bulgaria, but in all other places within the Turkish Empire.”230 The notion that the East was, categorically, a place defined by abuse of women—especially white, Christian women—is reminiscent of what Jenny Sharpe has called the “racial memory” of the Indian Rebellion, after which Britons interchanged racial and gender categories to make sense of

227 See, for example, petition from public meeting at Balcombe, 13 September, FO 78/2551, f. 373. 228 Petition from public meeting at Birkenhead, 4 September 1876, FO 78/2551, f.

23. 229 Petition from public meeting at Warminster, 26 September 1876, FO 78/2554, f.

12. 230 “Memorial from the Women of Coventry,” 26 September 1876, FO 78/2554, f.

92.

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difficulties in administering Eastern populations.231 In this sense, the petitioners’ purpose was to call attention not just to the Atrocities but to the status of Christians in the Ottoman Empire in general, which was an issue whose resolution was “the cause of Christianity and humanity itself.”232 Intriguingly, some petitions evoked not just general values, but specifically English values and history in their rhetoric supporting Bulgarian autonomy. At Weston-super-Mare, the petitioners elegantly connected the lessons of Britain’s past with the Balkan Christian present: Valuing the blessings of liberty and remembering the conflicts and sacrifices by which the freedom of our country has been achieved, this Meeting expresses its sympathy with the Principalities now so severely suffering in their patriotic efforts to free themselves from the oppression which for so many centuries has made the security of life and property well-nigh impossible, and [impresses] upon the Government of the Country the necessity of taking such a decided but pacific course of action as may assist the oppressed peoples to attain the advantages of self-government and the priceless boon of national and personal freedom.233

We see here that the Agitation saw the role of Britain in the response to the Bulgarian Atrocities and in the Eastern Question as a whole as the first among equals of the European states and the Christian world. And certainly, in keeping with this position Britain’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire was “unworthy of a civilized people” and should be dissolved.234 Later in September a common refrain would emerge in the petitions, speaking of “uniting with the other great powers” to find lasting

231 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2–3. Also, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 232 Petition from public meeting at Theydon Bois, 26 September 1876, FO 78/2554,

f. 27. 233 Petition from public meeting at Weston-super-Mare, 6 September 1876, FO 78/ 2551, f. 287. 234 Petition from public meeting at Swaffham, 15 September 1876, FO 78/2553, f.

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peace.235 But there was no doubt who should lead this union of likeminded, civilized nations, as Britain alone possessed both the democratic political climate and the unimpeachable international respect to offer, as one petition put it, “the voice of the people…spoken by its representatives in the Nation’s Council and before the World.”236 British thinking was civilized, moral thinking, and as such, it would of course be of the unified-front type. Thus, though it made no sense to turn away powers who felt similarly about the Ottomans’ crimes, the implication was that no other nation could lead. The great enemy of the Ottomans, Russia, was well known for its censorship of public dialogue—just one component of the widely-felt suspicion of Russian autocracy. And of the other Great Powers only one, France, could claim provision for the “voice of the people” to be heard. Yet France was an unknown quantity just five years out from its declaration of a republic; a British-French alliance was never a prominent part of the Agitation’s tone. Britain, as both a nation and an international entity, was therefore best situated to do for unfree people what free people knew was right and good. The Government was deemed out of step with the standards of this role, instead pursuing a line that was “weak, vacillating, and unworthy of a Christian Country.”237 None of this, however, was explicitly imperialistic, nor is there any reason to construct a vision of the situation that includes a hidden imperial agenda on the part of the Agitation. It should be clear that its adherents were earnest in their desires for justice in Bulgaria, and that their call for a “pacific” solution was genuinely felt. But they used the language available to them at the time to explain why Britain should act, how it should do so, and to what extent it should go to affect the changes that the Agitation felt were necessary for Britain to live with itself in the future. In doing so, a subtext of Britain’s external moral authority appears in their arguments, a language all the more pronounced as it came from those who traditionally considered themselves within the anti-imperial camp. This forced them to fashion an explicit and defensible logic for why morally-driven 235 This phrase appears in some form in the majority of anti-Government petitions from meetings held from the middle of September and into October—see FO 78/2552–2555. 236 Petition from public meeting at Peterborough, undated (based on preceding/ succeeding petitions, held likely around September 15), FO 78/2552, f. 173. 237 Petition from the Durham County Franchise Association, 16 September 1876, f. 224–225.

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acts might be necessary and just—even if such acts were (or perhaps because they were) contrary to the cold logic of Britain’s imperial interests. Instead, as Stoyan Tchaprazov has argued, the Agitation seems to have displayed a “compassionate colonialism,” which proceeded from the deeper context of Victorian politics and culture.238 In this view, Britain held a responsibility to oversee the well-being of less fortunate peoples, but, crucially, felt no responsibility to support specific nationalist movements like in Bulgaria.239 Likewise, people like W. T. Stead saw the Bulgarian Atrocities as a venue primarily for commenting on its relationship to general ills in British society, especially provincial Britain’s unjust subservience to London.240 Thus, the friendship that papers like the Northern Echo professed for Bulgaria and its cause may have been mostly symbolic, the Eastern Question serving as a code for other concerns in no way related to Eastern matters. As for the Agitation’s unofficial leader, Gladstone, the Eastern Question came to represent, in Biagini’s phrase, the “moral discernment” of the masses, who had shown a “virtuous passion” in rising up against the Government’s craven and selfish policy.241 This was an opportunity to use a usually abstract problem for “practical politics.”242 On the other side, just as the Conservatives saw the Eastern Question as an issue of the security, diplomatic position, and material interests of the British Empire, they broadcast their own vision of the idea and role of the Empire in their petitions. Pro-Government petitions pepper the piles of the pro-Bulgaria ones from the beginning of the Agitation, but by late September they began to appear with more frequency. From the middle of October to December, pro-Government petitions were almost the only ones received by the Foreign Office, even though in the final total they never equaled the magnitude of those from the pro-Bulgaria campaign.243 238 Tchaprazov, 22 (paragraph). 239 Ibid., 23 (paragraph). 240 Goldsworthy, 395. 241 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 388. The second quote is from Glad-

stone, which Biagini cites Shannon as having provided in Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 106–107. 242 Ibid. 243 By my count, out of a total of about 500 petitions sent from the end of August

to late December around 150 were from pro-Government sources with the remainder

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Just as the pro-Bulgaria petitions repeated the refrain of “horror and indignation,” petitions in support of the Government had many standard elements. Mostly from Conservative associations and working men’s clubs, they almost invariably expressed “unabated” or “implicit” confidence in the Government, praising its conduct as “able,” “patriotic,” and “honourable.” Others referred to Derby’s “masterly policy” and their “sympathy” with him and his colleagues for their troubles.244 As the weeks progressed, petitioners increasingly referred negatively to the Agitation and the politicians who supported it, such as one which said “crafty and subtle Politicians” were using the plight of the Bulgarians for political gain.245 Another called the Agitation “unjust and factitious,”246 while another went as far as saying it meant to “subvert the Constitution.”247 A worse insult perhaps was the claim that the Agitation’s actions were “inconsistent with their position as Englishmen.”248 The Liberals were seen as the true instigators of the “grave crisis” affecting the country, as they manipulatively sapped the public support to which the Government was “entitled.”249 The Agitation was thus portrayed not as a popular

from the opposite. The bulk of the pro-Bulgaria petitions were sent to the Foreign Office in September, while the pro-Government ones arrived from October on. These figures apply to all material in the FO 78/2551–2556 shelfmarks, which appears to be the main body of petitions sent to the Foreign Office during this period that had to do specifically with the Bulgarian Atrocities and Britain’s response to it. This collection also contains numerous personal letters (over 100) sent to the Foreign Office on the Atrocities and on Eastern affairs, which when considered together do not show any particular tone holding a clear majority. 244 See, for example, petition from Barton-upon-Irwell Constitutional Club, 17 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 70. 245 Petition from “the Conservatives of this City” (city not specified on document), included in a letter from D. McCay, 21 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 77–79. 246 Petition from Finsbury Conservative Association, Upper Holloway District, 12 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 98–99. 247 Petition from Newington Conservative Association, 4 November 1876, FO 78/ 2556, f. 165–169. 248 Petition from North Staffordshire Union of Conservative Clubs, 20 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 60–61. 249 Petition from Edinburgh Conservative Working Men’s Association, 1 November 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 143–144.

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groundswell but a partisan sham, with the Liberals “wantonly” promoting their party agenda at the “sacrifice of the best interests of this country.”250 The Tory petitioners’ invocation of the rhetorical power of “British interests” displays the discursive slippage between British interests and imperial interests, allowing for the advocating of external policy based on internal political rules. In pro-Government petitions, the interests of England, Britain, the country, or the nation are fluidly interchanged with the interests of the British Empire. There is little distinction between how the petitioners used these terms, just that pro-Government petitioners believed only the Conservatives could properly “maintain the honour, interests, and integrity of the British Empire.”251 War with Russia was another fear they broadcast, with Russia’s containment in the East portrayed as imperative to the survival of the British Empire. The Foreign Affairs Committees (the descendants of the “Urquhartites,” so named for their famously pro-Ottoman founder, David Urquhart) wrote at length on the matter: “[Alexander II said] ‘Constantinople is the key of my house,’ but that key is in the hands of the Turk, and with it also the security of the British Empire…Oh! that Englishmen would dare to look their real enemy in the face before it be too late.”252 And in a dramatic turn, Major Frederick de Dohsé, a self-proclaimed authority on “Oriental life,” offered his opinion in the form of a Russophobic poem, closing with an evocation of the tragedy that awaited the British Empire if it stayed at rest: To arms! ye warriors true and brave, Britannia’s shield and pride! On Turkish soil there stands the Slav, Backed by a mighty guide! 250 Petition from Finsbury Conservative Association, Stoke Newington District, 30 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 140. Some petitions baldly insisted, contrary to all other evidence, that the Agitation’s feelings were those of just a small part of the public—see, for example, petition from Southwark Conservative Registration Association and Council, 20 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 58–59. 251 Petition from Barnard Castle Conservative Association, 26 October 1876, FO 78/ 2556, f. 142. See also, in a similar manner, petition from Ryde Conservative Club, 10 November 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 183–185. 252 Petition from Conference of the Foreign Affairs Committees, 2 October 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 74–75. Emphasis is in original. For information on David Urquhart and the Foreign Affair Committees, see John Salt, “Local Manifestations of the Urquhartite Movement,” International Review of Social History 13 (1968): 350–365.

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Be on your guard, and cast on him An eager, watchful eye, To mar [sic, likely intended as “mark] in time his secret scheme, So vast and bold and sly.

She is Britannia’s bitter’st foe, Fast working in disguise, To strike at once a heavy blow At her to gain the prize.

Ye warriors! hear my warning voice, Distrust the lurking bear, Who long has brooded on the ice To take his final share.

There never was so good a chance For him to take his prey, Enough the danger to enhance Of his enormous sway.

O, hasten then, your time is short, Prepare and hurry on, Ere he has safely reached the port, And England’s hope is gone.253

In such circumstances, it seemed to the Tory associations that only clear, universal support of the Government could protect the British Empire and world from the “horrors of war.”254 At the same time, however, 253 De Dohsé, then a Captain, claimed his knowledge of “Oriental life” in an offer to the Foreign Office to go to Abyssinia in 1867 to secure the release of several British subjects from captivity, a situation which later led to the Abyssinian Campaign to free them. His offer was turned down—see “Further Correspondence respecting the British Captives in Abyssinia,” No. 88–89, State Papers: Abyssinia, Parl.Pap. (“Blue Books”) C.3918 (1867), p. 96. De Dohsé would also offer his services in 1877 to the War Office but War Secretary Gathorne Hardy declined—see Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 235, col. 822 (6 July 1877). Letter and poem from Frederick de Dohsé, 7 October 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 194–195. 254 Petition from West Ham Conservative Association, 18 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 85–86.

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the protection of the “National Interests of England” was more important than mere avoidance of conflict with Russia: the Government should see to the interests first and then “if possible preserve peace.”255 The conflict between the Russian and British Empires was a zero-sum game in Russophobes’ minds; the eventuality of renewed conflict was now “almost inevitable” in their calculations.256 In consequence of this worldview, the “real interest of the Empire” was in the maintenance, at all costs, of the British Empire’s place in the international order during the Eastern Crisis, while the moral or human interests espoused by the Agitation merely false piety that “a portion of the Liberal Party” sold for political gain.257 Britain’s empire protected the British people, and therefore, it needed protection itself. This was what mattered, not the plight of Ottoman Christians, whose lives and livelihood were not “real interests” of the British Empire. Some of the strongest imperial language comes from petitions from Ulster’s Orange Order organizations. This helps prove the primacy of existing political dynamics in determining one’s position on the matter. The Orangemen were some of the most vociferously anti-Liberal due to their central motivation as Irish unionists, a principle to which only the Tories were unanimously sympathetic.258 This appears to have inflated their rhetoric about the negative nature of the Agitation and the risk it posed to Britain’s international position and to the British Empire. In the mind of the Lisburn Orangemen, the Agitation had “misled the Insurgents as to the true state of feeling in the United Kingdom,”259 and thus, in another group’s words, should a war break out the blame 255 Petition from Grantham Working Men’s Conservative Club, 25 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 112. 256 Petition from Devizes Conservative Association, 20 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 62–64. 257 Petition from “a number of the residents” of South Shields, 25 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 110–111. Notably, in the petition the phrase “a portion of” has been inserted, via a caret, to mitigate the meeting’s original claim that the Liberal Party as a whole has organized the Agitation. 258 Of course, Orangemen were not universally pleased with Conservative policy, being “Protestant first and Conservative second,” nor were English Conservatives necessarily Orange, but there was no support for the Liberal Party from the Orange Order—see Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 182. 259 Petition from Lisborn District Orangemen, 21 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 109.

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would rest on the shoulders of “a portion of the Opposition (led by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe)…who – we firmly believe – would not hesitate to sacrifice the honor and dignity of the Empire to the exigencies of party.”260 The Ballymine Orangemen agreed that the Agitation was “misleading to foreign minds in regard to the feelings of the British Empire on the subject” and thus was not only an “unpatriotic” movement but an “unconstitutional” one.261 Perhaps the most extreme (and most revealing) take on the matter came from the Liverpool Orangemen, who declared that “if the schemes of these Liberal leaders were at any time to prove successful and they were again to come into power, the Throne and Constitution would be imperrilled [sic] and irreparable injury done to the best interests of the British Empire.”262 Therefore, to Ulster’s pro-British populace the empire served as a totem for all things that either support or threaten the Orangemen’s particular values. Consequently, it could be inverted: a risk to the Orangemen’s interests was a risk to imperial ones. Of course, the Orangemen’s fears stemmed from their stakes in the Irish Question. For them, the specter of Irish nationalism was preeminent, with Fenian terrorists lurking behind the screen of the Home Rule League (which had 60 MPs in Parliament) and Irish-friendly Liberals.263 But what is remarkable about the Orangemen’s amplification of the Conservative position is not that people prioritized their particular domestic political positions, but rather that these same people do not appear to have been moved by something that really should have moved them more substantially. After all, there had been a huge, terrible massacre and it would not until much later become clear that the killings had in fact stopped months before the Agitation began. To those watching at the time, those 12,000+ were only the start.

260 Petition from Armagh District Orangemen, 24 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 102–103. Along with Gladstone’s pamphlet, Lowe’s speeches helped set the Agitation’s tone—see Seton-Watson, 87, 104. 261 Petition from 2nd Ballymine District Orange Lodge, 1 November 1876, FO 78/ 2556, f. 148–149. 262 Petition from Liverpool Loyal Orange Lodge, 13 November 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 187–188. 263 See Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1998: War, Peace and Beyond (London: Blackwell, 2010), 106–108.

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With this in mind, then, the strength of the Agitation was remarkably weak and transient, even if it is clear that its adherents were sincere. The hold of existing political divisions on the British public’s mind was very strong, and savvy Conservative politicians could do much to subvert and reverse what counted as “popular feeling.” The later co-founder of the Primrose League, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, wrote that he overruled a public meeting called by the Agitation by carting in Government supporters in wagons to the meeting hall, using the Tory “electioneering organization, which was then in a most perfect condition.”264 In another, odder case the mayor of Stalybridge, Robert Stanley, would not allow a public meeting in support of the Bulgarians to take place because he insisted that the insurrections were all a plot by Russian agents.265 He then contrived a meeting in support of the Government, which produced one of the few petitions which did not come from a specific organization affiliated with the Conservative Party.266 Significantly, Stanley later converted to Islam, changed his name to Reschid, and became a noted figure in the British Muslim community.267 Stanley’s activities are a rare example of a truly pro-Ottoman stance put up against the pro-Bulgaria position. This instance and the petition from the Foreign Affairs Committees are about as close as we get to anything resembling Turcophilia, which was shown once again to not be the necessary correlate of Russophobia. One man even wrote to Derby to personally express sympathy with the latter’s treatment at the hands of the Agitation and then added that if the Government sanctioned the Ottoman’s policy regarding the insurrection (which it essentially had done all through the summer) it would “constitute one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of England.”268

264 Henry Drummond Wolff, Rambling Recollections, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), 140. Ironically, Wolff would later protest that another public meeting held in his constituency, Christchurch, that supported the Agitation was the work of Liberal electioneers, who had packed the hall with people from outside the borough, also carted in by wagon—see Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 234, col. 403 (7 May 1877). 265 “A Mayor Refusing to Call a Bulgarian Indignation Meeting,” The Preston Guardian, 16 September 1876, p. 3, col. G. 266 See petition from meeting at Stalybridge, 26 October 1876, FO 78/2556, f. 115. 267 See “A Distinguished British Musselman,” The Crescent, 3 April 1907. 268 Letter from William Price, 30 September 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 38–39.

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Nor did there need to be much evidence of a true countermovement for the Tories to proceed along the old well-traveled routes. Pro-Government public meetings were rare: one petition is signed by almost 200 people, named as “burgesses and inhabitants” of the town.269 Another has about 75 signatures from “a number of residents.”270 And of course the readers of Tory newspapers at least implicitly supported the Government. But unlike the Agitation, the pro-Government forces were ultimately Conservative Party proxies, their foot-soldiers, and the politicians themselves. It was not a groundswell like the Agitation, and that suited the Conservative leaders just fine. What they wanted were assurances of support from those who already supported them and would reinforce the Government’s position—that is, the people who mattered.

Conclusion: Pressure and Response As the fall wore on and the petitions from Conservative groups strengthened an alternate position to that of the Agitation, the Conservatives took heart that they could gain control of the discourse by staying on message and waiting out the storm. Disraeli and other Conservative leaders relied on the idea that the Agitation was quickly fading and that a sizable, though not very well-defined portion of the public supported the Government absolutely. Indeed, they almost seem to have begun dismissing the Agitation while it was still by all other accounts in full force. Already by the middle of September, Derby noted that the “agitation…has begun to subside,”271 while Disraeli had already written to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Cairns, prior to this to claim rather preemptively that “Derby has quenched the agitation.”272 At the end of the month, Derby felt comfortable to comment: “Resolutions denouncing Turkey continue to pour in, but they are now mostly from small meetings, & at least half are got up by dissenting preachers.”273 And by the middle of October, Derby

269 Petition from meeting at South (Lincoln), 3 October 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 81–85. 270 Petition from “a number of the residents” of South Shields, 25 October 1876, FO

78/2556, f. 110–111. 271 Derby Diaries, 14 September 1876, 326. 272 Disraeli to Cairns, 12 September 1876, PRO 30/51/1, f. 142. 273 Derby Diaries, 27 September 1876, 330.

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deemed “public feeling” to have “changed in a singular way,” implying that sympathy with the Government’s position was on the rise.274 Participants in the Agitation do not appear to have shared Derby’s view. Many years later, W. T. Stead would chafe at Wolff’s claim of having witnessed the turning point of the Agitation at a meeting the latter doctored into a taking a pro-Government position.275 Stead declared Wolff guilty of a “flattering delusion,” insisting instead that the “agitation did not reach its high water-mark” until December, when the Constantinople Conference was arranged.276 The Conservatives do not seem to have been very worried about the Agitation after September, though, feeling they had it in hand with their strong, integrated network of political organizations. Long before December, the Queen, who held a publicly (but not privately) muted suspicion of the Agitation and adherents, said that she felt less worried about Eastern affairs than she had been at the height of the Agitation, as she thought the Government had secured a path to order despite challenges posed by the fracas.277 The Queen’s interest in the East was palpable in this period, and it was clear which side she fell on—a place surely not unaided by her wellknown friendship with Disraeli, which was equaled by her disdain for Gladstone.278 Visiting the Queen at Balmoral in November, Richmond wrote that she so liked an anti-Atrocitarian, explicitly anti-Gladstonian pamphlet, Tory Horrors by Alfred Austin (Britain’s Poet Laureate, from 1896 to 1913), that she ordered two extra copies to distribute herself!279

274 Ibid., 10 October 1876, 332. 275 W. T. Stead, “The Book of the Month: The Tory Labouchere,” Review of Reviews

37, no. 218 (1908), 209. This article is not signed by Stead but J. O. Baylen claims that Stead generally wrote the “Book of the Month” article personally—see p. 76 of “W. T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the ‘Review of Reviews,’” Victorian Periodicals Review 12, no. 2 (1979): 70–84. 276 Ibid. 277 Richmond to Cairns, 30 October 1876, PRO 30/51/3, f. 121. 278 Earlier in October, Richmond commented that the Queen was “very much

perturbed” and “anxious” about the Eastern Crisis, and she urged the Cabinet to “advise Turkey to appeal to the Great Powers in the event of a threatened invasion of by Russia”—see Richmond to Cairns, 22 October 1876, PRO 30/51/3, f. 113–114. 279 Richmond to Cairns, 14 November 1876, PRO 30/51/3, f. 130. Richmond supposed that the Queen wanted to use one of the copies “for the purpose ‘educating’ Ponsonby,” her private secretary.

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The Government’s response to popular pressure was not very robust, even if it is clear that they were alive to the issue. War Secretary Gathorne Hardy wrote that the Cabinet, especially Disraeli, was misguided on the issue of public outrage, telling Cairns that “the stir about the atrocities is I think real.”280 Derby, who of the Cabinet fielded the greatest mass of the Agitation and the pro-Government petitions and letters, similarly noted his wonder at the rapid shift in public opinion: The change is certainly remarkable: meetings are being held daily in the provinces…the hope is expressed that we will have nothing more to do with the Turks, except to help in turning them out of Europe. To a considerable extent, these meetings are got up for party purposes, being generally attended by Liberal M.P.s and nonconformist preachers: but undoubtedly represent also a large amount of genuine popular feeling. The outcry is so far inconvenient that it weakens our hands abroad, & strengthens those of Russian statesmen, but it is not unnatural, and at this time of year can do little harm.281

Derby does not appear to have changed this opinion much as time went on—in fact, a month later he would reflect that it was “odd that in what is considered to be, & really is, a diplomatic crisis, I have not personally as hard work to do as often in more quiet times I have had.”282 Yet there is evidence that he was at least well aware of the scope and depth of the effect of the Agitation. Throughout the petition campaign, Derby and T. V. Lister, the Permanent Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, noted their receipt and basic apprehension of the petitions in each case: all the petitions bear both Lister’s and Derby’s signatures evidencing their personal handling of the material. How deep they went in reading each one cannot be clear, especially since many of the petitions are cast in identical terms, just issuing from different towns and groups. At times, though, Lister and Derby added additional comments to each another, with some telling results. The petitions and letters were, as a

280 Hardy to Cairns, 29 August 1876, PRO 30/51/7, f. 97. 281 Derby Diaries, 2 September 1876, 323. 282 Ibid., 11 October 1876, 333.

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rule, acknowledged in a return letter, while on several pro-Government petitions Derby wrote the phrase, “They should be thanked.”283 They even appear to have read the dozens of letters, some very long, promoting each writer’s own solution to the Eastern Crisis and the Eastern Question in general. As is the nature of political letters outlining personal policy solutions, these are at times strange and muddled, such as one that insisted at length that the British had to abandon the Suez Canal, blast a channel from Aqaba to the Dead Sea, and then another from there to the Mediterranean through Palestine, a plan which the writer insisted was in keeping with the prophecies of Ezekiel.284 This is far from the most peculiar letter that appears alongside the petitions, an honor held by another one which offers a cryptic disquisition on both the writer’s proposed solution to the Eastern Question in tandem with his personal take on the methods by which astronomers calculated the distance to the moon.285 Evidently, the author believed such things were, at the very least, of interest to those concerned with foreign affairs—the moon, after all, is foreign to the earth! On the back of this strange piece of mail, Lister noted, “Mad - programme for the Congress is extensive,” to which Derby replied, in an amused voice atypical of the stolid lord, “He is as sane as a good many men.”286 283 See, for example, petition from Finsbury Conservative Association, Highbury

District, 6 October 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 163–165; petition from Norwich Conservatives Central Club, 6 October 1876, FO 78/2555, 166. 284 Letter from G. Pearce Pocock, 7 October 1876, FO 78/2555, f. 184–190. Pocock

claimed that this plan would allow Jews to return to the area, aided by their influence in the “money markets” and in keeping with other aspects of Biblical prophecy. Britain would then be “marked” as the “approved Agents of the Almighty,” and benefit as a country and an empire. Pocock, whose words portray him as possibly sympathetic to the millennialist “Irvingites” (named for their leader, Edward Irving, who in the early nineteenth century preached of Jesus’s imminent Second Coming—see “Irving, Edward (1792–1834),” Stewart J. Brown in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/14473), kept on this tack: in 1883 he wrote to The Builder (an architectural trade paper), of his plan, using almost the exact same words and arrangement of his 1876 letter to the Foreign Office. Although in this instance he omitted his belief that Britain would be divinely favored by undertaking his plan, he still thought it necessary to mention that Ezekiel’s prophecy drove his zeal for the project—see “Red Sea and Mediterranean Junction and Valley of the Jordan,” The Builder, 9 June 1883, col. C, p. 794. 285 Letter to Derby (unsigned), 14 September 1876, 78/2552, f. 76. 286 Ibid.

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This truly absurd letter and the pair’s dryly humorous exchange in fact helps establish proof of their careful scrutiny of the material sent to the Foreign Office, as even such confused ramblings were read and communicated by the very real powerbrokers of Britain’s foreign policy apparatus. Policy authorities “listened” to pressure insofar that the petitions and letters that poured in were not merely rubber-stamped. Although we cannot say how closely each petition and letter was read and with what level of seriousness they approached each one, it seems that they were not pushed aside or discarded by the men in power. It is worth reflecting on how the system used in that incompletely democratic era afforded individual opinions more value than in our more fully democratic superstructure, in which the receipt and acknowledgment of letters to top-level dignitaries is handled, Santa-like, via the labor eager, nameless interns and in which an acknowledgment that an executive figure actually read one’s pleas is as locally newsworthy as a neighbor winning the lottery. This all said, we should in any case guard against conflating the effect of the Bulgarian Agitation on Conservative leaders with a shift in Britain toward the Government’s support for the Agitation’s causes. The Conservatives’ opponents often accused them of not listening to what the populace thought. They did listen, but they did not agree with the idea that what the populace thought should translate directly into policy. So as in other cases they sought to understand the pressure campaign in order to defeat it, either by contesting, ignoring, or absorbing its goals and principles. By combating or co-opting the Agitation, the Conservatives used the meetings, the petitions, the speeches, and its friends and opponents in the press to gauge what avenues of action were open to them and which ones were not. In a sense, Tory leaders used the pressure campaign as “strategic intelligence” for combating the effects of the Agitation and the resurgence of a revitalized Liberal Party led by Gladstone. Conservative figures always sought to place the level of public outrage in the context of its relation to the domestic political climate, rather than considering it on its merits. As Derby wrote, the sheer height of indignation was the result of the people having no “other subjects of public interest…I have never known in England so absolute an absence of internal agitation – I mean on any internal question.”287 Although one cannot totally agree with Derby’s

287 Derby Diaries, 10 September 1876, 325.

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assessment (there were plenty of other internal affairs to deal with, such as Fenianism, the stagnant economy, and a mounting agricultural crisis288 ), this remark, along with Disraeli’s early dismissal of the strength of the movement, shows us that the foreign policy leaders understood it as a disturbance of a domestic nature in lieu of other domestic concerns about which to agitate. Moreover, the theme of imperialism neatly dovetails with the dispute over Britain’s role in the Bulgarian Atrocities and the East in general. Although the Agitation was careful to speak of a “peaceful” solution to the Eastern Question, it saw the answer as lying in vigorous European intervention. And despite the fact that the Agitation made clear that they did not condone any initiative involving venal territorial motives, it still was unable to get away from the fact that both the principles and the justification for intervening rested upon the knowledge that Britain was a significant Eastern power and had an investment in overseeing order in the area. For the Conservatives, of course, the matter of British imperialism in the Eastern Question was much easier to reconcile with their existing ideology. They clearly believed that Britain should protect and extend its economic, political, and military power in the East. But for them, the path to power was not paved with flagstones bearing Britain’s moral achievements but rather the bargains it made to secure existing interests. Still, the Government, which was so hesitant to intervene until the Agitation was in full swing, appears to have been able to turn the principle of intervention promoted by the Agitation to its favor, promoting Britain as a strong, decisive force in Europe and the region in the next phase of Britain’s journey through the Eastern Question—the diplomatic attempts to avert a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

288 See Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966), 697–698.

CHAPTER 4

The Triumph of War: The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War in Victorian Society

A Forgotten War The world was not prepared for the utter carnage of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Everyone knew bloodshed was inevitable, but most observers across Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere were much more concerned with the war’s effects on borders and alliances. They presumed that, in military terms, it would be a quick war settled in Russia’s favor.1 That is not what happened. Instead, after the Ottomans rejected Russia’s conditions for peace in late April 1877 and the Russians, already on the move, crossed into Ottoman territory, the door was opened to the most deadly war Europe would see until the First World War. Over the next year, around 250,000 soldiers would die, while anywhere between the tens of thousands to over 200,000 Balkan Muslims were killed and over 50,000 to upwards of 500,000 made into refugees as a result of the war.2 Tens of thousands Christians also fled into Russian-held 1 R. J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83. 2 Michael Clodfelter gives a figure of 215,000 combined dead—see entry in Warfare and Armed Conflict: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (New York: McFarland & Co., 1992), 483, while the Correlates of War Project (ed. by J.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_4

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territory, with additional thousands killed before the end of the war.3 David Singer) calculates the combined death toll at 285,000—see Meredith Reid Sarkees, “The Correlates of War Date on War: An Update to 1997,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 18, no. 1 (2000): 123–144. Given the lack of accuracy of the records available, especially on the Ottoman side, the actual number is most likely somewhere between these two figures. The statistics related to the war’s effect on the civilian population are not only much more difficult to calculate than the military dead but they are also much more contentious both in scholarly and political terms, especially in relation to Bulgaria, the region where the bulk of the fighting took place. Mark Levene’s, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005) puts the number of Bulgarian Muslim civilian dead at “many more tens of thousands” than the estimated 12,000 Bulgarian Christians killed in the Atrocities (see p. 225), while Katherine McCarthy computes the death toll at 216,000 dead of “disease, starvation, or murder” out of a population of 1.4 million Bulgarian Muslims prior to the war, although many of these deaths are to be considered the effects of the war and actually occurred in the years following the war itself—see p. 641 of “BosniaHercegovina,” in Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture, vol. 3, Southeastern Europe, ed. Richard C. Frucht (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 621– 694. Although derived from similar data, this higher end figure appears to be a slightly more reliable number than that put forward by Justin C. McCarthy (no relation to Katherine McCarthy), a well-known Armenian Genocide skeptic, who puts the Bulgarian Muslim civilian death toll at 262,000 and the number of refugees at “perhaps a million”— see Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin, 1995), 64, 90. On the number of refugees, Katherine McCarthy again offers somewhat more sober numbers, finding that by 1890 484,000 Bulgarian Muslims had emigrated, mostly to Ottoman territory, compared to the 1.4 million pre-war population listed above, whereas the noted scholar of Bulgarian history, R. J. Crampton, gives a more conservative figure of 130,000–150,000 Bulgarian Muslim refugees and says that 75,000–80,000 returned after the war ended—see Bulgaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 426. Dirk Hoerder’s figure of 177,000 Muslim refugees Balkans-wide offers a middle point between the two extremes—see Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 448. Outside of Bulgaria, Justin McCarthy’s figures are easier to verify and thus more worthy of note: he computes the number of Bosnian Muslims as having dropped from 695,000 in the 1870 Ottoman census to 449,000 in the 1879 Austrian one, a change of 246,000 either dead or having fled. However, while he has taken into account the change in size and shape of Bosnia between its status as an Ottoman province and its formulation as an Austrian protectorate after 1878 (it was slightly smaller post-1878), but he does not appear to have considered the relative accuracy of Ottoman vs. Austrian census techniques and standards. A similar criticism can be made of his accompanying claim that Serbia lost a third of its Muslim population to death or emigration in roughly the same period—see pp. 80–81 in “Ottoman Bosnia, 1800–1878,” in The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, 2nd ed., ed. Mark Pinson (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1996), 54–83. 3 These numbers are even more difficult to compute than those related to the Balkan Muslims, and they are also just as contentious. Francis Vinton Greene, a US military attaché with the Russian Army during the war, said in 1879 that by the summer of 1877

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It is a grim and mostly forgotten part of history, particularly in Englishlanguage scholarship.4 On the matter of the war’s influence on the international realm, onlookers at the time were closer to the mark in suspecting the outcome would be dramatic. Indeed, although often overlooked by historians, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 stands as a key foundation of many of the political and cultural mechanisms that underpinned the following global imperial epoch of the 1880s to the First World War. In June 1877, The Times presciently commented: In all the wars that have raged in the revolutionary period which extends from 1848 to the present time there has been no movement more colossal, more dramatic, and at the same time more closely affecting the interests

“the Bulgarians [i.e. the Christian ones], to the number of nearly 100,000 souls, were fleeing north over the Balkans,” yet he provides no evidence for this claim other than to state that people were responding to a plenary Ottoman Army directive mandating “a wholesale system of hanging at the street corners” of collaborators—see Report on the Russian Army and Its Campaigns in Turkey in 1877–1878 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1879), 204. The basis of Greene’s claim appears to be from testimony from those fleeing, giving the impression of a rumor, although such a punishment is in no way beyond the realm of the imagination in terms of the era’s military protocol regarding what would have been considered aiding the enemy. James J. Reid says that because the Ottoman defensive network in the Balkans was made up of many small groups of semi-autonomous units, soldiers were fearful at the prospect of being cut off from other units and “if subjects near their camp appeared to side with the enemy, then this paranoia could provoke aggressive intimidation, assault, and even massacre to prevent overwhelming attacks by both the enemy army and rebellious subjects”—see Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to Collapse 1839–1878 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 41. Bulgarian scholars have stated that perhaps more than 30,000 Bulgarian Christians were killed during the war, a figure based mostly on the destruction of the city of Stara Zagora at the end of July 1877. The accuracy of these claims is suspect given the lack of hard evidence, but most scholars believe it is fair to assume that a figure well into the thousands, if not as high as 30,000, is appropriate—for a discussion on Stara Zagora and other Christian civilian deaths in the war, see Dimitur Konstantinov Kosev, Bulgaria Past & Present: Studies on History, Literature, Economics, Sociology, Folklore, Music & Linguistics: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Bulgarian Studies Held at Druzhba, Varna, June 13–17, 1978, Volume 1978 (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1982), 40–43. 4 There has been some work looking at the memory of the war from the Russian

and Balkan perspective. For example, an article by Nadieszda Kizenko looks at Russia’s memorialization of the war in the shape of a Russian church built to commemorate the battles for the Shipka Pass, which the author argues effectively gives Russian imperial policies regional immortality—see “The Church-War Memorial at the Shipka Pass, 1880– 1903,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 16/17 (2000–2001): 243–254.

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of Europe and the future course of history. We have now before us a catastrophe which every politician of foresight has known must one day come, and which the populations of South-Eastern Europe have dimly discerned before them as something terrible and mysterious behind the veil of the future.5

The writers at The Times were right in feeling that this war would have great political consequences—for the places it was fought in, for the Ottoman Empire and Near and Middle East more broadly, and for Europe as a community of competing states and empires. In terms of the view from Britain, though, the war’s significance was not just loftily international in character. Instead, Britons saw everything from the war’s complicated political calculations and intrigues, to its dramatic battles, to its countless smaller scenes of human suffering through the lens of their existing national sensibilities and priorities. And by the time the killing stopped, a great swath of British society had begun to see the British Empire as representing the chief stabilizing influence in global affairs—both in war and in peace. In this sense, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 played an important role in fueling the growing link between the management of Britain’s domestic, foreign, and imperial policies. The cultural and political experience of the war inscribed into the country’s collective consciousness a sense that they could not rely on the international arena to produce order and security. As diplomatic attempts to stave off conflict came to nothing and the subsequent war deepened, it became increasingly evident to the British public that if “Eastern disorder” threatened their national and imperial interests, then the might of the British Empire should be employed to provide a solution to the Eastern Question. This chapter explores two primary themes: first, the competition between the elite sector of policymaking (confidential diplomacy, backroom politicking, and Cabinet-level discussion) and public discourse on policy (published diplomatic correspondence, Parliamentary debate, and the press); second, the influence of a concurrent and ongoing democratizing trend in British politics and civil society. My discussion matches the progression of the conflict and Britain’s role in it. First, I investigate the reasons why Europe’s much-vaunted system of international diplomacy failed to avert the escalation of the conflict between Russia and the 5 The Times, 30 June 1877, p. 11, col. A.

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Ottoman Empire in late 1876 and early 1877. Then, I look at the close attention paid by the British public to the conduct of the participants in the war, especially at the disastrous five-month Siege of Plevna in the second half of 1877. Lastly, I examine the outbreak of intense and often violent public demonstrations in London and elsewhere in early 1878, which saw anti-Ottoman, anti-war activists clash with a pro-Ottoman, pro-war contingent over the question of how British policymakers should respond to the Ottoman Empire’s imminent defeat. As seen in the last chapter, one cannot simply rely on easy truisms dictating neatly divided interventionist/imperialist and isolationist/antiimperialist camps that corresponded to the parties broadly associated with such positions, i.e. the Conservatives in the former case and the Liberals in the latter. Rather, what the 1876 Bulgarian Agitation showed was that Liberals were fully capable of supplying British debate with interventionist beliefs tailored to their party’s particular values and goals. If in that episode it was the Conservatives who used the rhetoric of isolation and independence to resist many Liberals’ calls for intervention on the side of Russians, during the 1877–1878 war, it was now the Tories’ turn to push for intervention in the conflict on the side of the Ottoman Empire and thus, at the same time, to fend off calls for standing back from those whom opposed that position. This dynamic, I argue, had a cumulative effect in motivating imperial ideology and rhetoric: the beliefs in the fundamental preeminence of the British Empire, its right to intervene physically, and the intelligence of a territorial solution to global disorder were the sum total of this competition over the grounds, ethics, and methods of intervention. If the Bulgarian Agitation had inscribed into British discourse the Liberals’ case for intervention to protect Britain’s (and Europe’s) moral interests in the East, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 made an indelible mark on British society in the shape of their country’s economic, international, and imperial interests in the Eastern expanse.

The Failure of Peace Like any war, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 did not appear out of nowhere, nor was it an inevitable consequence of the troubles witnessed in the Balkans in the decade prior. It is tempting to consider it a flare-up of a supposedly elemental and ever-escalating animosity between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. However, the presumption of continuous,

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mutual hatred between Russians and “Turks” (as Victorian Britons, like most non-Ottoman Europeans at the time, usually and speciously labeled the Ottoman Muslim population in toto 6 ), is belied by the fact that Ottoman-Russian relations were not statically hostile, but were fluid and even cooperative when it suited both powers’ needs. As Victor Taki has documented in the case of the connection between Russian Orientalism and armed conflict between the two countries, the Ottoman-Russian relationship was, as with all competing regional powers, complex and interwoven—irreducible to simple maxims of cultural incompatibility and contempt.7 Nevertheless, the old Anglo-American tradition of naming these conflicts the “Russo-Turkish Wars” (as I have retained here solely for the sake of documentary clarity) and counting them out—first, second, third, and so on—expresses a historical presumption of near-constant acrimony between Russia and the Ottoman Empire from the seventeenth century onward. Tellingly, though, a longstanding confusion among Western scholars about which ordinal number to assign the 1877–1878 war exposes a reiterative, fungible texture in chronologies of OttomanRussian violence. Depending on the source, one might read that the

6 The use of the words “Turk,” “Turkish,” and “Turkey” by British and many other non-Ottoman European writers was the standard of the era. Due to the obviously Orientalist associations of these terms to describe Ottoman actors, systems, and places (as well as their inaccuracy due to the span of the Ottoman Empire), I have of course avoided any such use of them outside of direct quotations from my sources. However, it is worth noting that, first, Ottoman writers used these terms for certain purposes and, second, were also well aware of their use by authors outside the empire. It is thus less helpful to banish these words entirely for their problems than it is to understand the parameters of their use according to those same problematic views of the Ottoman world and its peoples—an issue that is, indeed, a major aspect of my study. In this regard, my use of period terms like “Turcophile” and “Turcophobe” do not endorse othering worldviews but rather expose them within their context. For more information on these terms’ etymologies, see Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” History and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the “Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25. 7 See Victor Taki, Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016).

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1877–1878 war was the third of its name,8 the fifth,9 the sixth,10 the eighth,11 or an even higher number. Without a glimmer of irony, Frank Jastrzembski asks his audience: “What makes the eleventh Russo-Turkish War worthy of evaluation by English readers?”!12 Instead of relying on cultural generalizations, it might be more profitable to come down from a mile-high view to specific, near causes at the ground level of international relations and policy. In this regard, it is important to examine the claim made, at the time and since, that diplomatic attempts to stop the war “failed,” in particular the failure of an international conference that met in Istanbul between December 1876 and January 1877 to discuss the mounting hostility between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. This “Constantinople Conference” was convened ostensibly to discuss the issue of reform of Ottoman policies in its Christian territories, particularly in Bulgaria and Bosnia.13 However, the Great Powers came to the table with specific demands of the Ottomans, while the Ottomans felt that the new Ottoman Constitution (signed the day the conference began) should suffice as evidence of their commitment to reform. Moreover, the discussion was colored by two unspoken factors of conflict: first, the general treatment of Christians in Ottoman lands; second, the growing threat of war with Russia, which treated the first factor as a case for war. The idea of getting the Ottomans to, as the saying in English went, “induce reform” was therefore often used as code to gauge the Ottomans’ willingness to bend to the Great Powers’ conditions for peace.

8 See p. 157 of D. J. B. Trim, “Humanitarian Intervention,” in The Changing Character of War, ed. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151–166. 9 Houman A. Sadri, Global Security Watch—The Caucasus States (Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO, 2010), 9. 10 Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Ibrahim Al-Marashi, A Concise History of the Middle East, 12th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 126. 11 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 12 Frank Jastrzembski, Valentine Baker’s Heroic Stand at Tashkessen 1877: A Tarnished British Soldier’s Glorious Victory (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2017), 40. Emphasis added. 13 For their discussion, the Bosnian entity included part of Herzegovina.

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These problems showed themselves immediately. In the preliminary meetings, delegates from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, AustriaHungary, and Italy agreed among themselves to call for the establishment of an autonomous Bosnian province and the separation of Bulgaria into two autonomous provinces (West and East Bulgaria).14 In return, Ottoman representatives offered its reform plan in the shape of the Ottoman Constitution.15 The Constitution not only enumerated a number of liberal principles to be instituted (such as an elected assembly, freedom of the press and religion, equality before the law, and statesponsored education), but was also intended by its authors to represent the Ottoman Empire as a modern, European state.16 In many ways, liberal Ottoman leaders regarded the Constitution as the final phase of the Ottomans’ period of modernization commonly referred to as the Tanzimat, which had begun in 1839.17 The Ottomans thus felt that the provincial arrangements agreed on by the European powers were evidence of the latter states’ imperial ambitions, as why should there be any need for territorial changes if the Constitution was supposed to fix the problems that had been the source of the conference in the first place? But because the Europeans had come to the table wanting precise outcomes and particular things, they did not accept the Ottoman Constitution as offering any path toward the territorial resolution they asked for. Therefore, the delegates reached an unbreakable impasse.

14 Italy, only recently unified into a single country, was the official successor state to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which had been a victor of the Crimean War and a signatory to the 1856 Treaty of Paris. This means that Italy had the right to be a direct part of discussions that involved revisions to the Crimean system. In addition, Italy of course had its own strategic concerns in the dispute. 15 See Ottoman Constitution (Kanûn-ı Esâsî), 23 December 1876. An English translation prepared by Boˇgaziçi University can be found at the following link: http://www. anayasa.gen.tr/1876constitution.htm. 16 The Ottoman Constitution’s reforms were extensive. The subjects of key articles include: decentralization of power away from the Sultan (Article 108), freedom of the press (Article 12), freedom of religion (Article 11), the establishment of a bicameral General Assembly with an elected Chamber of Deputies and an appointed Senate (Articles 42, 60, and 65–66), equality before the law (Article 17), public tribunals (Article 82), free education (Article 15), and state-mandated primary school (Article 114). See above reference for details. 17 See Re¸sat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, Albany, 1988), 59.

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The Constantinople Conference ended inconclusively, with no party coming away with exactly what they wanted. In what way is it appropriate to think of this as a “failure” and in what way is it not? In some ways, the failure is simply that despite the institution of preliminary reforms in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Ottoman Constitution, a war ended up happening. Yet I contend that it is not convincing or useful to think of this as marking a failure simply of the diplomatic event in question. Rather, the Constantinople Conference and the subsequent war stand as a failure of two key components of diplomacy itself : on the one hand, the failure to properly apply the principle of collective intervention in the internal affairs of one of the members deemed a part of that collective; and, on the other, the failure of individual diplomats to understand the duties and issues involved in doing their jobs well. The first of these principles is a central part of diplomacy—the expression, as Carl von Clausewitz famously said, of war as a “continuation of policy by other means.”18 If the political phase is misunderstood or mishandled, then an ensuing war phase usually follows. The movement to war, moreover, benefits certain parties even if their representatives pay lip service to the maintenance of peace. This is exactly what happened in the case of the lead up to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The voices for war successfully manipulated this aspect of international diplomacy to create a diplomatic case that war was the only avenue to the redress of grievances. War with the Ottoman Empire was the only way to keep the European peace. The second principle is a simple reality: diplomats are real people, and diplomatic outcomes are determined by individual personalities. People can be fallible or incompetent, even powerful people charged with critical tasks. As we shall see below, such was the case with one of Britain’s two representatives, Lord Salisbury, who would as Conservative leader in the 1880s and 1890s design much of the foundation of Britain’s late foreign and imperial policy apparatus. Nevertheless, rather than think of this as somehow the failure of individuals like Salisbury to be up to the task, it is more illuminating (and troubling) to think of it as an unavoidable failing built into diplomacy as an institution and international relations as a set of practices.

18 For full quote, see On War: A Modern Classic, ed. F. N. Maude and J. J. Graham (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1911), 42.

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It is clear that diplomatic episodes serve not only to seek a way toward peace, but also serve as a venue for war-minded diplomats to exhaust diplomatic avenues. Skilled diplomats can deploy this aspect of diplomacy to benefit an aim that is best achieved by violence. The object then is to get the opposition to resist diplomatic intervention to the point that war can be put forth as the only option. Some scholars have suggested that this was the express purpose of Russia’s long-time ambassador in Istanbul, General Ignatyev.19 Yet this interpretation misses the mark. It is more convincing to think of Ignatyev as goal-directed rather than warmongering: if the Balkans could be freed of Ottoman control and put under Russia’s wing by peaceful means, then all the better; but if it took war, then that was a necessary consequence of the overarching goal.20 Still, there was very little doubt among the other powers at the time that Russia wanted war—even if this was based in no small part on the traditional Russophobia that, as discussed in detail in the previous two chapters, had been influential in international circles since the Crimean War. As Ottoman leaders became more and more resistant to external pressure during and after the Constantinople Conference, they relied on their previous promises of reform and the Ottoman Empire’s status as a sovereign state to resist being compelled by the other powers. Delegates from states other than Russia and the Ottoman Empire could have better confronted this challenge. Britain’s long-time ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Stratford de Redcliffe, who was no Turcophile, may have said it best when he recommended in 1877 that Europe wait for a while after the Ottomans declared their reforms, and then use official declarations rather than ultimatums to put pressure on the Ottomans if they proved to not be serious about enforcing the reforms and the Constitution they had promised they would follow.21 As de Redcliffe stated, “[the reforms] were adopted with strong pressure from without. Give them a fair trial 19 See for example, Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 283. 20 The noted postwar scholar of Russian history, Sidney Harcave, may have termed it best when he said that Ignatiev and the other Panslavs were publicly working for the official policy of collective pressure and intervention while privately promoting not international, but “unilateral Russian action”—see Russia, A History, 6th ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 362. 21 Stratford de Redcliffe, “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 2 February 1877, p. 6, col. A.

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and they may turn out to be a reality, and in that case perhaps the better for wearing the semblance of a voluntary act. Should they prove a failure, the pressure might surely be renewed with a better show of reason, and a better prospect of success.”22 In other words, to de Redcliffe, it made little sense for the Great Powers to demand reforms from the Ottomans, only to charge the Ottomans with being insincere the moment they agreed to such reforms. From this vantage point, it appears that the very call for reform itself served a rhetorical purpose in justifying a conflict. As this trick relied upon continued resistance from the Ottomans, it is clear that the failure of the Constantinople Conference was useful to those calling for war rather than peace. To be sure, securing peace was in no way a single-minded pursuit for either Russia or the Ottomans, no matter how loudly and often their leaders and representatives said it was. To delay war would not only jeopardize Russia’s claim that its intervention was to protect the Ottoman Christians from harm, but it would also equally take away the Ottomans’ justification for contending they were being pressured to the point of conflict. Of course, both sides had forces that wanted peace, but the calls for war were more powerful. In the case of Russia, the pressure for war came from the liberal class of Panslavists who saw a war with the Ottoman Empire as a divine task in the process of bringing about a transnational Slavic, Orthodox federation; the aristocratic elite were much less interested in a fight that everyone knew would be costly in men, money, and international credibility.23 Yet to resist popular sentiments risked a domestic disturbance directed against the government, so Russia’s leaders could not appear to fold.24 In the Ottoman Empire, very few major politicians thought that the Ottoman Empire could withstand a Russian invasion unaided. Notably, Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had replaced his brother Murad in September,

22 Ibid. 23 See Bass, 243–247. Also, see Marlène Laruelle, “The Orient in Russian Thought

at the Turn of the Century,” in Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism, ed. Dmitry Shlapentokh (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 9–38, especially pp. 21–25. 24 Bass, 297.

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was anxious about the prospect of war, especially so soon after beginning his rule.25 But just as in Russia, the sentiments of certain important factions could not be ignored. Midhat Pasha, the new grand vizier, notably resisted calls to limit the power of the Ottoman central government, leading Salisbury to tell Derby that Midhat Pasha “would rather risk a war than the chance of assassination & the prospect of losing the Sultan’s favour.”26 Midhat Pasha, given his terms as vali in Bulgaria and Baghdad combined with his previous term as grand vizier, represented the cadre in Istanbul that perceived Westernization as a double-edged sword. He saw decentralization and provincial administration reforms as the only path forward, but he did not want to Westernize at the cost of the Ottoman Empire’s loss of sovereignty.27 Certainly, the fact that the opening article of the Ottoman Constitution stated that the Ottoman Empire “forms an indivisible whole, from which no portion can be detached under any pretext whatsoever” did not mesh at all with the specific territorial demands made by the European powers at the conference, and the European delegates’ lack of appreciation of this problem limited the chances of agreement.28 As suggested above, Salisbury does not seem to have been fully aware of the dynamics of the region and the actual forces at work in Ottoman society, nor was he over-interested in mastering these topics during the conference. Whereas the other representative, Britain’s Ottoman ambassador Sir Henry Elliot, has been criticized for acting in an explicitly Turcophilic fashion (then29 and since30 ), Salisbury has mostly escaped

25 Derby noted that Salisbury wrote to tell him that the Sultan was “disposed to yield, but afraid of his ministers”—see Derby Diaries, 16 January 1877, 367. 26 Ibid., 26 January 1877, 372. Ironically, Midhat Pasha was removed from office and exiled following the unsatisfactory end of the conference. He was brought back into the government in 1878, as the governor of Syria, but was soon exiled again and died, most likely by assassination, in 1884—see Florian Riedler, Opposition and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire: Conspiracies and Political Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2011), 88. 27 See Roudometof, 86–88; also, Seton-Watson, 122–123. 28 Ottoman Constitution, 23 December 1876, Article 1. 29 Recall from the last chapter, for example, the nearly ubiquitous calls for Elliot’s dismissal in the petition campaign during the Bulgarian Agitation, based specifically on the petitioners’ belief that he was criminally Turcophilic. 30 Bass, 261–262.

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criticism. This is in no small part due to Salisbury’s towering historical reputation as a foreign policy expert. Any claim to the contrary will ruffle feathers. Still, in the field of British history Salisbury’s presumed mastery of all foreign matters can often seem like an aspect of his personality rather than a measure of his aptitude. Indeed, years ago Peter Marsh wrote a very good book detailing Salisbury’s domestic policy priorities and successes, with the whole project predicated in part on the simple fact that most historians only consider Salisbury’s foreign policy accomplishments.31 Nevertheless, Salisbury deserves a significant portion of the blame for his part in talks that ultimately led toward rather than away from war. More importantly, the nature of his failure in Istanbul in many ways illuminates the imperial path he would help forge in the 1880s and 1890s. Significantly, Salisbury appears to have been unable to understand the conditions of Midhat Pasha’s domestic pressures, preferring instead to deride the Ottoman representatives as “idiotic Turks,” as he put it, for their unwillingness to simply accept the terms of the conference proposals no matter the consequences.32 Salisbury thus seems to have regarded Ottoman discourse as determined solely by the Ottoman political elite and not any kind of popularlevel response to changes in policy. He clearly felt that pressure and veiled threats were all the Ottoman government understood, complaining the Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon that his efforts to “squeeze the Turk” into alignment with Britain’s goals had proved unsuccessful.33 Additionally, he blamed a pro-Ottoman caste in Istanbul, especially Conservative MP and noted Turcophile Henry Munro-Butler-Johnstone, for formulating “intrigues” to “persuade Turkey to resist us by saying that we must fight for them at last.”34 Salisbury’s distaste for British Turcophiles (whether in Istanbul or Britain) reveals the fact we cannot simply chalk his narrow perspective up to a generalized, Orientalist conception of Ottoman society held by all Europeans ipso facto. Rather, Salisbury’s conduct and language expresses 31 See Peter Marsh, The Discipline of Popular Government: Lord Salisbury’s Domestic Statecraft, 1881–1902 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1978). 32 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 22 December 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,758, f. 185–186. 33 Ibid. 34 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 25 December 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL

Add. MS 60,758, f. 192.

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a widely held principle that diplomats should be detached from and even unconcerned with cultural contexts other than their own. Other figures connected with Britain’s delegation at the Constantinople Conference and who were not beholden to a party platform disagreed with Salisbury’s tactics. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Home, attached to a mission charged with surveying the Ottoman Empire’s defensive capabilities, told his superior at the War Office, the Head of Fortifications General Sir Lintorn Simmons, that Salisbury’s repeated claim in private at the conference that Britain was “fighting for Turkey, not the Turks” might sound good as a talking point but did not make any real sense.35 Home thought it irresponsible of Salisbury to depend on such poetic sophistry, as there was no way for the Ottomans themselves to distinguish between fighting for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and fighting for these “Turks” as a people, especially when so much lip service was at that moment being paid (at the conference and elsewhere) to the long, historical friendship between the two empires and their peoples.36 Thus the failure here is not only that the principle of collective pressure was not suited to the task yet was still applied, but also that Salisbury appears to have been completely uninterested in accepting the validity of the qualities and pressures of Ottoman politics and society. Those who did take these concerns into account, as Elliot was known to do in his time as ambassador between 1867 and 1877, were in Salisbury’s words “stupid” and “capricious.”37 Salisbury would certainly have agreed with another attendee, H. S. Northcote, when Northcote rather artlessly deemed Elliot chief among the “dummies” at the conference.38 This explicit antagonism should arouse a certain degree of scholarly suspicion of Salisbury’s alleged handle on Britain’s Eastern policy throughout his long career in foreign politics. That so much of the

35 Letter from Home to Simmons, 16 January 1877, Simmons Papers, FO 358/1, f. 614–617. 36 See letter from Home to Simmons, 8 February 1877, Simmons Papers, FO 358/1, f. 624–629. 37 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 13 September 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,758, f. 179–182. 38 Qtd. in Millman, 210—from a letter from H. S. Northcote to S. H. Northcote, 7 December 1876, Northcote Papers, BL Add. MS 50,032, f. xx. H. S. Northcote was also the son of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Northcote, the recipient of this letter.

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strength of Britain’s relationship with the Ottomans resulted from Elliot’s success at preaching the close ties between Englishmen and “Turks” does not seem to have entered into Salisbury’s mind. Instead, Salisbury could, on the one hand, believe that “the Turk’s teeth must be drawn: even if he be allowed to live”39 and, on the other, wonder how Britain’s influence with the Ottoman government came to be “at a very low ebb,”40 without noticing any substantive link between the two propositions. It is not entirely clear why Salisbury felt an Ottoman diplomat could more easily ignore domestic interests and pressures than a British or a French or a Russian diplomat could. Perhaps he was simply uninterested in altering his view of the Ottoman Empire, preferring the ease of generic Orientalist caricatures to seriously grappling with the actual characters of the real people he met in Istanbul. Or perhaps due to his own class and position in British society, Salisbury subordinated popular dynamics in his consideration of macro-level issues no matter the country in question, let alone an Ottoman society that so many in the West regarded as the prototypical despotic society. Both of these possibilities would help explain the sense one gets from the evidence that Salisbury seems to have been totally unaware that the Ottomans possessed a civil society of any kind—stakeholders and pressures that Ottoman diplomats might need to heed. In Salisbury’s mind, Elliot was “stupid” for having tried, however unsuccessfully, to make British policy mesh with Ottoman politics and the relationship he had built up with the Ottoman government over the previous decade.41 For 39 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 13 September 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,758, f. 179–182. 40 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 11 January 1877, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,759, f. 11–12. 41 For example, Kemal Karpat says on p. 147 of his book (see above note for citation) that a prominent Istanbul paper, Besiret, prior to the war “pointedly stressed that many European newspapers sided with Russia and looked forward to an Ottoman defeat.” This would seem to mesh with the idea that Elliot’s Turcophilic reputation could be useful in improving negotiations with the Ottoman government, but Salisbury appears to have rejected directly exploiting Elliot’s characterization diplomatically. Indeed, Derby wrote that Salisbury touched on this topic in a letter in late December, summing up the letter as follows: “The Turks are not easily made to believe that we are in earnest: Elliot himself is loyal, but all about him are not so, and they persuade the natives that Salisbury’s mission & his language are only a feint to deceive the Powers – which is an idea so consonant to Eastern ideas as to find ready acceptance”—see Derby Diaries, 1 January 1877, 362.

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that, Elliot’s more complex view of the issues earned him the same kind of ridicule from Salisbury as had the Ottoman politicians. Finally, and the worst of his failures, Salisbury did not understand the consequences of holding a deceptive and insincere attitude on the subject of the Ottoman-British alliance, especially in light of the fact that many Ottoman Muslims appear to have actually believed that the official platitudes of friendship issued by British representatives were made in good faith. For example, shortly after the war began, a cohort of Colonel Home, Lieutenant-Colonel W. O. Lennox, wrote to General Simmons that all the Ottoman Muslims he met in Istanbul and elsewhere had told him they had no doubt that the British would eventually join them against the Russians.42 Lennox added that there were rumors everywhere in the Ottoman army that a British force had already landed and was rushing to join them at the front.43 Moreover, Salisbury himself encouraged the Ottomans’ belief that there existed between the two countries a bond beyond diplomatic pretext, assuring Sultan Abdülhamid II during the conference that the “Queen and English People were earnestly desirous of helping him.”44 Many historians, from popular writers like Andrew Roberts to serious scholars like Richard Shannon, have treated Salisbury as a shrewd foreign policy expert, and this is no doubt accurate in other contexts.45 But in the winter of 1876–1877, as Istanbul fell into winter and war crept closer, it appears that his most remarkable quality was an aloof ignorance of the deeper effects and implications of Britain’s Eastern policy. Failing to appreciate the Ottoman government’s position and the trends at work in Ottoman society, he operated under the assumption that a person would have to be an idiot to think that the friendship between Britain and the Ottoman Empire was anything other than an obvious lie that had finally lost its convenience. Such an openly insincere attitude cannot logically have added to the resolution of the matter and the avoidance of war, the very mission with which he had been charged. 42 Letter from Lennox to Simmons, 15 May 1877, Simmons Papers, FO 358/3, f. 386–387. 43 Ibid. 44 Telegram from Salisbury to Derby, 15 January 1877, FO 881/3049. 45 See Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

1995); Richard Shannon, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–1902: Unionism and Empire (London: Longman, 1996).

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Choosing Empire, Choosing War What Salisbury’s conduct at the Constantinople Conference was useful for, though, was the development and popularization of the notion that Britain needed to sever its ties with the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian empire-building, instead trusting in the British Empire’s ability to meet this challenge on its own. In fact, Salisbury was relatively nonplussed at the conference’s result, writing to Carnarvon: “Apart from the question of immediate success, I think the Conference has done good. It has I hope made it impossible that we should spend any more English blood in sustaining the Turkish Empire. And I hope it will make English statesmen buckle to the task of devising some other means of securing the road to India.”46 This echoed the beliefs of Carnarvon, who was a great proponent of Britain’s “splendid isolation,” or what might be better described as “independent imperialism”—the idea that the aims of the British Empire should be achieved by independent action and policy, avoiding any move that would tie Britain to another power formally.47 As colonial secretary, Carnarvon clearly brought this idea to the management of his portfolio in general and his response to the Eastern Crisis in particular. As he explained to Derby during the Bulgarian Agitation: You know also—though I am afraid you’d not agree with it—my preference for acting more of and by ourselves and less in conjunction with others. The former seems to me to the bolder and really the safer line: but circumstances have materially changed during the last few weeks: an action has become one of concert and combination and it is impossible to constantly shift the lines of policy. At the same time a moment may occur when you may be able to take the initiative without much risk and I would ask you to weigh the advantages of such a course which gives us greater independence of action and (as I believe) greater power of influencing results.48

46 Letter from Salisbury to Carnarvon, 11 January 1877, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add.

MS 60,759, f. 11–12. 47 The term “splendid isolation” does not quite get at the essence of that which it implies, as it identifies neither the nature nor the purpose of this isolation. I have substituted what I feel is a more useful term. 48 Letter from Carnarvon to Derby, 24 September 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,765, f. 104–107.

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From this perspective, we see that Salisbury’s participation in the destruction of Britain’s policy of Ottoman integrity fell in line with the camp in the Conservative Party that took their leader Disraeli’s imperial ambitions to the next level. If the British Empire were to be as powerful and glorious as Disraeli’s rhetoric would have it, then the “old” methods of protectionism would have to be abandoned for newer, more independent, and stronger ones. Emphasizing the Ottoman Empire’s integrity (a key part of Disraeli’s worldview), proved retrograde and senseless to this group, as Elliot had seemed to Salisbury; a policy based on Imperial Britain’s exceptionalism was the way forward. This reorientation omitted the need to act in a certain way purely for diplomatic consistency or heritage, except when absolutely bound by formal agreement.49 Thus in involving itself in international affairs—no matter the subject— Britain should make sure to operate with the overarching goal of increasing the British Empire’s latitude of movement, as when Carnarvon suggested that the logic behind any intervention in Ottoman affairs over the 1876 Bulgarian Atrocities should be to make Britain “somewhat more free to act in the East.”50 In this way, the new ideology would present Britain in the international sphere as unapologetically driven by its own imperial interests. To be sure, after the war began “Salisbury & Co.” (as Derby termed it in his diary51 ) pushed against Disraeli’s impulse to support the Ottoman Empire against Russia, unless it could be absolutely proven that there was a direct threat to British interests. If this threat materialized, intervention would be taken, but only then and only if feasible politically. And, like Carnarvon, Salisbury clearly thought that if intervention should prove necessary, it should take a more “direct” and “territorial” form— the possession of a real, physical “pied à terre” rather than the more easily

49 The appearance of following formal agreement was still all-important, however, as attested to by the sheer number of memos on Britain’s treaty obligations that were prepared by Edward Hertslet, the Foreign Office’s head librarian, during the Eastern Crisis. Hertslet wrote up around two dozen of these, the details of which can be found in the FO 881 series of the PRO, with the specific shelfmark range of FO 881/2763 (7 June 1875) and FO 881/3885 (22 July 1878). 50 Letter from Carnarvon to Salisbury, 9 September 1876, Carnarvon Papers, BL Add. MS 60,758, f. 175–178. 51 Derby Diaries, 21 April 1877, 392.

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subverted tactic of diplomatic discourse and arrangements, which Salisbury famously compared to “[floating] lazily down a stream.”52 This was an important development: it illustrates the tying together of a new idea and shape of the British Empire, the place of international diplomacy in promoting a clearly independent line of policy, and the role of Britain’s political dynamics in the prosecution of the former two goals. Further, it shows an important foundation for the emerging recursive justification of the “new imperialism,” with the defense of Britain’s imperial interests being accomplished by expanding the empire territorially, leading to an expanded responsibility for imperial defense. The unsatisfactory results of the Constantinople Conference led to stepped-up mobilization by Russia and the Ottoman Empire, further charging the international atmosphere. After the conference, all subsequent attempts to avoid war seem to have increased the chance of it happening. This trend is epitomized by the formulation and promulgation of the London Protocol of March 31, 1877, which listed the provisions required from the Ottoman government for Russia to stand its army down. The problem with the development of this protocol was two-fold. First, the whole affair was predicated on the notion that, as Russia’s Foreign Minister, Prince A. M. Gorchakov, put it in a remarkable letter to Count Shuvalov (the ambassador in London) at the close of the Constantinople Conference, the Ottomans’ “refusal…to the wishes of Europe” at the conference had been intended purely for the purpose of avoiding reform; the question of Ottoman sovereignty did not enter into this equation.53 Gorchakov’s formulation was a convenient way to at once absolve all other players of any blame and to reiterate Russia’s casus belli, allowing Russia to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Ottoman Empire for the problem. Second, as I have written about elsewhere, the Ottoman Empire was depicted as having European responsibilities but was clearly excluded symbolically from the Concert of Europe, both on the grounds

52 Qtd. in Millman, 255—from a letter from Salisbury to Lord Lytton (the Viceroy of India), 9 March 1877, Salisbury Papers, D/xi/337. 53 Gorchakov to Shuvalov (and communicated to Derby), 19 January 1877, “Circular of Prince Gortchakow, and Correspondence Respecting the Protocol on the Affairs of Turkey,” No. 1, Turkey, No. 8 (1877), Parl.Pap. (“Blue Books”) C.1713 (1877), p. 2.

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of lacking a clear claim to being “Great Power” and on its identity as a Muslim state.54 Indeed, as Gorchakov termed it, the question was a “European one, which should not and cannot be solved but by the unanimous agreement of the Great Powers,” meaning that the Christian powers had to collaborate in devising a way of “inducing the Government of Turkey to govern Christian subjects of the Sultan in a just and humane manner.”55 The Ottoman Empire was seen through the racist, stereotypical vision of the “Turks” as an untrustworthy, anti-Christian “inhuman menace” who never should have been allowed to participate in European affairs in the first place—a symbolic allusion to Russia’s indignation at the clearer inclusion of the Ottoman Empire in the Concert of Europe after the Crimean War. As Gorchakov put it: The Porte [i.e. the Ottoman government] makes light of her former engagements, of her duty as a member of the European system, and of the unanimous wishes of the Great Powers. Far from having advanced one step towards a satisfactory solution, the Eastern question has become aggravated, and is at the present moment a standing menace to the peace of Europe, the sentiments of humanity, and the conscience of Christian nations.56

A meeting was called in London to put together the protocol that would enumerate the details of Great Powers’ demands. This meeting took place over the second half of March, as both the Ottoman and Russian Armies continued to move troops to the frontier. One would expect the Great Powers, if they were serious about the absolute avoidance of war, to ask for the Ottoman Empire’s presence at this meeting, but this is not what happened. Instead, the agreement was written up and signed by the Great Powers, and then forwarded to the Ottoman government. Although it arrived in the form of a diplomatic protocol (that is, an agreement supplementing official treaties), its effective shape was that of an ultimatum. This is the only rational way that this document could have

54 See Leslie Rogne Schumacher, “The Eastern Question as a Europe Question: Viewing the Ascent of ‘Europe’ through the Lens of Ottoman Decline,” Journal of European Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 64–80. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

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been written to represent the interests of those opposed to the Ottoman Empire’s conduct, given that the document was designed specifically to reflect Christian indignation at Muslim crimes. With such a confessional, racial basis, how could this statement include the cooperation of the embodiment of the Islamic state? Logically, this requirement precluded the participation of the Ottomans in its creation, but that did not mean that the Ottomans would accept it. It did not matter that Russia’s demands—which made up the bulk of the protocol—were “mildly & cleverly worded,” as Derby put it,57 or “extremely moderate,” as Richard Millman characterized Salisbury’s opinion.58 The document made clear that the Ottoman Empire was not to be party to the document but rather subject to it. It stated that if the signatories’ representatives in Istanbul discovered that the Ottoman government was not following the provisions of the protocol, “they reserve to themselves to consider in common as to the means which they may deem best fitted to secure the well-being of the Christian populations, and the interests of the general peace.”59 This statement ensured that the Ottoman government was supposed to understand the protocol as a directive from a group of states that it was considered to be in relationship with diplomatically. And yet the tactics of the protocol’s formulation and the form it took underlined the fact that the Ottoman Empire was regarded as not at all on the same level if it came to matters regarding religion, democracy, and even the general European peace. On these issues, the Ottoman Empire was to be excluded from multiparty negotiations but subjected to any agreement. The form and execution of the London Protocol of March 31, 1877 seems almost to have been devised to deepen the conflict rather than alleviate it. It is difficult to see exactly how it was supposed to receive anything other than an indignant response from the Ottoman Empire.

57 Derby Diaries, 11 March 1877, 382. 58 Millman, 255. 59 “Protocol Relative to the Affairs of Turkey: Signed at London, March 31, 1877,”

No. 1, 31 March 1877, Turkey, No. 9 (1877), Parl.Pap. (“Blue Books”) C.1714 (1877), p. 2. The signers were the European powers’ representatives in London, plus Derby: Count G. H. zu Münster (Germany), Count F. F. von Beust (Austria-Hungary), Marquis G. D’Harcourt-Olonde (France), Derby (Britain), Count L. F. Menabrea (Italy), and Count P. A. Shuvalov (Russia).

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The protocol itself is actually less remarkable than the Ottoman government’s response to it, sent to the Ottoman ambassador in London, Musurus Pasha, on April 9, who gave it to Derby three days later.60 It is a manifesto on reform, sovereignty, and the principles of international law, summing up with the dramatic statement: “Turkey feels that she struggles at the present moment for her very existence.”61 The dispatch’s recipients would see such comments as mere hyperbole, but its desperate tone makes a certain degree of sense given the circumstances the Ottoman Empire found itself in. As noted, the protocol had not accepted the issue of Ottoman sovereignty as an important subject in discussions of how the Ottoman government could be “induced” to permit reforms in the form of territorial and administrative changes in the Balkans. Thus Ottoman leaders zeroed in on this disconnect and exploited it to justify its objection that the protocol ultimately had “no legal validity in [the Ottoman government’s] eyes.”62 If the Ottomans were to have responsibilities to the Great Powers based on international laws (especially the 1856 Treaty of Paris following the Crimean War), then it could not be bound to any agreement among the Concert of Europe that concerned Ottoman policies unless it had been party to the agreement.63 On this point, the notion that Ottoman reform should be watched over by the protocol’s signatories’ representatives in Istanbul was a direct affront to Ottoman sovereignty, requiring the Ottoman government’s “formal opposition” on the grounds that “Turkey, as an independent State, cannot submit to be placed under any surveillance, whether collective or not.”64 Moreover, Ottoman leaders protested that the Great Powers, regardless of the situation or the evidence, seemed to imply that any reform the Ottoman government proposed was a premature, insufficient, or insincere solution to the problem. The writers hence deemed an “injustice” any agreement that “under the appearance of reform” required the Ottoman 60 The foreign ministries of the other five signatories received the same document at roughly the same time. 61 Telegram from Safvet Pasha (Ottoman Foreign Minister) to Musurus Pasha (Ottoman Ambassador at London), 9 April 1877 (communicated to Derby on April 12), “Despatch from the Turkish Government on the Protocol of March 31, 1877,” Turkey, No. 12 (1877), Parl.Pap. (“Blue Books”) C.1719, p. 8. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., p. 7. 64 Ibid.

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Empire to create divisions between religions, classes, and territories in contradiction to religious equality clause of the Ottoman Constitution, or to admit direct and conspicuous foreign influence in Ottoman affairs via a formal system of intervention operated by European ambassadors in Istanbul.65 The authors of the response to the protocol brushed aside the idea that their new constitution was not an appropriate or effective path toward reform: If the objection be made that this system of reforms is too new to bear fruit immediately, it may be remarked in reply that that is an objection which could just as well have been made to the reforms recommended by the foreign Plenipotentiaries, and in general against every reform which, from the very fact that it is an innovation, cannot possess at its birth the efficacy that time alone can impart.66

The Ottoman leaders were right about the logic behind the London Protocol’s dismissal of the Ottoman Constitution as evidence of reform, but the authors completely miss (undoubtedly on purpose) the point that the Constitution had not been considered an acceptable plenary reform because it explicitly forbade any territorial changes or special treatment of religious groups, which were the very things that the other Powers had called for and which Russia based its right of intervention on. Hence, the Ottoman government defended its policy of non-action in regard to the London Protocol based on items that they felt had been unrightfully discredited as a solution to the crisis at the Constantinople Conference. This meant that they responded to pressure with counter-pressure, rejecting in order every demand the protocol made and concluding that “immediate and simultaneous disarmament will be the only efficacious means of obviating the dangers with which the general peace is menaced.”67 Of course, this blink-first attitude was bound to lead to nothing other than further deadlock in diplomatic negotiation and further troop mobilization. Derby said, on receiving it from Musurus Pasha, that it was written with a “tone rather of defiance than on conciliation: evidently

65 Ibid., p. 5. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 8.

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showing that war is thought inevitable at Constantinople.”68 Yet at the same time, Derby himself had commented earlier that the London Protocol was dangerous because of the “vagueness of the language.”69 He therefore likely agreed in some ways with the Ottomans that the protocol’s provisions for the oversight of Ottoman affairs by the signatories’ were vaguely designed and potentially, as the Ottoman note stated, “a source of grave complication for the present as well as for the future.”70 Despite Derby’s private insights, however, neither the London Protocol nor the Ottoman response offered much hope of lessening the calls for war. Instead, all the diplomacy seems only to have solidified the impression of observers that the only recourse for both sides was to meet on the battlefield. And the calls for war were soon answered. The Russian army, already on the move, received word from St. Petersburg that the Emperor had declared war on the Ottoman Empire on April 24. Just the day before, the Russians had crossed into Romania via the new Eiffel Bridge on the Prut River and were moving toward the Danube, the border of Ottoman territory.

Britain’s Siege of Plevna: Visualizing Eastern Violence Despite vigorous activity on the diplomatic side, British society did not rise up in public consternation at the failure of the Constantinople Conference.71 The same seems to have gone for the London Protocol and the eventual declaration of war. The most likely explanation for the muted response is that the cohorts of the previous fall’s Bulgarian Agitation now waited for some decisive action on the part of the Government, a reaction that had the effect of taking the steam out of the movement. Further, the need for pressure from the Turcophobic camp was lessened by the fact that the Constantinople Conference and the London Protocol had bred a distinct feeling even among some prominent Tories, such as Salisbury and Carnarvon, that the Crimean system had to be reassessed 68 Derby Diaries, 12 April 1877, 389. 69 Ibid., 11 March 1877, 382. 70 Turkey, No. 12 (1877), Parl.Pap. (“Blue Books”) C.1719, p. 7. 71 Wirthwein, 174.

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and Britain’s strict insistence on Ottoman integrity abandoned.72 At the same time, the small amount of sympathy with Russia in the spirit of Christian brotherhood seen in the petition campaign during the Agitation was soon exhausted.73 This allowed for a return to the default feeling in Britain of guarded animosity toward Russia—an “ineradicable antipathy” that was not neatly counterbalanced by unmitigated Ottoman sympathy.74 In consequence, a deep suspicion of Russia’s goals developed concurrently with the opinion that the Ottoman-British relationship should be reformulated. The movement of the conflict from diplomacy to open war changed the game even more. As the whole apparatus of diplomacy was designed to limit public opinion’s role as a mover of policy, the walls of confidential privilege had obscured the diplomatic process. Indeed, Gladstone seems to have complained during the winter and spring of 1876–1877 that he was unable to influence Parliament on diplomatic issues, saying that it should be dissolved because the London press and club society supported diplomatic positions that, as Derby characterized Gladstone’s position, were not reflective of “the real opinion of the people.”75 Elite-level diplomatic tactics having failed to protect British interests in the East and the spectacle of war now displayed for witness and commentary, public debate over how Britain should respond to the war—and what that response should mean in terms of Britain’s wider foreign and imperial policy—would build to a fever pitch over the ensuing year. In contrast to their “apathetic” response to the diplomatic proceedings, Britons quickly took to following the war’s fast progress, especially when the serious fighting began in the summer of 1877. There were two fronts in the war: the primary one in the Balkans, mostly in Bulgaria; and a secondary one in the Caucasus. The Russian force was at first modest (around 200,000 men were in the first army that crossed into

72 Millman, 273. Millman notes that even Disraeli considered Ottoman partition imminent, and thus protecting its integrity would be to miss an opportunity to “anticipate such partition, or, at least, to prepare militarily to take part in it and to defend her interests.” 73 Bass, 297–299. 74 Wirthwein, 174. 75 Derby Diaries, 17 February 1877, 377. The phrase in quotation marks is Derby’s summary of Gladstone’s language.

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Ottoman territory76 ), but eventually massive with nearly 750,000 battlefront troops, the bulk of whom were engaged on the Balkan front.77 The Russians were assisted by a Romanian army of about 35,000 men,78 led by Prince Carol I, who took the opportunity on May 22 to declare Romania’s formal independence from the Ottoman Empire.79 After crossing the Danube in late June, there was the addition of around 10,000 Bulgarian Christian volunteers, dubbed the “Bulgarian Contingent,” and similarly sized forces from Serbia and Montenegro.80 Opposing them, the Ottomans were able to field only about 250,000 men in the Balkans and another 100,000 in the Caucasus.81 If the war stayed limited solely to Russia and its allies vs. the Ottomans, the outcome was not in question: Russia would win. Austria-Hungary had declared its neutrality, taking out the direct involvement of the other competing power in the Balkans. The question was whether any other power would come to the aid of the Ottoman Empire and so balance the conflict. As we

76 Lionel W. Lyde and A. F. Mockler-Ferryman, A Military Geography of the Balkans (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 149. 77 Samuel Dumas, Knud Otto Vedel-Petersen, and Harald Westergaard list the number of Russian troops engaged in the campaign as 933,726, with a combined 737,355 as an “effective strength” figure for the two fronts of the war—see Losses of Life Caused by War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 55. 78 Lyde and Mockler-Ferryman, 151. 79 Romania was an autonomous principality and, as an internationally recognized consti-

tutional monarchy, a de facto independent state, but it was legally dependent on the Ottoman Empire. This effectively had meant that Romania paid a yearly tribute to the Ottoman Empire and had certain legal responsibilities, similar to Egypt’s relationship to the Ottoman Empire at this time. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin recognized Romania’s formal independence, paving the way for the declaration of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881 with Carol I as king. 80 David Stevenson, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers

from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part I, Series F (Europe, 1848–1914), Volume 15 (Bulgaria, 1907–1914; Montenegro, 1895–1913) (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1989), 37. The Bulgarian Contingent is listed as being composed of 10,000 troops organized into three brigades, forming the core of the post-1878 Bulgarian Army. 81 Sir Frederick Maurice computed the Ottoman forces at 170,000 in Bulgaria and about 95,000 elsewhere in the Balkans—see The Russo-Turkish War, 1877: A Strategical Sketch (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1905), 37–38. In the Caucasus the Ottomans had 100,000 troops split into one force of 60,000 manning a series of fortresses and another of 40,000 in an army group near Erzerum in eastern Anatolia—see Neville G. Panthaki, Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia, vol. 1, ed. Stanley Sandler (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002), s.v. “Battle of Kars (16 November 1877),” 453.

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have seen, many Ottoman leaders and citizens believed that, at the very least, Britain’s involvement would eventually become necessary. Otherwise, as the Ottoman government’s response to the London Protocol predicted, the only possible outcome seemed to be the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This possibility deeply worried many Britons, given the fact that the Ottoman Empire would then cease to offer any protection against threats and competition along the route to India via the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea. Worse, many feared that the loss of the Ottoman buffer between Russia’s southern and eastern territories and British India would allow Russia to rush into the vacuum. In retrospect, the former concern makes sense: the prospect of Russia sailing warships into the Mediterranean would certainly affect the sea’s economic and political status quo (and Britain’s naval dominance there). Conversely, the fear that an Ottoman defeat would mean the British Empire would soon thereafter share a border with the Russian Empire is, on review, a less clear-cut counterfactual, given the significant geographical, political, and human space that separated Russia’s 1877 borders with British territory in India. Logistically, Russian empire-building was not simply a matter of pushing toy soldiers eastward on a war room map, propelling them via croupier rake to India and beyond. Still, this kind of grandiose, domino-effect thinking characterized British discourse at the time about the so-called “Great Game” of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia. Such nightmare scenarios, though, depended on the assumption that Russian leaders and stakeholders had an unswerving devotion to a zero-sum fight with Britain over Eastern preeminence. In reality, Russia’s anti-British, “Eastern empire” camp was not without competing and moderating factions, including Emperor Alexander II himself, who hesitated to over-privilege any political interest group in Russian society lest he have to deal with their influence in the future.82 However, what matters here most is what Britons thought was the reality of the situation. As Queen Victoria wrote to Disraeli’s Cabinet

82 See the section “Expansion in Asia” on pp. 82–89 of Hugh Seton-Watson’s, The Decline of Imperial Russia 1855–1914 (New York: Praeger, 1952), especially pp. 87–89; also, Peter Hopkirk refers to Alexander II’s reluctance to expand the empire at the expense of diplomatic relations in Europe or merely to satisfy pro-war factions, see pp. 380–386 of The Great Game.

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on April 19, 1877, just prior to Russia’s declaration of war: “It is not the question of upholding Turkey; it is the question of British or Russian supremacy in the world!”83 It is also clear from a review of the British experience of the war that, one, Russian imperial aspirations and, two, Ottoman weakness in the face of it were considered by a range of British political and cultural groups to be twin threats facing the British Empire. The British public’s response to the war thus featured interpretations of and responses to this perceived menace, while the protection of the British Empire and the extension of its power increasingly appeared as a profitable solution to the problem. Key battles in the war provided a venue for discussions of the conflict’s relationship to British interests and values, with a substantial effect on how Britons decided the method and justification of their country’s response. Nowhere do we see this dynamic more than during the centerpiece battle of the war, the infamous Siege of Plevna, which lasted from July 20–December 10 and cost nearly 100,000 total casualties.84 Frederick William von Herbert, a German soldier of British descent who fought on the Ottoman side at Plevna, wrote in 1895 that the preceding two decades had “rendered the name of Plevna famous for all times; have made it as dear to the Turk as Waterloo is to the Briton, as Thermoplyæ was to the ancient Greek; have constituted it the Ottoman national symbol of heroism, endurance, and sacrifice.”85 Undoubtedly von Herbert took some artistic license, but the Siege of Plevna occupies a special place in the mythology of Southeastern Europe, especially in modern-day Bulgaria and Turkey. It also had this effect outside of the area. Von Herbert hit upon a pair of examples, the costly success of Waterloo and the tragic defense of Thermoplyæ, which neatly sum up the myth’s resonance with British culture: an Ottoman defense that appeared so dramatic and heroic that it threatened to outshine the perseverance (and eventual success) of the Russian besiegers. Not just for

83 Qtd. in Bass, 298. This is from a letter from the Queen to the Cabinet on April 19, 1877. 84 40,000 Russians and 25,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed or wounded in the siege, with 40,000 Ottoman soldiers captured. Of these 40,000, only 15,000 survived their period of captivity. See Byron Farwell, The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 653–654. 85 Frederick William von Herbert, The Defence of Plevna, 1877: Written by One Who Took Part in It (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1895), vii.

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the Ottomans, Russians, and Bulgarians but also for the observer, the Siege of Plevna came to serve as the chief embodiment of the war: at five months long, it played out over the bulk of the war’s major combat operations. For Britain, the Siege of Plevna, in league with other major battles of the war such as the back-and-forth struggle for Shipka Pass in the Balkan Mountains, influenced the logic behind the growing calls for direct British involvement on the Ottoman side. The shift toward widespread support of the Ottoman Empire in 1877 does not appear at first glance to be congruent with the popular upheaval of the previous year’s Bulgarian Agitation. Rather, it appears to be exactly the other way around. But as we saw in the last chapter, the Agitation was not really a movement centered on the old anti-imperial, free-trade class à la John Bright and Richard Cobden, but rather was made up of those who believed in Britain’s religious and moral supremacy in guiding world affairs—a pattern of thought that directly contributed to the shape of British society’s later imperial attitude. Thus Britons’ experience of the war provided a venue for the development of a separate, yet complementary component of Britain’s imperial development, namely the presentation of a chaotic East that needed British strength and order. Reportage on the siege and the wider war (as well as, later, public reactions in the form of mass political demonstrations) show that it was possible to combine, on the one hand, the principle that Britain was moral, enlightened, and selfless and, on the other, the idea that Britain’s greatest asset in spreading its moral wealth to the world was its military, economic, and imperial might. The Siege of Plevna was the single biggest reason the course of the war did not go as expected—a turn of events which contributed greatly to the startling casualty and refugee figures listed in the introduction. The siege’s prolonged, bloody nature was the result of two factors: first, Russia had dawdled on its way south into Ottoman Bulgaria, which had allowed the Ottoman Army to move troops to Plevna and fortify it strongly and comprehensively86 ; and second, Plevna occupied a physical and strategic location that Russia had to capture to make any further advance toward Istanbul.87 86 Uyar and Erickson, 188. 87 If the Russians had gone around Plevna and continued their advance, their lines

of communication would have been disrupted and harassed by the Ottoman force at Plevna. See Chapter IX, “Plevna—The supremacy of the rifle established—Earthworks,”

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Further, the Ottoman force at Plevna had been put under the command of Osman Nuri Pasha, a general who would prove himself during the siege to be a more gifted and dynamic military leader than his fellow Ottoman commanders.88 The Ottoman troops were also better outfitted than the Russian ones: the former carried modern breechloading Martini-Peabody rifles and the latter Krnka muzzleloader rifles converted to breechloaders, while the defenders at Plevna had new Krupp steel breechloading artillery and the attackers had old bronze guns.89 This gap in the quality of materiel deployed by each side during the siege helped offset the disparity in numbers. The Russians eventually moved over 110,000 troops plus smaller forces from their allies in position to attack Plevna, while the Ottomans only had 40,000 at the highest point.90 Militarily, the Siege of Plevna was not a continuous, day-in-day-out struggle, but rather consisted of four major battles in the summer and autumn of 1877, the first and fourth marking the beginning and end of the siege. The second and third battles occurred on July 31 and September 11, the latter marking the high point in terms of action and casualties. At the end of October the Russians found they could not sustain any more casualties, and so they decided to encircle the city and achieve victory by means of attrition.91 This strategy took an additional month and a half, but it proved successful. Osman Pasha, wounded in the leg in the final battle on December 9, surrendered the following day and went into captivity with the rest of his remaining troops.

of Henry Fleetwood Thuillier’s The Principles of Land Defence and Their Application to the Conditions of To-day (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 145–166. 88 Reid, 325. 89 Thuillier, 145; Uyar and Erickson, 188. Martini-Peabody rifles were an American-

made model of the famous Martini-Henry rifle, a single-shot breechloading (as opposed to muzzleloading) rifle, produced specifically for the Ottoman Army. They were extremely modern guns, having only been put into production in 1871. Their primary user was in fact the British Army, which carried the Martini-Henry from 1871 to 1888. Some of the more elite regiments of the Russian Army, such as the Guards and Grenadiers, were equipped with Berdan rifles, a better weapon than the Krnka, but almost all of the regular troops engaged at Plevna and in the wider war still carried the much less accurate, poorly made Krnka—see Ian Drury, The Russo-Turkish War 1877 (London: Osprey, 1994), 18. 90 Thuillier, 163. This figure is for October 24, 1877, three months into the siege. 91 The total encirclement was complete by October 24, after which the Ottoman troops

and the remaining inhabitants received no resupply or relief—see Thuillier, 163.

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The Siege of Plevna made the war accessible and understandable to the British observers. Whereas the Eastern Question and all its diplomatic interactions were complex, opaque, and fraught with intellectual angst, the siege provided a portrait of the situation that had clear-cut boundaries and offered provocative scenery. The first battle, on July 19 and 20, was little more than a skirmish and attracted little commentary in Britain; only in retrospect would Britons note that it had set the stage for the later drama. However, after the second battle ended with a decisive Russian defeat, British readers quickly came under a flood of detailed news coverage. On August 4, the Northern Echo led with the headline, “The Russian Defeat at Plevna—Graphic Description of the Fighting—Whole Regiments Annihilated—Massacre of the Russian Wounded.”92 The Echo then quoted a dispatch from Archibald Forbes, one of the Daily News ’s correspondents attached to the Russian Army, which called upon the established trope of savage, animal-like bashi-bazouks “swarming” (a favorite term in the article) down upon the fleeing Russian with “yells of bloodthirsty fanatical triumph,” catching all the Orientalist hooks in a single phrase.93 The imagery is further pro-Russian according to the biases of the author: earlier in the battle, the bashi-bazouks are efficiently and “promptly bayonetted” by “muscular Russian arms,” a simple, brave, and cool-headed response to the beasts that would later “[butcher] them without mercy” when night came.94 A later article from the Echo contains a similar allusion to the contrasting personalities of the opponents, the author saying the Russians “drove the Turks out of the shelter trenches at the foot of the mamelon, and pressed on vivaciously up its southern slope.”95 Even in this innocuous phrasing, it is the superior spirit and energy of the Russians that is given credit for forcing the cunning “Turk” out of his hiding place. Yet the siege produced too much evidence of Russian brutality toward Ottoman troops and Muslim civilians for neat distinctions to hold up for very long. Even anti-Ottoman sources, like the extremely popular Liberal 92 “The Russian Defeat at Plevna,” Northern Echo, 4 August 1877. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 “The Siege of Plevna—Tuesday’s Fighting—Storming the Redoubts,” Northern Echo,

15 September 1877. A mamelon (French for “nipple”) is a breast-shaped hill with a fort at the top, forming the “nipple” to the observer from below.

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weekly, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (which sold over 500,000 copies each week),96 had to acknowledge by the middle of September that atrocities had been committed by Russian troops, even if they maintained the attitude that the Turks were worse: “[The war] has been marked already by more foul deeds than any campaign of the present century—we had almost said, of modern times. The infamous Turk is the greater ruffian, the more inhuman monster; but Russia’s account is a dark one.”97 The “Turk” may have remained “incorrigible” in refusing to alter his treatment of Christians, but if the Russians had the goal of freeing Balkan Christians, Lloyd’s thought that “if the provinces to be emancipated are much longer the battle-fields of two semi-barbarous armies, there will be no Christians to emancipate.”98 Lloyd’s Turcophobic writers thus ruled the Russians out as the appropriate party to bring about Christian relief in the Balkans. Furthermore, the Russians seemed to lack the ability necessary to take care of their own troops. As Lloyd’s said in the aftermath of the disastrous third battle of the siege, in a twist on the earlier image of the strong, brave Russian soldier, Russia’s “leonine troops have been led to destruction by asinine commanders. In this mismanaged war it would seem that the killed lie unburied, and the wounded unattended.”99 The plight of the Russian wounded was there for all the foreign correspondents to see, with 12% of the war’s 56,652 wounded Russians dying—a similar figure, as the Philadelphia Medical Journal later showed, to the 12.9% of wounded Union troops who died in the American Civil War.100 Further, given that at least twice as many Russian soldiers died from disease as in battle (officially, 81,166 vs. 34,742), the specter of contagion in the camps the correspondents routinely visited during the war must have been equally as troubling. 96 The circulation of Lloyd’s at this time was at best estimate something over 500,000; in 1879 it averaged 612,902 copies sold a week—see Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspaper (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 52. This was almost twice the figures of the other two high-selling weeklies, Reynolds’s Newspaper and the Weekly Times, which sold 350,000 and 300,000 respectively per week—see Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 21. 97 “The Siege of Plevna,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 September 1877. 98 Ibid. 99 “The Disaster at Plevna,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 23 September 1877. 100 W. C. Borden, “Military Surgery,” Philadelphia Medical Journal, 11 August 1900,

col. A, p. 249.

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For the British public, this scene would have been a cruel simulacra of the medical tragedies of the Crimean War, where Britain’s grueling fight against death from untended wounds and virulent camp diseases had inspired the curative mythology surrounding the Victorian heroine, Florence Nightingale.101 This is not just my theory, as we can juxtapose this fact of Britain’s recent past with Lloyd’s call for a medical intervention, with Britain leading the way with a “battalion of medical volunteers, by way of example to the continental nations.”102 This hints at the answer to the obvious question hanging in the air of which European state should replace the Russians in bringing lasting peace, protection, and stability in the East. Who but the nation which had known and yet mastered death in the perilous East? The role of the press in determining the war’s effect on British popular and political opinion cannot be overemphasized. As discussed in the last chapter in detail, the British were voracious readers of newspapers and magazines by this point, with major stories emerging from as well as contributing to political sensibilities and behaviors. The effect of correspondence from the war zone was further enhanced by the use of telegraphic cables for transmitting copy, a practice that had begun during the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War and that gave readers a sense of immersion in the news as they were provided with not just recent, but even current information.103 Britons thus bore witness to the siege’s progress from an active, ongoing perspective, rather than with the detached and blameless regret of hindsight. In a sense, readers of any emotional sensibility had to consider themselves concerned, as the efficiency of the press in providing up-to-date information precluded the excuse of not having learned of an 101 Like in the Crimea, in the Russo-Turkish War deaths due to disease were three or four times in excess of those due directly to combat. Based on Russian military records, Friedrich Prinzing calculated 23,752 Russian deaths due to four major fevers (typhoid, gastric, typhus, and relapsing) for just the march from Russia to the Danube, prior to any actual fighting! See p. 288 of Friedrich Prizing’s, Epidemics Resulting from Wars, ed. Harald Westergaard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1916). He further says that even though Ottoman troops also suffered from disease, it was not as bad as they “were better nourished and their camps were kept clean,” the latter a major prerequisite for reducing the spread of disease—see p. 290. 102 “The Disaster at Plevna,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 23 September 1877. 103 See pp. 141–142 of Roger T. Stearn’s, “War Correspondents and Colonial War, c.

1870–1900,” in MacKenzie, 139–161.

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affair until after it was too late. In particular, the quality of concern about the war provided (indeed, insisted upon for months) by the British press is embodied in the visual medium provided by illustrated papers, which during 1877 and early 1878 came to regard the war as their numberone focus. Coverage of the war in illustrated papers therefore allows us to reconstruct a visual choreography British readers followed when they contemplated the Siege of Plevna and other battles. A common format for war coverage in illustrated papers of this time was to place a number of contiguous images on a two-page spread, with captions for description; a more detailed write-up on what the images depicted would follow on subsequent pages.104 The effect was to immerse the audience in the conflict, much in the same way as one is now exposed to war footage in film, television, or online video.105 Britain’s two biggest illustrated weeklies, the Illustrated London News and The Graphic, both used this style. For example, on September 1, 1877 The Graphic published a spread of eight wood engravings titled “With the Russians—The Fighting in the Shipka Pass.”106 The juxtaposition of images of military locations (such as “The Heights of Shipka”), with those of quiet scenes (“Russian Officers in a Mill Stream at Hainkoi”), and of battle (“Cossacks Saving Wounded Bulgarian Volunteers During the Battle of Yeni Sagra”) offered a kaleidoscopic view of the war, its participants, and its effects (Fig. 4.1).

104 This form was also used for other topics, but it is most commonly seen in the illustration of complex and acute affairs, of which war is a primary example. The next most common example that exhibits this format is probably the depiction of a royal ball or procession. 105 An interesting insight on this topic is provided by Rudolf G. Wagner, who, in his examination of the history of Chinese illustrated newspapers, refers to the global significance of the fact that during the Crimean War illustrated papers tied their news narrative directly to the images (he says the “Russian-Ottoman War on the Crimea (1876– 1878),” which is surely a garbled reference to the Crimean War, as it was during the Crimean War that the Illustrated London News first employed this practice), thereby acting as a foundation for “the universal grammar of the moving image” further developed into film, and then by logical extension into television—see p. 106 of his chapter, “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai huabao,” in Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, ed. Rudolf G. Wagner (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 105–174. 106 “With the Russians—The Fighting in the Shipka Pass,” The Graphic, 1 September 1877, col. A, p. 201. See Fig. 4.1 for images.

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Fig. 4.1 “With the Russians—The Fighting in the Shipka Pass” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

An intriguing dynamic emerges when one compares a bemused scene in the image titled “In a Turkish Bath at Kezanlik—Cossacks Transformed into Turks” with that in an adjacent, grotesque engraving, “Heads of the Russian Wounded Decapitated by the Turks after the Battle on the Heights.” The former image is intended obviously to elicit a smile and the latter a feeling of disgust; the reader is left to ponder the meaning of this emotional contrast. Britons in the mold of the Daily News ’s Archibald Forbes may have taken it as evidence of Russian gallantry in the face of the “unspeakable Turk,” while others might see it as evidence of the consequences of the foolhardy encouragement of Russia’s casus belli by British “Atrocitarians,” as the notably anti-Russian Queen Victoria did.107 The Siege of Plevna was of particular interest to illustrated papers because so many themes could be contained in one story. Some of these 107 Bass, 298.

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themes were intentionally political and some merely reflected general cultural values. Often, it is difficult to distinguish between the two. For example, Orientalist images abound, but they are not always visibly negative. More than anything, the primary motive was to depict (and sell) the spectacle of combat. In this sense, the illustrations and other graphic descriptions in print were clearly designed to resonate with Victorian attitudes toward war and heroism, but the harder question is how to tease out the variety of ways that Britons responded to these themes. Certainly, the illustration of the conflict in at-the-scene detail told British readers that an affair of great gravity was taking place. The impression one gets, then, is that the papers attempted to connect such remote events with British values and the British experience. Readers could get involved in the war themselves, merely by spending a few pennies. By the same token, illustrations made it difficult to leave the problem in the abstract: as a rule, other people’s death and tragedy sucks one in. Moreover, given the saturation of print media and the habit of sharing and leaving papers in common areas, the human elements of the Siege of Plevna were a quotidian British presence. Some papers put out special issues on the war, such as the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, which devoted the entire September 22 edition to documenting the height of the siege, beginning with a full-page image titled “Gallant Defence of the Grivica Redoubt by the Turks: Victory and Death of the Russian Colonel” and following up with several more engravings and a description of the action108 (Fig. 4.2). The front-page image depicts the heroic charge of Russian troops into Ottoman fire, the Russians (and the British reader) gazing upward at the “Russian Colonel,” who is arranged in the classic trope of the mortally wounded leader: sword out, holding a tattered Russian standard atop the scarp before the redoubt itself, his cap falling off his head as his body is thrown back by the bullet that killed him at his precise moment of triumph.109 Opposing the Russians, half the Ottoman soldiers

108 “A Large Bird’s-Eye View of the Siege of Plevna,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 22 September 1877, p. 179. See Fig. 4.2 for image. 109 A redoubt is a fortification built outside a main fort that provides a strong, enclosed, partially self-sufficient defensive structure, complete with its own artillery and a body of troops. In combination with other redoubts and the firepower of the artillery in the main fort, a redoubt hinders the advance of an attacker across otherwise clear ground in front of the main fort. If constructed properly, a set of redoubts requires attackers to focus first

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Fig. 4.2 “A Large Bird’s-Eye View of the Siege of Plevna” (Copyright Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk])

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are arranged in a firing line, while the other half hustle to the rear to continue the fight. Their short vests and baggy “Zouave” pants are clearly visible—an easily recognizable Oriental image (though no longer a standard uniform).110 Inset into the picture are two smaller images: to the left, a sketch of Alexander II on a purpose-built viewing platform titled, “The Czar’s Grand Stand”; to the right, an image of a Russian artillery observer on a 60-foot ladder titled “A Perilous Perch.” In an era before the advent of photography in newspapers, which fixed the reality of a scene in stark detail, this kind of image must have evoked a response that was unique to that short era between the development of speedier processes of preparing wood engravings for print in the midnineteenth century and the direct reproduction of photographs in print in the 1890s.111 Unlike an image known by the reader to be the creation of an artist’s mind long after the fact or a print version of a photograph, the drama of the scenes in these 1877–1878 illustrations can be played out in the mind according to one’s own imagination of the wide range of possibilities lying between representation and reality. When one turns the page, one leaves the Czar behind and is presented with a quiet scene: a local Muslim soldier bidding farewell to his child, “Good-by, Papa!,” his rifle on his shoulder and his be-turbaned neighbors standing witness to the touching exchange.112 Turn the page again, and one is transported “Inside a Turkish Redoubt,” reversing the vantage point from the front page: the reader now joins the “Turk” in defense against the Russians on taking all the redoubts in a wide area before they can attack the main fort directly, with the object being that an attacker will be exhausted by the effort and have to withdraw or circumvent the area, disrupting and weakening their line. A scarp is the side of a defensive ditch in front of a fort or redoubt which is closest to the interior of the fort or redoubt. 110 In establishing the reliability of this image, it is important to note here that it may have been accurate if the defenders of the redoubt were rural troops from the Balkans, many of whom were outfitted in this type of uniform. On the other hand, it may have been merely the artist’s Orientalist take on the scene, as the regular Ottoman Army’s uniforms were much like those of the other European armies, with the notable exception of the use of the fez as headwear. For images of the standard-issue uniform of this time, see Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 175. 111 For details on these processes and this transition, see “History of Periodical Illustration,” Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Analytics, https://ncna.dh.chass.ncsu.edu/imagea nalytics/history.php. 112 “Good-By, Papa!,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 22 September 1877, p. 180. See Fig. 4.3 for image.

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with whom he had so recently charged the redoubt.113 All the images are connected, but what these connections signify is entirely up to the reader (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4).

War of Words: The Daily Telegraph, Jingo Russophobia, and the New Imperialism Given the various ways one could respond to these images of the war and their descriptions in the press, we are left with the difficult task of gauging how the British public came to regard the conflict as an occasion for flexing British might on the side of the Ottomans, who so recently had inspired such popular indignation. Clearly one of the main considerations is that papers written for a Liberal audience tended to depict the Russians as being in the right and the Ottomans as in the wrong, while Conservative papers presented the reverse. These biases were based on broader fault lines in British society: a Liberal paper would also tend to support Gladstone’s rhetoric on any topic and decry Disraeli’s, and vice versa for a Tory paper. Yet the Russo-Turkish War blurred these lines in significant ways, with the result that several significant Liberal papers began to sway toward the anti-Russian side. We have already seen a suggestion of this change with Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, but a vastly more significant example is the Daily Telegraph, the largest-circulation daily in Britain at 200,000–250,000 copies sold a day during the Eastern Crisis.114 Founded in 1855 and shortly thereafter reorganized and popularized as a Liberal paper, the Daily Telegraph was famous in its first two decades for its connection to the wing of Liberal politics and society associated with William Ewart Gladstone, coining and popularizing the phrase “the People’s William” as a handle for the Liberal leader.115 During Gladstone’s first ministry between 1868 and 1874, its principal manager, Edward Levy-Lawson, made sure that its commentary always proceeded

113 “Inside a Turkish Redoubt,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 22

September 1877, p. 181. See Fig. 4.4 for image. 114 Andrew Milner, Literature, Culture and Society, 2nd ed. (London: UCL Press, 2005), 105. Milner lists the figures as 200,000 per day in 1870 and 250,000 per day in 1880. 115 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),

136.

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Fig. 4.3 “Good-By, Papa!” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk])

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Fig. 4.4 “Inside a Turkish Redoubt” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [(www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)]

from a Gladstonian angle.116 This was part of the paper’s cachet with its readers and, thanks to Gladstone’s wide popularity, a component of the paper’s own rapid success.117 However, after Gladstone lost the 1874 general election to Disraeli’s Tories and entered his “retirement” phase, his relationship with the Daily Telegraph began to weaken; it worsened further after the paper supported the Disraeli-organized Suez Canal shares purchase at the end of 1875.118 It was only during the war, however, that the Daily Telegraph went in

116 Matthew, 230–231; Koss, 200. The owner was his father, Joseph Moses Levy

(1812–1888), but most control had by this time been delegated to Levy-Lawson. 117 As Ian St. John notes, it was the Daily Telegraph that led the other papers who supported Gladstone in gratitude for his work to repeal the stamp duty in 1855 and the duty on paper in 1861, which made newspaper production further profitable—see Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London: Anthem, 2010), 141. 118 Koss, 201.

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the totally opposite direction, becoming one of the most vocal antiRussian, pro-Ottoman voices there was.119 For this end, the paper tied itself more firmly to the Conservatives and, more precisely, to Disraeli’s call for a serious consideration of direct intervention on the side of the Ottomans—not for the Ottoman Empire’s sake, of course, but for the British Empire’s. Over the course of the war, the Daily Telegraph became the popular press’s representative for imperial defense, appropriating the familiar phrase “British interests” and replacing it again and again in its columns with a theretofore less familiar maxim: “imperial interests.”120 This modification was not done over-subtly, as the paper began to take a brashly Russophobic, imperialist line on almost every issue. This tactic was by its leaders’ design. As Levy-Lawson told Disraeli’s private secretary, Montagu Corry, a month after the war started, “I am in a big fight and I know how to use my guns…The country will defend its interests. But these interests must have champions with courage in their hearts and bold and national utterances on their lips.”121 These were rallying cries for direct British action to protect its empire, to be incited by tapping into and exploiting the totem of “the British nation” and thus, as Richard Koebner and Helmut Schmidt put it, “they were ‘imperial’ utterances.”122 The Daily Telegraph’s chief editor, Edwin Arnold (who had replaced the staunch Gladstonian Thornton Leigh Hunt in 1873 and was a wellknown Orientalist scholar, poet, and strong supporter of the Ottoman Empire), helped Levy-Lawson in this task.123 During the war, LevyLawson and Arnold worked to make sure that the Daily Telegraph preached the Ottoman cause in a suitably dramatic fashion, which included healthy doses of Russophobia and scare tactics over presumed

119 Ibid., 201–203. 120 Richard Koebner and Helmut D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance

of a Political Word 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 127. 121 Qtd. in Koss, 202. This is from a letter from Levy-Lawson to Corry from May 17th, 1877. 122 Koebner and Schmidt, 127. 123 Arnold published a famous poetic account of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, The

Light of Asia, in 1879. It went through 60 editions in Britain—see “Arnold, Sir Edwin (1832–1904),” J. P. Phelan in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.floyd.lib.umn.edu/view/article/30455.

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Russian designs on the British Empire’s territory. It was not a slow development. Already in June 1877, the Daily Telegraph was stirring up fears among its readers that Russia’s object was to “hoist the Imperial standard of Holy Russia on the Mosque of St. Sophia.”124 In July, it recommended Britain’s “immediate occupation” of the Gallipoli peninsula (southwest of Istanbul and strategically crucial for control of the city and the Dardanelles) to protect its interests from being threatened by Russia.125 And in late October it called upon the powerfully anti-Russian mythology of the Great Game, which we saw Queen Victoria was an adherent of, saying that with the war going badly for the Ottomans, soon “the Russian ought to prove master” over Asia Minor “if, indeed, these limits can now be said to content him.”126 Of course, the insinuation was that Russia would never be content—at least not until the British Empire fell and India echoed with the hoots of Cossacks dancing the Hopak. This marked a point of departure for the Daily Telegraph and the dynamic of British news. In fact, by the 1880s the Daily Telegraph had not only left Gladstone behind but the Liberals in general, becoming a fully Conservative paper.127 Its opposition to Gladstone’s proposals for Irish Home Rule in the 1880s only reinforced the paper’s earlier decision to cleave to the Tories and their own “bold and national utterances.” In fact, the Daily Telegraph might even be thought of as the paper of the “new imperialism.” This status is underscored not only by its openly imperialist editorial policy but its 40-year dominance in daily circulation (not being overtaken until 1900 by the Daily Mail ), its later popularity due in no small part to the exciting, pro-imperial reportage provided by war correspondents like Bennet Burleigh.128 For the Daily Telegraph to go Tory in 1877, then, was a major event in the context of that moment in history, as for up to that point almost all of the high-circulation papers were Liberal, which meant that British “public opinion” as viewed through the lens of the media had theretofore effectively been the Liberal

124 Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1877. 125 Daily Telegraph, 24 July 1877. 126 Daily Telegraph, 18 October 1877. 127 It is still the most significant Conservative daily in Britain, plus the highest-selling broadsheet. 128 Stearn, 149–150.

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opinion.129 Suddenly, though, the most popular Liberal daily switched sides and took a Tory line. The Daily News and the Northern Echo could not take up the slack nor could any of the popular Liberal penny weeklies, like Lloyd’s or Reynolds’s.130 Meanwhile, The Times, generally known as a centrist, moderately Liberal organ with a stagnant circulation at the time, vacillated on the issue of British intervention in the war, offering no clear voice on the matter.131 The British public therefore received a media message skewed in favor of intervention, using the logic of the protection of Britain’s cherished route to India and its territories in the East. This was conveniently bolstered by evoking the robust Russophobia that had long been present in British society. To those who opposed this viewpoint, the eventual and somewhat unspectacular triumph of the Russians at Plevna in December 1877 was dampened by how long it had taken, by the reports of Russian atrocities, and by the rapid growth of a hero cult of Osman Pasha at the battle’s end. This last element should not be discounted in its influence on British views of the war. All the major papers, regardless of political slant, portrayed Osman Pasha in positive (yet no less Orientalist) light as a kind of noble savage redeemed by chivalric, civilized acts such as his dignified meeting with Alexander II after the battle ended, the Russian officers yelling “Bravo! Bravo! Osman!”132 Even the deeply Turcophobic Reynolds’s Newspaper had to admit that “no soldiers could have fought better, and no general could have done more than Osman Pasha. His courage and resource were conspicuous, and could only be exceeded by the unspeakable baseness of the cause which claimed him as a soldier”133 (Fig. 4.5).

129 St. John, 141. 130 The Daily News and the Echo had about half the circulation of the Daily Telegraph

at this time, both about 100,000 vs. the latter’s over 200,000. See pp. 4–5 of Alvar Ellegård, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain: II. Directory,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 4, no. 3 (1971): 3–22. 131 Ibid., 5. Ellegård records The Times ’s daily sales as 65,000 in 1861, 63,000 in 1868, and 63,000 in 1875. The Times ’s stagnation is despite an increase in population and, even more substantially, literacy during this period. 132 “Osman Pasha Brought before the Czar at Plevna,” The Graphic, 5 January 1878, col. A, p. 9. See Fig. 4.5 for image and caption. 133 “The Fall of Plevna,” Reynold’s Newspaper, 16 December 1877.

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Fig. 4.5 “Osman Pasha Brought before the Czar at Plevna” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

The widespread praise for Osman Pasha and the men under his command, whether as a defier of Russian aggression or a kind of Liberal’s anti-Oriental Oriental, made Turcophobic and thus anti-intervention commentary somewhat like yelling against the wind. Even the Daily News ’s rejoicing at the final “impotence” of the “wild beasts” at Plevna,134 or Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper’s view of the siege as evidence that the “Turk” had “lost none of his old warlike brutalities,”135 seemed weak and retrograde after all the praise heaped upon Osman Pasha and his cohorts. Regarding the question of whether a British invasion force should land in the Balkans or Gallipoli to protect Istanbul from being captured by the Russian army, the belief that, as Lloyd’s put it, “the Government should adopt a masterly inactivity” could not possibly mesh with the increasingly violent mood of the populace.136 Under such circumstances, the 134 “The Operations against Plevna,” Daily News, 3 December 1877. 135 “The Fall of Plevna,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 December 1877. 136 Ibid.

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explosive popularity of the pro-intervention music hall song “By Jingo!” makes complete sense. Its lyrics, written in late 1877 by G. W. Hunt and performed by a music hall grandee billed as “The Great MacDermott,” perfectly summed up the amalgamated foreign and imperial viewpoint of the broader Tory voting block—that is, not just for Tory peers and their middle-class fellow travelers, but for other constituencies: the communities around shipyards and ports dependent on colonial trade; the army of financial clerks in the City of London; or the “personal freedom” and “beer and bible” portion of the urban working class, who had been newly enfranchised in 1867 and helped vote in Disraeli and the Tories in 1874137 : The “Dogs of War” are loose and the rugged Russian Bear, All bent on blood and robbery has crawled out of his lair. It seems a thrashing now and then, will never help to tame, That brute, and so he’s out upon the “same old game.” The Lion did his best to find him some excuse, To crawl back to his den again. All efforts were no use. He hunger’d for his victim. He’s pleased when blood is shed. But let us hope his crimes may all recoil on his own head. Chorus: We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too! We’ve fought the Bear before and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

The misdeeds of the Turks have been “spouted” through all lands, But how about the Russians, can they show spotless hands? They slaughtered well at Khiva, in Siberia icy cold. How many subjects done to death we’ll ne’er perhaps be told. They butchered the Circassians, man, woman yes and child. With cruelties their Generals their murderous hours beguiled, And poor unhappy Poland their cruel yoke must bear, While prayers for “Freedom and Revenge” go up into the air.

137 For more detail on mid-1870s, Tory urban voting factions, see Alex Windscheffel, Popular Conservatism in Imperial London, 1868–1906 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), especially pp. 35–40.

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May he who ‘gan the quarrel soon have to bite the dust. The Turk should be thrice armed for “he hath his quarrel just.” ‘Tis said that countless thousands should die through cruel war, But let us hope most fervently ere long it shall be o’er. Let them be warned: Old England is brave Old England still. We’ve proved our might, we’ve claimed our right, and ever, ever will. Should we have to draw the sword our way to victory we’ll forge, With the Battle cry of Britons, “Old England and St George!”138

Almost invariably, scholars cite only the chorus of “By Jingo!” in discussing this topic. This is a shame, as the chorus is the least interesting part of the song. Instead, it is the verses’ detailed impeachment of Russia’s claim to the moral high ground that is more clearly representative of the vital shift in public opinion that took place during the war. The lyrics explicitly cite the trifecta of Russia’s massacre of Circassian Muslims in the 1860s, its sacking of the Khiva Khanate in 1873, and the plight of Russian Poland after the 1863 January Uprising, holding these crimes up against the Ottoman atrocities which had gripped British society for the preceding three years (Fig. 4.6). Ironically, it is from the cult of Osman Pasha and this chauvinistic, nationalistic song that we get some of the clearest and most unmitigated Turcophilic sentiment during the Eastern Crisis—an opinion we might even characterize as contrary to the Orientalist refrain that would place the Ottoman Empire in every negative position vis-à-vis the West. Just as it could be popular among Britons to denigrate “Turkish rapacity,” it was also popular to speak of a just conflict with a rapacious Russia. As we learned in previous chapters, such a discourse of a corrupt Russia of course had its legacy in “patriotic” public outrage during Crimean War (and perhaps even before139 ), but Jingo Russophobia amplified such 138 The popularity of “By Jingo!” led quickly to the emergence of “Jingo” as an identifier for anti-Russian, pro-war, and (often, if not always) pro-Ottoman urban men and, less commonly, women. The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times provided a “Portrait of a ‘Jingo’” for its readers (27 April 1878, col. C, p. 269), showing a Jingo dressed garishly and shouting while waving his walking stick-cum-club above his head. See Fig. 4.6 for image. 139 John Howes Gleason traces the foundations of British Russophobia to the first decade after the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, focusing on the Near Eastern Crisis of 1839–1841 as where it began to be an acute aspect of British thought—see The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study in the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 16.

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Fig. 4.6 “Portrait of a ‘Jingo’” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishnewspaperar chive.co.uk])

views and gave Russian imperialism new, more “criminal” texture in the British mind. During the war a spate of anti-Russian books, pamphlets, and speeches in Parliament on the Eastern Question attempted to combat Liberal accusations of Ottoman misrule in just this manner, fighting fire with fire by exposing Russia’s own alleged transgressions. In March 1877, Lord Dorchester asked Parliament why the reports of the Bulgarian Atrocities

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in the diplomatic Blue Books were not read “side by side” with the “list of horrors that occurred in Poland in 1863, and the like of which [Dorchester] believed had also occurred in Circassia.”140 Likewise, the Liberal peer Lord Campbell claimed that while “the influence of Russia is wrapt up in the corrupt administration of European Turkey,” crimes like the “annihilation” of Poland were indicative of how Russia would go about taking over management of the Balkans from the Ottomans.141 Tory Lord Dunraven went further, saying Europe owed the “best part of our boasted civilization” to Moorish writers and scientists and that “however black the pages of Turkish history might be, one could find something tangible to set up against it. But…what had we but empty protestations and high-sounding Christian professions with which to balance the long list of items under such headings as Poland, the Caucasus, and Khiva?”142 As Dunraven’s remarks show, British Turcophilia was not solely a realpolitik calculation of whether British interests were better served by supporting the Ottoman Empire. Affection for the Ottoman Empire (as well as for Islam and Muslims) also did not always take the form of simple exoticism, i.e. as an attraction to barbarous Oriental mysteries. During the war, older Turcophiles in the tradition of David Urquhart made their opinions known.143 One such example was William Wight, a retired vicar and Orientalist who wrote from a Chislehurst house he called the “Arab’s Tent.”144 Wight published a pro-Ottoman book in 1877 offering “a word for the Mohammedan,” opening with an admonition that “Man is a bundle of prejudices, and unfortunately the Englishman is no exception.”145 To claims that the Ottomans were not reforming quickly enough, he answered: “Are they anything worse than the English people were in the past? Is it so long since we English emerged out of political darkness? Are the Mohammedans very slow to take in a new 140 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol.232, col.1745 (12th March 1877). 141 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol.238, col.278 (25th February 1878). 142 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol.238, col.281 (25th February 1878). 143 See the discussion of Urquhart and the Foreign Affairs Committees in the previous

chapter. 144 A description of Wight and his personality is found in John Ross Macduff, The Author of “Morning and Night Watches”: Reminiscences of a Long Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), 230–231. 145 William Wight, Cross and Crescent: A Word for the Mohammedan in the Present War (London: Shaw & Sons, 1877), iii.

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idea? Is not this equally true of the English?”146 It was certainly true also of the Russians, Wight thought. If Russia demanded constitutions for the Ottoman Christian principalities, he argued it was hypocritical not to grant a constitution to its own people and its subsidiary Catholic and Muslim states.147 Turcophiles had their own prejudices, of course, not the least of which was of course Russophobia itself. Some went further than mere antiRussian claims, rejecting the idea that Balkan Christians had any claim to being civilized just by sake of being Christian. In the 1877 revised version of their book Twelve Years’ Study of the Eastern Question in Bulgaria, S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles Brophy called the “true Bulgarian” a “lazy drunkard and a fanatical fetishist.”148 They deemed the Bulgarian Orthodox Church a “secret society” allied with the Russian state, claiming that Bulgarian Christianity was “not less dangerous, and but little more scrupulous, than Fenianism.”149 Thus, they declared that the attribution of Bulgarian nationalism to “Turkish misrule” made them “doubt of the mental sanity of England!”150 Wight, St. Clair, and Brophy were not the only voices who took a dim view of British moral indignation over the treatment of Ottoman Christians. The explorer, Tory MP, and naval officer Captain (later Admiral) Bedford Pim thought that the Ottomans were “more sinned against than sinning,” and that the Bulgarian Atrocities were surpassed not only by Russia’s actions in Poland and Central Asia but by Prussian soldiers in France and, significantly, by “England in India and Jamaica”!151 An annotated 1875 letter in a book on the Eastern Question published by Major-General Hope Crealock (who, readers will recall, helped design and organize the Eastern Question quadrille at the Dublin Castle ball described in the previous chapter) in 1878 concurred, saying that Britons who were upset over Ottoman massacres should keep things in perspective:

146 Ibid., vii. 147 Ibid., 9. 148 S. G. B. St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy, vi. 149 Ibid., 222. 150 Ibid., vi. 151 Bedford Pim, The Eastern Question, Past, Present and Future, 2nd ed. (London:

Effingham Wilson, 1877), 43 and 14 respectively.

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These gentlemen, who have such sensitive feelings, and who are so easily moved by the accounts of the sufferings of their Christian brethren in Turkey, would do well to remember all that took place in Poland, in India, in the West Indies, in America during the war, and elsewhere, during rebellions which have taken place in our day. Every one deplored them. Nothing could be more terrible than the events which occurred in America and India on both sides.152

Writing in 1878, Crealock felt no need, in light of the Bulgarian Atrocities, to amend his view on the tactics Ottomans used to suppress insurrection, commenting in the retrospective on his 1875 letter merely that the Bulgarian Agitation allowed Russia to attempt to “induce Europe to coerce Turkey to accept Russian aggression” after Russia’s case for war began to whither.153 The idea of a high-ranking British officer (a veteran of the Indian Rebellion, no less) impugning, even rhetorically, the conduct of the British army in India and in Jamaica offers a compelling contrast to the typical “East/Muslim = bad, West/Christian = good” logic so closely associated with European thought. The fact that proOttoman claims are just as vigorously and categorically expressed as those proceeding from hyperbole depicting the Ottoman Empire as the greatest evil in human history shows us that the nature of British thought on Eastern matters was far more contested than has been appreciated fully. The British mind on these matters was plastic, even changeable, and often less determined by the dominant categories we ascribe to the era than by situations that elicited an intellectual or political response. British popular opinion therefore adapted to what mattered at the moment, and usually what most closely affected Britain’s place in the world. This meant that the British public felt no cognitive dissonance in overriding negative conceptions about the Ottoman Empire, the East, and Easterners if the consequences of carrying such ideas to their logical conclusions threatened to damage Britain’s position (or just make Britain “look bad”) on the global stage. As Jimmie Cain has shown, British Russophobia could be linked to a host of other imperial and domestic issues, and if Russian imperialism had hurt the Ottoman Empire, then for many Britons this was cause enough to offer support to the Ottomans, if 152 Henry Hope Crealock, The Eastern Question, and the Foreign Policy of Great Britain: A Series of Papers from 1870–1878 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1878), 115. 153 Ibid., 117–118. Emphasis original.

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only temporarily.154 If British interests or prestige were on the line, most Britons almost immediately avowed that the East was not such a bad place after all. In fact, when it came to matters of empire, authority, and historical stereotypes, even a vigorous Turcophobe like Archibald Forbes had to admit that the implications of advocating Balkan Christian nationalism went beyond what Britain and the rest of Europe were willing to stomach.155 Forbes wrote in November 1877 that to base one’s support of Bulgarian independence on the idea that the Ottomans were artificial rulers in Europe meant one must also accept that “there logically follows a revolution in the face of the world, and all but universal chaos.”156 He dramatically laid out the next steps for the British Empire should Britons accede to the idea that a national group had a fundamental right to kick out its most recent overlords: We must quit India, and bid an apologetic adieu to the Maori, the Kaffir, and the Hottentot, the Spaniard from whom we wrested Gibraltar, the Dutchman from whom we masterfully took the Cape. We are to take ship from the jetties over which frown the Heights of Abraham [i.e. Quebec City], and leave the French habitants and the remnant of red men at Cachnawaga to settle between them the ownership of Canada.157

Forbes leaves the reader to ponder the hypocrisy of advocating nationbuilding by proxy while maintaining an empire based upon constructed (or even fictional) claims of exclusive territorial right, with most places incorporated by force of arms even as the Ottoman Balkans had been hundreds of years prior. Meanwhile, the redemptive spectacle of Ottoman fighting at the defense of Plevna made those opinions reminiscent of the Bulgarian Agitation seem anachronistic and blind to the implications to the British Empire of supporting Russia in the war. When in December 1877, just as Plevna was falling, Reverend Malcolm MacColl responded to Forbes’s claims by arguing that Russia’s fight against the Ottoman Empire 154 Jimmie Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2006), 4–5. 155 Archibald Forbes, “Russians, Turks, and Bulgarians—At the Theatre of War,” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, November 1877, 561–582. 156 Ibid., 575. 157 Ibid.

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was “one of the most righteous wars recorded in history,” this opinion resonated little with a country that had made it clear by this point that the plight of the Bulgarians was not on par with protecting against an increase in Russian influence.158 The Pall Mall Gazette, for example, took MacColl’s article (though its editors admitted they had not read the article, nor had any plan to!) along with two other responses from Gladstone and E. A. Freeman as evidence that these men “have been for eighteen months the victims of a political delusion.”159 The tide had changed so radically and so quickly that support for Russia’s cause now looked like a betrayal of the well-being of Britain’s Eastern interests and imperial possessions. With Plevna taken, the road open to Istanbul, and the war drawing to a close in January 1878, the conflict between Christian internationalism and Russophobic imperial patriotism reached a literally violent level of division.

Mob Rule, Britannia! G. W. Hunt’s “By Jingo!” was first performed at the end of December 1877, and already by the New Year it was “the song which every street Arab is whistling today and all the gods are applauding at the Theatres and Music Halls.”160 Yet the story of the Jingo movement in early 1878 goes far beyond the mere popularity of the song. After an armistice between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was signed on January 31, 1878 much British society became obsessed with whether Britain would intervene, given that the Russians continued moving toward Istanbul during February and early March. Rallies were held on both sides of the issue, and on a number of occasions protesters and counter-protesters clashed violently over the issue. Newspaper reports provide us with a remarkable level of detail on the nature of these political street battles, which were unmatched since the Hyde Park riots of 1866, a movement that

158 See p. 832 of Malcolm MacColl, “Some Current Fallacies About Turks, Bulgarians, and Russians,” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, December 1877, 831–842. 159 “Mr. Forbes’s Offences,” Pall Mall Gazette, 3 December 1877, col. A, p. 10. 160 “London Gossip—London, December 31st, 1877,” Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post,

2 January 1878, col. A, p. 8. A “street Arab” is synonymous with street urchin—in the context of this study, an interesting coincidence.

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one of the leaders of the 1878 anti-interventionist movement, Charles Bradlaugh, ironically was also involved.161 All through January and February, there were small but increasingly violent rallies both for and against intervention. An anti-war meeting at the Thirsk Liberal Club on January 9 expressed its hope that people like Derby and Carnarvon would fight in the Cabinet against a policy of intervention.162 One man professed to the assembly that he “could not understand Russophobia,” while another elicited laughter by characterizing the “war party” into three segments: “aristocratic rowdies,” “democratic rowdies who spent their time supporting lamp-posts,” and “fanatical people.”163 An attendee to a meeting at Brotton stated that the fear of Russian designs on British interests was a “scarecrow, raised for a purpose” that was opposite to what the bulk of Britons wanted.164 Indeed, the Northern Echo attempted to paint pro-war groups holding meetings as contrary to true public opinion, reporting that one meeting at St. James’s Hall was “by ticket only—a significant fact.”165 Similarly, the Daily News reported that on January 31 an anti-war meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel in London was crashed by a crowd chanting “Down with Russia” and singing “By Jingo!” loudly.166 Later, another larger mob occupied the whole of the hotel and “amused themselves by the execution in various keys of ‘Rule Britannia’ and other ditties,” before bursting through and destroying the glass doors of the conference room to more cheers of “Down with Russia!” and “Three cheers for Turkey!”167 When they had driven the anti-war meeting from the room, the mob “hoisted a fez and a Turkish flag” and brought their own speakers forward, later moving on to Guildhall to have another meeting which they closed by giving “three cheers for the Daily

161 See Chapter 7, “Bradlaugh and National Unity,” on pp. 275–286 of Edward Royle’s Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). 162 “England and the War—Opposition to a War Policy—Meeting at Thirsk,” Northern Echo, 10 January 1878, col. E, p. 3. 163 Ibid. 164 “Enthusiastic Meeting at Brotton,” Northern Echo, 10 January 1878, col. E, p. 2. 165 “The War Party,” Northern Echo, 10 January 1878, col. F, p. 3. 166 “The Country and the War Vote,” Daily News, 1 February 1878, col. E, p. 3. 167 Ibid.

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Telegraph.”168 It would seem Levy-Lawson’s “guns” had been used effectively, ironically making his paper itself into one of the very “national utterances on their lips.” In response to the anti-intervention groups’ quite reasonable outrage, the Pall Mall Gazette cynically responded that “the last few days has taught the anti-British agitators that agitation is game which two can play at.”169 It judged the anti-war party to be hypocrites on the matter of popular politics, saying “our Radicals were wont to extol the many moral virtues and the high political aptitude of the ‘toiling masses;’ but it seems that they only meant the ‘toiling masses’ who agree with them. The ‘toiling masses’ who do not are ‘roughs,’ ‘rowdies,’ ‘the mob.’”170 Given the depth to which these issues cut into and separated British society, this set the stage for a violent confrontation when the Hyde Park Association, which was led by two controversial figures in British society, atheist Charles Bradlaugh and neo-anarchist Auberon Herbert (who was also, incidentally, Lord Carnarvon’s brother), began holding meetings in late February and the inevitable counter-protests emerged.171 In the larger context of Victorian politics, the Hyde Park Association appears to have taken pages out of both the Cobdenite anti-imperial, internationalist book and the radical labor movement book, with its leaders adding their own iconoclastic twists to the motive behind their protest of a warlike policy.172 168 “Political and Social—Notes and Comments,” The Examiner, 2 February 1878, col. A, p. 1. 169 “Agitators on Agitation,” Pall Mall Gazette, 5 February 1878, col. A, p. 10. Emphasis added. 170 Ibid. 171 Although there are many ways to characterize Herbert’s (and his mentor Herbert

Spencer’s) views, such as anarcho-capitalist, proto-libertarian, etc., I have borrowed Miles Taylor’s chosen term—see “Herbert, Auberon Edward William Molyneux (1838–1906),” M. W. Taylor in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/33828. 172 Biagini notes that Bradlaugh’s support came largely from labor organizations that admired his speaking skills and commitment to the labor reform cause—see Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 220–221. Also, the ODNB describes him as “a symbol of people against parliament”—see “Bradlaugh, Charles (1833–1891),” Edward Royle in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http:// www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/3183.

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In their own respective ways, Bradlaugh and Herbert represented the segment of British society that took a republican line on matters of governance, seeing Parliamentary decisions (even many Liberal ones) as hopelessly guided by elite motives and prejudices.173 Their calls for peace, therefore, proceeded more from their opposition to the identity of the forces calling for war rather than from general pacificist beliefs. Hence, although the Hyde Park Association and the pro-war counter-protesters arranged against it were in dispute over the use of force internationally, this did not imply that Bradlaugh and Herbert were against the use of force in domestic political confrontations. Indeed, they not only were prepared for a physical confrontation in the promotion of both their specific and larger cause, they appear to have welcomed the opportunity to challenge the physical aggression of the pro-war faction. The first major peace demonstration was held on February 24, 1878 in Hyde Park, with Bradlaugh bringing 50 “marshals” and 500 “deputy marshals” to keep counter-protesters at bay.174 Along with Herbert’s own contingent, all the marshals were clothed in uniforms and wielded “wands of office” that Bradlaugh’s daughter later mildly described as “short staves similar to the constables’ truncheons,” though they were told that the weapons should be “[kept] concealed unless they were required for purposes of defence.”175 The first meeting was therefore carried out “without grave results,” as the marshals were able to repel “rush after rush” of their “muscular opponents”176 (Fig. 4.7). Many of these attackers came from across Hyde Park, where about 10,000 gathered to hear speakers from the pro-war “National and Patriotic League,” led by a naval officer, Lieutenant R. H. Armit.177 This group was dwarfed by the 50,000 to 90,000 in Bradlaugh’s and Herbert’s 173 Jon Lawrence describes the dissatisfaction of radicals with the Liberals’ populist response to the Eastern Question, which they saw as masking the fact that the Liberal Party, when in power, avoided undertaking actual reforms that would benefit workers—see Speaking for the People, 170–171. 174 Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work by His Daughter Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, vol. 2 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 82. 175 Ibid. 176 Daily News, 25 February 1878, col. B, p. 5. Such was recorded by the Penny

Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times in “For Peace and War in Hyde Park Last Sunday. Etched by a Neutral Eye-Witness,” 2 March 1878, col. B, p. 133. See Fig. 4.7, in lower right, for image. 177 Daily News, 25 February 1878, col. E, p. 4.

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Fig. 4.7 “For Peace and War in Hyde Park Last Sunday. Etched by a Neutral Eye-Witness” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www.britishne wspaperarchive.co.uk])

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group and was by the Daily News ’s account much more disorganized, with a “brass band of itinerant description” milling about.178 Meanwhile, an argument emerged over whether an Ottoman flag someone had brought to the demonstration should be raised alongside a British one held by a teenage boy, which led one man to worry that the British flag would be attacked and lost given that, as he unwittingly told the Daily News ’s reporter, “there were many of the ‘Gladstone roughs’ and ‘Daily News scum about.’”179 Eventually, the Ottoman flag was raised alongside the British one, though it was only the former that came under attack from the antiwar crowd: the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times showed a fight over a “Turkish flag in a tree” carried out above a bellowing crowd, by turns indignant and delighted.180 And as if that was not enough, the confusion deepened as yet another flag came waving into the prowar camp.181 This one was, remarkably, large enough to showcase a brief manifesto, stitched on in appliqué: “Polish Society of the White Eagle – We Poles do protest against the Russian barbarities perpetrated upon our countrymen in Turkey”—a baffling statement that only could be made sense of if one pushed through the crush to reach the flagbearers, who were passing out fliers explaining that a number of Poles had been executed by Russian troops in the Russian occupation zone of the Ottoman Balkans.182 After the meeting finally got started, there were diverse speeches of an anti-Russian and anti-Liberal nature. The most intriguing was that of Ellis Bartlett, who indicted the Daily News for its lack of patriotism to the audience’s cries of “Down with the Daily News ” and “Three Cheers for the Daily Telegraph.”183 Significantly, Bartlett had been an enthusiastic leader of the Bulgarian Agitation but had experienced a dramatic conversion to Russophobia after traveling through the Balkans during the

178 “The Hyde-Park Meetings,” Daily News, 25 February 1878, col. A, p. 1. 179 Ibid. 180 “For Peace and War in Hyde Park Last Sunday. Etched by a Neutral Eye-Witness,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 2 March 1878, col. B, p. 133. See Fig. 4.7, in upper right, for image. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid.

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Russo-Turkish War, and he would later become such a strident Conservative firebrand that his entry in the ODNB goes so far as to dub him “something of a caricature of a tory imperialist.”184 Despite the marshals’ defense, the battle was fierce at times. Bradlaugh himself was almost trampled in the fray and at one point was attacked by a pro-war protester armed with an improvised pike, who sliced Bradlaugh’s hat in half but luckily left his head unscathed.185 Yet subsequent meetings saw greater organization of the pro-war contingent, who consequently exhibited a greater ability at getting past the anti-war marshals’ “wands of office.” Papers sympathetic to the anti-war party immediately criticized the violent nature of both the tactics of the pro-war mobs and the words of the Tory organs. The Liverpool Mercury found it ironic that the “party of order” sanctioned newsmen who delighted in the abuse of anti-war protesters and denigrated them as “rads and roughs and Gladstonian infidels,” concluding that it showed “your true Tory is a real rowdy at the bottom…a terribly brute-force fellow when his passions are excited by successful opposition.”186 Herbert contended that a “certain amount of beer and a certain amount of money” had been handed out by Tory agents to pay these rowdies to disrupt the peace movement’s “right of free meeting.”187 In much the same way Armit, who was also the leader of a failed private colonization company called the “New Guinea Colonising Association,”188 responded that the Bradlaugh’s and Herbert’s group was a “mechanical demonstration” organized by Liberal activists who “did not represent English opinion.”189 Yet both sides exhibited a confusion 184 J. P. Anderson, “Bartlett, Sir Ellis Ashmead (1849–1902),” rev. H. C. G. Matthew, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http:// www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/30627. 185 Bonner, 85. 186 “The Rowdy Side of Toryism,” Liverpool Mercury, 1 March 1878, col. B, p. 6. 187 Qtd. in George Carslake Thompson, Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield 1875–

1880, vol. II (London: Macmillan & Co., 1886), 367. 188 “Annexation by Private Adventure,” The Economist, 27 November 1875, col. B, p. 1392. The Examiner reported by the time of the Hyde Park meetings, Armit’s “scheme for an amateur occupation…came to nothing, and Lieutenant Armit was left to do patriotic work of a different kind at home”—see “Variorum Notes,” The Examiner, 2 March 1878, col. A, p. 283. 189 “The Hyde-Park Meeting,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 3 March 1878, col. E, p. 7.

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over what the appropriate level of organization was and what should be considered a spontaneous outpouring of public feeling. Both wanted their groups to represent “true” public opinion, but anything more energetic than a placid oration was depicted as a street battle designed by shadowy political forces on either side. Neither group seemed willing to admit that the conflict was a mixture of both deliberate and spontaneous influences, and that the level of chaos and acrimony indicated powerful feelings on both sides far more than mere bribery could accomplish. Another meeting in Hyde Park on March 10 drew 70,000 people, with a higher proportion of pro-war demonstrators than before. Wearing fezzes and singing “Rule Britannia,”190 the crowd marched into the park under Ottoman and British flags and a banner reading “Anti-Russian Patriotic League, Marylebone” to await the beginning of the peace meeting.191 After the Hyde Park Association showed up, the Jingoes were better prepared to fight and in “an ugly rush, almost swept [Bradlaugh and Herbert] away.”192 The Echo reported that a “pretty lively exchange of blows followed,” as the marshals took out their wands and beat back the attackers until Bradlaugh and Herbert could leave, following which “one gang of roughs” led 5,000 pro-interventionists to the Ottoman embassy and proceeded to cheer and sing “By Jingo!” under placards that read “Englishmen, beware of Russian Christianity!” and “Remember Poland!”193 Back in the park, the remaining pro-war demonstrators “amused themselves by throwing about dead cats, &c., and making raids on the pockets of respectable people.”194 The Pall Mall Gazette dubbed the attempt at a peaceful meeting a “total failure,” and wrote with distaste that Gladstone’s house had been targeted and he and his wife, Catherine, driven into hiding at a friend’s house, while the Duke of Teck was attacked by a Jingo mob as “he was mistaken for [the Russian ambassador] Count

190 “The ‘Peace Meeting’ in Hyde Park,” Pall Mall Gazette, 11 March 1878, col. B,

p. 8. 191 “Peace and War Demonstrations in London—Mr. Bradlaugh Roughly Handled— Attempt to Mob Mr. Gladstone’s House,” Liverpool Mercury, 11 March 1878, col. E, p. 7. 192 “Another Hyde Park Demonstration,” Northern Echo, 11 March 1878, col. D, p. 3. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid.

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Schouvaloff.”195 Ironically, Teck’s wife, Princess Mary, was so pro-war that the News of the World called her the “Queen of the Jingoes.”196 Yet there was clearly no one at the demonstration in a position (or, rather, a state of mind) to recognize friendly elites. Despite there being more pro-war demonstrators in attendance there was less pro-war leadership presence than before, with The Derby Mercury noting that one of the only evident pro-war speakers was an old militiaman, who professed goals both broader and more bizarre than a simple little war with Russia. Wearing a patchwork coat and standing amid the chaos, he demanded not only a pro-Ottoman intervention but that Bradlaugh be targeted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, crying out “I am the voice of the people” while being pelted, in a surreal deluge, by a rain of dead cats.197 Given the growing level of violence, following meetings were vigilantly overseen by the police. A rumored meeting on April 6 saw 500 policemen mobilized in reserve, and when it turned out the Hyde Park Association would not hold a meeting the police had only Armit’s National League to watch.198 The size of Armit’s group barely equaled the police force in number, and they marched from the Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park to pass a resolution that Britain must enter into an alliance with the Ottoman Empire to protect “the future safety of National Freedom, now threatened by armed despotism,” before breaking up without a fight.199 Open-air conflict began to die down after this point, with fewer instances of violent interference with anti-war meetings. A meeting of 462 representatives of Liberal workingmen’s associations held a large meeting in London on April 10 that saw no rioting, prompting one of the speakers to say that the claims of the “Rule Britannias” to speak for the working class was a “delusion.”200 The Northern Echo called the meeting evidence 195 “The ‘Peace Meeting’ in Hyde Park,” Pall Mall Gazette, 11 March 1878, col. B,

p. 8. 196 Reprinted from the World in “London Gossip,” The Newcastle Courant, 5 April 1878, col. D, p. 5. Princess Mary (Adelaide) was George III’s granddaughter. 197 “A Bradlaugh-Herbert Riot in Hyde Park—Disorderly Proceedings,” The Derby Mercury, 13 March 1878, col. E, p. 8. 198 “The Opinion of the Country—Demonstration in Hyde Park,” Western Mail, 8 April 1878, col. D, p. 3. 199 “Demonstration in Hyde Park,” Freeman’s Journal, 8 April 1878, col. H, p. 5. 200 “Opposition to a War Policy—Great Workmen’s Conference in London,” Northern

Echo, 12 April 1878, col. E, p. 3.

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of the “real voice” of the country, offering the argument that the war craze was a myth propagated by “swashbucklers” like Captain Bedford Pim, who, they charged, “openly admits that he hopes to get employment by a war.”201 Although such conspiracy theories likely went too far, it was true that the intense zeal for war had reached its zenith, especially outside of London where Jingo fever had been more subdued. For example, organizers of a meeting in Birmingham (then, as now, the second biggest city in Britain) in early April were worried that it would be crashed by a prowar mob like those in London had, but in the event “the ‘jingoes’ were in such a hopeless minority” that their attempts to drown out the proceedings by singing “Rule Britannia” and “By Jingo!” devolved into “braying, hooting, whistling, and yelling.”202 The Echo deduced that the belief in the country’s war spirit was all part of the thin, artificial hold Disraeli and the Conservatives had on Britain, especially outside of London, where the Tories had lost 12 seats in by-elections to Liberal candidates who advocated a policy of non-intervention.203 Still, even if on a more cool-headed level, a war feeling charged British society all the way up to the Berlin Congress in June. Once activated, the drive to go to war was difficult to put aside. People like Armit, Pim, Princess Mary, and the man in the patchwork coat did not halt their advocacy for war just because the papers had less titillating news to report or fewer dead cats sailed through the air. On the contrary, the patriotic drive to protect and increase the prestige of the British Empire—and the hatred of those who were thought opposed to such a feeling—was now a stable part of popular opinion. The Queen even went as far as to make her opinion publicly known, if only in a backhanded way. When an advertisement for a new pro-war song appeared that included a personal letter of approval from Victoria herself, the Manchester Examiner marveled at her support for a song that spoke of supporting Turkey (“the plucky little bird”) against “Roumania’s dirty slurs,” “Servian whelps and curs,” and “Russian lies,” which inspired the

201 “Working Men and the War,” Northern Echo, 12 April 1878, col. E, p. 2. 202 “The War Crisis—Great Town’s Meeting in Birmingham,” Birmingham Daily Post,

8 April 1878, col. A, p. 5. 203 “The Constituencies and the Eastern Question,” Northern Echo, 26 April 1878, col. A, p. 3.

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British “Lion’s grand impatience” for a fight.204 The paper was worried that if “the Queen gives her sanction to songs which directly accuse Russia of lying,” it meant that “unless her Majesty’s influence with our Ministers is much smaller than is supposed, no hopes of peace can safely be based upon the action of the Government of the country.”205 Meanwhile, with their thought patterns and mode of action in place the Jingoes could from time to time rise up again, as on April 30 in Manchester when the Working Men’s Conservative Association held a meeting where 2,000 unruly pro-war attendees threatened to disrupt their own meeting with shouts and the “greatest disorder.”206 Even the pro-war party’s affinities to the Tories in general and to Disraeli specifically were themselves indicative of the deeper effect of the tumult—a fact commented on dramatically by an anti-war meeting in Glasgow on May 3 at which a Liberal MP and newspaper owner, Charles Cameron, called Disraeli “the great arch-Jingo.”207 In the end, the peace movement was itself mostly posturing. There was little chance that Britain’s characteristic Russophobia and its growing imperial angst could possibly have been overruled by the anti-war movement’s indifferent testimonies about Russian honor, much less the notion that the British Empire was safer with Russia as a neighbor.

Conclusion: “A Suggestion of National Animus” The fight between the Jingoes and the peace movement over who “truly” spoke for the British people is a fitting end for the story of Britain’s experience of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, which began with the failure of the diplomatic process to maintain peace and ended with violent conflict over the question of whether Britain should enter the war. Moreover, the question of Britain’s imperial future was tied up deeply in the conflict, as diplomacy had earlier proved ill-suited for accomplishing

204 Reprinted from the Manchester Examiner in “Her Majesty and the Jingoes,” Liverpool Mercury, 26 April 1878, col. H, p. 6. 205 Ibid. 206 “Open Air Meeting of the ‘Jingoes’ in Manchester,” Liverpool Mercury, 1 May

1878, col. H, p. 7. 207 “The Eastern Crisis and Public Opinion,” Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 8 May 1878, col. F, p. 3.

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Britain-centric goals while the prospect of war proved useful in rallying Britons behind policies of imperial security. However, we should not treat Britain’s experience merely as a step in an inevitable progress from a less imperial to a more imperial Britain. Rather, it provided a specific vector for imperial thinking to present itself to the British populace as the proper mindset in confronting Eastern— and therefore global—disorder. This distinction is easy to miss, yet such a response would have been less appropriate had Britons not experienced the drama of the preceding war. The conflict and all its charisma produced the referent necessary for the obscurity of the Eastern Question to become accessible to the masses and applicable to Britons’ notion of their identity and their place in the world. As the famous critic of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, said in The Psychology of Jingoism in 1901: How many audiences who cheered [“By Jingo!”] to the echo, and were heated by it almost to enlisting point had, or even desired to have, the faintest notion of the Eastern Question, or even of the grounds of our immediate quarrel with Russia? A suggestion of national animus, with a vague assertion attached to it, is quite sufficient at this stage in the manufacture of Jingo spirit.208

In other words, Britons who called on “The Great MacDermott” to sing “By Jingo!” again and again had no reason in, say, 1873 to join the army in a nationalistic pique over events that would occur five years later. Nor by the same token was there any specific reason to activate latent imperialist values and ideals. Of course, the capacity for accessing the “national animus” in group behavior—the manifest soul of Britannia—existed prior to G. W. Hunt putting pen to paper or before a be-fezzed Jingo “rowdy” swung a homemade pike at someone’s head. But the feverish excitement that made the song a hit and motivated such violent fervor have their basis in the precise events that inspired such influential, creative, and peculiar actions. Jingoist thinking was the result of Britons’ response to the war and the wider Eastern Crisis; it did not pre-exist in any coherent form. Certainly, other conflicts had seen the British public rally around divisive friendships and hatreds to fit the

208 J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 4–5. Hobson’s more famous work, Imperialism: A Study (which influenced Lenin’s 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism) was published a year later, in 1902.

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moment, as in the Crimean War. But the answer to such troubles had never before been so clearly and publicly defined around Britons asserting vis-à-vis Russia or any other power their right to oversee order in the East and, possibly, the wider world. In the same way, it is both compelling and troubling to muse that maybe the “new imperialism” did not need to happen. Victorian Britons had not always been predominantly imperialistic. Instead, they were made so by a series of events and trends which allowed imperial categories to become preeminent. The political, cultural, and intellectual forces that built an imperial identity were provided a vital asset in the form of the war’s implications for the British Empire’s interests, while the Siege of Plevna provided a bounded, accessible setting for the drama, romance, and tragedy necessary to affect people on an emotional level. From this perspective, the Jingo movement may also illustrate Britons’ profound yearning to take part in the epic scenes they had viewed for the last three years. In entering the war themselves, they could finally be a part of such momentous events. They could stand beside the noble Osman Pasha as a confederate in gloriously doomed circumstances, or perhaps even offer a last salute to the patriotic “Russian Colonel” as he bled out in the ditch of the Grivica redoubt.

CHAPTER 5

Surveillance, Negotiation, and Propaganda in British Imperialism: The Case of Cyprus

A Dance by Madame Collier In Southwark, just east of the Imperial War Museum and underneath what is now London South Bank University, lie the foundations of one of the great music halls of Victorian London. At its zenith in the 1870s and 1880s, the South London Palace of Amusement had hosted music hall heroes like the Great MacDermott, who had stomped its stage singing “By Jingo!” and other favorites to the crowd’s roar.1 In late September 1878, the “South,” as it was then known, saw the production of a new comic ballet called Cyprus, a work whose topical nature led The Era to offer a bemused remark that the hall’s owners “are evidently in league with the members of her Majesty’s Government in their determination to make us believe that their newly-acquired island in the East…is of all places under the sun the most beautiful, and nearly all its inhabitants are only just a little lower than the angels.”2 Under the

1 Matthew Lloyd, “The South London Palace,” http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/SouthL onPalace.htm. This website is edited and maintained by the great-grandson of music hall legend Arthur Lloyd, and it is archived by the British Library as a leading source on the history of London music halls. See also, Ken Roe, “South London Palace,” Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/31542. 2 “The London Music Halls—South London Palace,” The Era, 29 September 1878, col. A, p. 4.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_5

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direction of Madame Lizzie Collier, a well-regarded ballet mistress,3 on the curtain’s rise the South’s audience was treated to a sumptuous and sensual Oriental dance, by a troupe organized into ever-higher layers of splendor: We find ourselves given a peep into an Eastern harem, where beauties recline and other beauties waft them cool breezes with ostrich feather fans, we know that there is a treat in store. We do not care much for the duskyskinned Pasha who owns all these beauties without deserving half of one; but our attention is very quickly arrested by the dancers, who use their veils, not to hide their loveliness, but to assist in forming with banners borne by other beauties a bower for the gyrations of other dancers, and for the marches of gorgeously clad Amazons. The eye is fairly dazzled by so much beauty, and we are sure that many in gazing upon it if they could persuade themselves that it was a truthful picture would be off to Cyprus to-morrow.4

The impact of Britain’s experience throughout the 1870s and the Government’s imperial solution had clearly born results in the cultural realm. This is no mere extrapolation from the scenery, as the ballet’s plot is thoroughly intertwined with Britain’s role in the Eastern Crisis and the takeover of Cyprus. In it, English sailors (“tars”) sit imprisoned, evidently by the Pasha or the regime he represents. Two of these tars sing songs while awaiting rescue, with a “Miss Anderson” then singing, in a cheeky reference to Disraeli’s earlier Tory activism, “the song of ‘Young England.’” After which, she introduces “a little toddler,” who then sings of his belief that “British boys will stick together in fine and rough weather.” Chaotic, Eastern-themed hilarity ensues: some “black slaves” do acrobatics, actors mounted on a “wonderful elephant” and a “pair of donkeys” tilt at one another, while throughout “we get a pretty

3 On Lizzie Collier’s reputation, see “The Only Jones,” Judy, or the London SerioComic Journal, 2 September 1874, col. A, p. 199; “South London Palace,” London and Provincial Entr’acte, 29 April 1876, col. A, p. 3. 4 “The London Music Halls—South London Palace,” The Era, 29 September 1878. I am delighted that Marinos Pourgouris, on pp. 33–34 of his recent book The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), also picked out this remarkable quote for review, providing both further detail than I have here as well as other conclusions from his point of view.

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view of Cyprus, and are permitted to see the iron-clads making stately progress through the waves.”5 There is even evidence that the South’s audience were exposed to the patently Orientalist belief that the higher castes of Eastern society approached European standards of grace and nobility, so that The Era stated that “the humbler natives are pleasant enough to look upon, but when the elite are forthcoming we get more beautiful faces, more comely figures, and more elegant dresses.”6 Also present, though, is the theme of the eventual triumph of the West, with Britain injecting itself into the Eastern scene to start a new narrative of protection, order, and restraint. In other words, the East is a nice thing to look at on its own, but it is much better when harnessed to the powerful, yet kind British yoke: We make acquaintance with the “Marines;” we enjoy a naval hornpipe, and then, as the iron-clads boom and the “jolly tars” cheer, a handsome damsel, in the character of Sir Garnet Wolseley, arrives, flags are waved and amid general rejoicing we find a very high personage and another very high personage kneeling at her feet and receiving at her hands the rewards of his endeavors on behalf of his country.7

The ballet thus ends with the arrival of the illustrious hero LieutenantGeneral Sir Garnet Wolseley, Britain’s first high commissioner in Cyprus, who directly rescues the tars and indirectly rescues Cyprus from its continued fate of existing under the regime of a gorgeous, yet aimless and dissolute Eastern culture led by retrograde, “dusky” overlords. Though the pronoun-use in the report of the scene is a bit vague, rewards change hands to signify the cementing of an auspicious East-West contract, and both Britain and Cyprus are shown to be all the better for their new union. In the South’s production of the ballet, Britain’s Eastern future (and the East’s British future) commences with an optimistic imperial act. Two months earlier, while languishing in the less lavish bowels of the Crimean-era troopship HMS Himalaya, General Wolseley began a journal intended to be read by his wife, Louisa, describing to her his detail as high commissioner. His appointment had been speedy and unexpected. Having recently returned from a stint as governor of Natal he thought he 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 7 Ibid.

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would next be sent to Bombay, an assignment perhaps meant to distance him from the Commander-in-Chief, Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, a notorious traditionalist with whom the reform-minded Wolseley shared a mutual dislike.8 But after Cyprus’s administration passed to Britain as a result of the 1878 Berlin Treaty, Wolseley instead found himself reassigned as Britain’s chief administrator to the new possession. Despite the fact that this was to his personal and professional advantage, Wolseley reflected on his private doubts about Britain’s investment in Cyprus. He wondered that Egypt had not been the choice, the place in which his exploits would make him a household name in Britain as commander of the British forces during the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War: To have occupied Egypt would have been a grand measure: to have founded a new Empire where abundance of soldiers could have been obtained to help us in India….The move taken…whether viewed in conjunction with our Eastern Empire, or whether looked upon as laying the foundation of another – our African Empire of immense magnitude, would have been a great one worthy of a nation that had already an Eastern Empire, but this annexation of Cyprus is a half & half measure that will certainly entail great outlay upon us to secure us – what?9

Wolseley marveled that “Dizzy never liked the idea of Egypt,” blaming Disraeli’s predilection as an author (and, the assumption follows, as a politician) for “dreamy Judaism” that “turned his attention to the Holy Land in preference to the land of Egypt.”10 Still, Wolseley did not understand the central premise to the choice of Cyprus, nor could he have had much apprehension as to the background of its choice—very few could, given that the whole thing had been arranged secretly over the preceding year and a half. And although Disraeli’s personal preferences made some difference, they were neither the predominant nor the most important aspect of how Cyprus came to be British. Instead, we must look deeper inside the institutional and political mechanisms by which the British government made Cyprus into the prime candidate for its newest imperial expansion, comparing this with the public dialogue about the intelligence and morality of territorial solutions 8 Garnet Wolseley, Cyprus Journal, 19 July 1878, WO 147/6 (Wolseley Papers ), 3–4. 9 Ibid., f. 12–13. 10 Ibid., f. 13.

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to the disorder promised by the Eastern Crisis and the Russo-Turkish War. Cyprus may have proved to be an “inconsequential possession,” as Andrekos Varnava has deemed it, but the dynamics that led to Britain’s decision to occupy Cyprus are of vital consequence to any understanding of British imperialism.11 Cyprus has rarely been a key focus in discussions of British imperialism in the Levant, particularly those conducted in the language of the agents who originated the idea of absorbing the island into the British Empire. While the other places in the Eastern Mediterranean with a British connection, Egypt and Palestine, have formed the focus of literally thousands of books and articles written by scholars of British imperialism, the path to the taking of Cyprus has been limited to a few dozen shelfmarks of varying quality. This began to change in the 2010s with Varnava’s superb and extensive work on the topic as well several good, in-depth books from a few others including Marinos Pourgouris and Daniele Nunziata, but sadly this small corpus marks an exception to a more general rule.12 This is a problematic omission from the narrative given that Britain occupied Cyprus at the very cusp of the explosion of Britain’s imperial expansion from the 1880s to the First World War—the era of the “new imperialism.” Many scholars have chalked this oversight up to Cyprus’s supersession as a strategic possession with Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882.13 Traditionalists cited the fact that Britain was never successful in implementing its administrative reforms in Cyprus—an imperial embarrassment whose residue has seeped into later scholarly inquiry.14 And there is no doubt that the tumultuous history of Cyprus in the post1945 era has overshadowed all other angles of investigation into the 11 See Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 12 In addition to Varnava’s work, see Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gail Hook, Protectorate Cyprus: British Imperial Power before World War I (I.B. Tauris, 2015); Marinos Pourgouris, The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press; Daniele Nunziata, Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus: Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 13 See C. W. J. Orr, Cyprus under British Rule (London: Zeno Publishers, 1972), 44. 14 See Dwight E. Lee, Great Britain and the Cyprus Convention Policy of 1878

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 159–165.

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island’s past. Yet one might suggest that Cyprus was the first possession of Britain’s “new imperial” era to fully display the connection between Britain’s democratic society and the principles of its governing imperial ideal.

General Simmons’ Secret Task Force While Cyprus did not enter into the British fold until after the Berlin Treaty was signed in July 1878, the circumstances of its eventual inclusion began, in secret, almost two years earlier. When it became clear in the fall of 1876 that war was most likely imminent, Disraeli, Derby, and War Secretary Gathorne Hardy met on October 23 and decided to order a survey of the Ottoman Empire’s defenses, especially those of Istanbul, which Russia would have to take to gain entry into the Mediterranean.15 This mission was to be carried out covertly by the War Office under the oversight of the Inspector-General of Fortifications, Sir John Lintorn Arabin Simmons. Simmons, a future Field Marshal, had already had a long career in the Corps of Royal Engineers, having served as their ColonelCommandant prior to his appointment as the head of Fortifications, the latter of which was at this time the Royal Engineers’ top position.16 In addition, Simmons had extensive experience in the Balkans during and after the Crimean War, where he had acted as Britain’s military attaché to the Ottoman commander in Bulgaria, Omar Pasha.17 After Simmons served in several key engagements, Omar Pasha sent him to London and Paris to act as the former’s voice on the next steps in the war, however by the time Simmons arrived the war had ended.18 He was therefore appointed to chart out the precise borders in Anatolia and the Caucasus that were set out by the Treaty of Paris; under his

15 For a description of the decision, see Derby Diaries, 23 October 1876, 337. 16 See R. H. Vetch, “Simmons, Sir John Lintorn Arabin (1821–1903),” rev. James

Lunt, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Unoversity Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/36094. 17 Ibid. See also, Whitworth Porter and Charles Moore Watson, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), 415, 417. 18 Whitworth Porter and Charles Moore Watson, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), 302.

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command was a young Charles George Gordon, then a 22 year-old lieutenant fresh from his first fight at the Siege of Sevastopol.19 Simmons’ work led indirectly to his appointment as British Consul at Warsaw until 1860, after which he returned to service with the Royal Engineers in Britain. As a result of this experience in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Simmons was considered a voice not only of authority on technical matters of defense but on the political and sociocultural details of Britain’s Eastern policy. On October 26 Simmons’ primary data collectors, Royal Engineers Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Home and his assistant Captain Thomas Fraser, received their orders to go to Istanbul to meet with the British ambassador, Sir Henry Elliot, and from there range out into the critical strategic areas of the potential battle zone to prepare detailed reports of their condition.20 Their subsidiary task was to gauge the number of troops Britain would need to field in the key locations in order to halt a Russian advance on Istanbul itself.21 At first, there was no direct mention of seizing any area for Britain, let alone Cyprus.22 This is not to say that an occupation of Ottoman territory was not the indirect consequence of this work, though: on the very same day Home and Fraser were given their orders, the lord president of the Council, Lord Richmond, noted that Hardy claimed that a defense of Gallipoli would “require a much larger force than the Prime Minister seemed to imagine.”23 Gallipoli was then considered, as it would be in 1915, to be not only the key area for control of the Dardanelles Straits but an advantageous staging zone in general.24 19 Ibid. 20 Simmons to Home, 26 October 1876, Reports and Memoranda Relative to Defence

of Constantinople and Other Positions in Turkey, also on Routes in Roumelia (London: Harrison & Sons for the War Office, 1877), 3–6 (FO 358/1, f. 4–6). 21 Ibid., 4 (f. 4). 22 Although, Varnava shrewdly notes that even before Home received his orders, the

War Office ordered a map of Cyprus—see pp. 74–75. The map in question (MFQ 1/ 724) was stamped as received on October 23, the same day that Disraeli, Derby, and Hardy decided to order the Ottoman defenses mission. 23 Richmond to Cairns, 26 October 1876, PRO 30/51/3, f. 120. 24 Varnava notes on p. 74 of his book that the anonymous author of the pamphlet

The Dardanelles for England: The True Solution to the Eastern Question (London, 1876) spoke of the importance for Britain to control the Dardanelles even prior to the Ottoman defenses survey; the pamphlet was published on October 20.

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A seizure of Ottoman land, whether temporary or indefinite, thus almost immediately begat a proposed imperial solution to the risk to British interests in the Near East at large. Already by October 30, Simmons had drafted a memo proposing that perhaps the only way Britain could secure the route to India if Russia took Istanbul would be if a special fleet were assembled at immense cost, complete with a “naval arsenal for repairs somewhere at the Eastern End of the Mediterranean.”25 Given the strategic and economic importance of a suitably deep harbor that contained enough space for a large fleet, there is little doubt of the implication regarding the type of relationship Britain would have to forge with any place that would house this hypothetical naval arsenal. The scale of Simmons’ survey was immense. Over the next two years Home, Fraser, and a number of other officers, mostly drawn from the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General’s office, would be employed in a vast swath of Ottoman territory. The maps and fortification sketches that were amended and produced numbered in the hundreds, with all places surveyed in minute detail regarding the quality of their defenses.26 Telegraph maps of the Balkans attested to the possibility of carrying out a defense of Istanbul should Ottoman lines be cut in the Balkans and new lines be needed, given that “Turkish lines are notoriously bad.”27 Thousands of pages of detailed description accompany these maps and sketches, all of which was distilled by Home and Simmons into a concise view of the potential military situation if and when the Russians declared war. Additionally, this information attested to the details of Britain’s potential involvement in a wider war, ostensibly in defense of the Ottoman Empire but eventually with wider and more critical implications for 25 Memorandum by Simmons, 30 October 1876, FO 358/3, f. 54. 26 Special attention was paid to the approach to Istanbul on the western side of the

Bosphorus, such as Fort Sultan and the Boulair Lines, a major defensive installation built by an Anglo-French force during the Crimean War (MPK 1/434, f. 4, 145, 156; MPK 1/481, f. 363, 365; MPK 1/482, f. 722), Adrianople, i.e. present-day Edirne (MPK 1/ 434, f. 61; MPK 1/481, f. 312; MPK 1/483, f. 432), and the coastal forts surrounding the Sea of Marmara south of Istanbul (MPK 1/485). Other key places surveyed were Batumi, a critical port on the eastern shore of the Black Sea (MPK 1/482, f. 727), the Danube port of Silistria (MPK 1/434, f. 544), and the Bulgarian port city Varna (MPK 1/481, f. 366–369, 926). 27 Map with description, 13 December 1876, FO 358/1, f. 745–746.

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Britain’s international and imperial status. Home also served as the Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Intelligence Branch, a body expressly charged with gathering not only military but political information, ensuring that both aspects were deeply intertwined from the beginning.28 Indeed, even before the Constantinople Conference met, Simmons noted on December 4 that Britain might even consider landing a force in Bulgaria at Varna—a place where Simmons had spent time during the Crimean War,29 and an ideal staging area for a defense of the Danubian Plain and the Balkans in general.30 However, Simmons cautioned that this move would mean Britain would have to “at once make up her mind” to intervene and immediately decide whether Britain wanted a direct war with Russia rather than a defensive one.31 Although at this early stage, the question on the table was primarily one regarding intervention and not permanent occupation, Simmons felt that the prospect of intervention was actually more risky. He artfully invoked a lesson from the Bible on the cost of true commitment to a cause, warning the Cabinet of taking any action that would result in a lopsided, costly, and embarrassing Russian victory at the expense not only of the Ottomans but of the British Empire: The struggle will be one of life and death…By carrying on such a war [Britain] would descend from her position as a first-class power, and lose her prestige in the East…There never was a time when it was more necessary “to sit down and consult whether, with” the force at the disposal of England, “she is able to meet the power that is against” her. And, if she decides in the affirmative, then that the modus opperandi should be most carefully considered.32

28 Home had been made A.Q.M.G. on April 1st, 1876—see R. H. Vetch, “Home, Robert (1837–1879),” rev. Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/ article/13648. 29 Porter and Watson, 412. 30 Memorandum by Simmons, 4 December 1876, Defence of Constantinople, 20–21 (f.

13–14). 31 Ibid., 21 (f. 14). 32 Ibid., 22 (f. 14). Quotes original. Though he does not mention it explicitly, the

quotes Simmons incorporates are from Luke 14:31, a lesson on the costs of discipleship that reads in full: “Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not

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From this perspective, the idea of direct military intervention promised much more of a risk than, as Hardy had earlier warned, Disraeli was willing to admit. The idea of a strategic possession in the Near East to guard against the possibility of Russia exploiting its gains too far became, in light of Simmons’ analysis, much more appealing, with few of the risks and many potential benefits vis-à-vis Britain’s ongoing competition with Russia over their Eastern spheres of influence. By the end of December 1876, the language used had hence began to be more explicitly imperial, with Home commenting that if a successful Russian invasion were to lead to the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, then “England will want a slice.”33 Home suggested that this “slice” should not be Istanbul itself, even considering its vaunted control over the Dardanelles Straits, as this would be immensely costly and would open up Britain to problems from the often-riotous Christians in the city, whom he called “some the greatest scoundrels on earth.”34 Instead, he thought that Crete, Rhodes, or Egypt offered the best strategic location minus the risks; he considered Rhodes the best, but left the radical idea of taking all of these places open to discussion.35 Less than a month later Home devised the rhetorical premise upon which the later final choice of Cyprus would be based, beginning a memo on the idea of occupying the Gallipoli peninsula with the following clause: “Should circumstances occur to induce the British Government to seek a material guarantee in the East or should on the breaking up of the Turkish Empire it become requisite to seek compensation in the Levant…”36 No matter the location eventually chosen, Home did not construe Britain’s imperial goals as rapacious or greedy but the sad consequence of events outside Britain’s control that contrived to overwhelm her natural forbearance. Britain is “induced” to expand, her hand forced toward a territorial compensation as a “requisite,” not an optional, action—a passive statement for so active a potential role.

down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?” 33 Home to Simmons, 20 December 1876, FO 358/1, f. 576. 34 Ibid., f. 577. 35 Ibid., f. 578. 36 Memorandum by Home, 12 January 1877, FO 358/2, f. 30.

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Exactly how Britain was “induced” to expand had much to do with the presumption that Russia had an unquenchable urge to supplant Britain’s power in the East, either by direct conflict or indirect strategic pressure. Robinson and Gallagher, though they make little mention of the Cyprus project in their work,37 might have seen this as a matter of Britain choosing “formal” imperialism when “informal methods had failed to give security.”38 But this presupposes that the process was by design and decision rather than what it really was: a measured, organic plod toward an imperial solution. The method British officials used to confront the specter of Russian imperialism thus falls somewhere outside the informal vs. formal rubric, and the route to Cyprus is further muddied by the secret nature of the process. In spite of the British public’s calls for war, rather than producing a like-minded spirit the fear of Russia instead drove Simmons’ task force toward mitigating Russia’s subversive effect on the British Empire by some other means. In February 1877, Home wrote that if Batumi were taken by the Russians it could be used as a staging ground to move into Armenia and thereafter move southeastward, “occupying Mesopotamia and establishing themselves on the Persian Gulf,” thereby posing a direct threat to British India.39 Layard agreed, commenting that if holding Batumi led to both the Black Sea becoming a “Russian lake” and Russia gaining access to the Persian Gulf, it would be “to England a second secession of the United States of America; she will then find herself forced to bow before the irrevocable.”40 Likewise, in April Northcote wrote that the Russian consul at Alexandria promised that if Khedive Isma’il provided any aid to the Sultan, Egypt’s official suzerain, then Isma’il would “subject himself to reprisals.”41

37 Robinson and Gallagher’s “The Imperialism of Free Trade” (discussed in the Introduction) does not see Cyprus as a significant case in establishing their theory (though, to be fair, their focus was on the mid-Victorian period), while their book Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1967) only mentions the takeover in passing on p. 83. 38 See Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” 12. 39 Home to Simmons, 10 February 1877, Defence of Constantinople, 174–175, FO

358/1, f. 140–141. 40 Layard to Derby, 29 December 1877, FO 881/3410. 41 Northcote to Cairns, 24 April 1877, PRO 30/51/5, f. 78.

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However, Home had already estimated that making adequate arrangements for the defense of, merely, Istanbul would cost at a minimum over £2,600,000, amounting to ten percent in excess of the existing military budget.42 Simmons thought that occupying Gallipoli alone would take at least three months.43 However, this was nothing compared to the cost and time needed to actually field a complete British force, which the War Office estimated would cost over £12,000,000 to equip and maintain the necessary number of men for six months and a further six months and another £9,000,000 to mobilize them.44 In short, there was no way that Britain could effectively double its military budget when it would not even have any larger effect on the problem of Russia taking over places like Batumi and Armenia, to say nothing of the fact that the Army thought it would not be able to arrange the logistics in time to avert Russia’s gains anyway.45 With this information in mind, the War Office deemed any kind of direct intervention to be a potentially disastrous proposition. The possibility of Britain intervening remained useful, however, as a political weapon that could be wielded by the Government so as to appear strong in the eyes of Europe and, indeed, in those of the British public. This was not a value shared by everyone in the Conservative Party or even the Cabinet, especially the closer the Russians got to Istanbul. When Disraeli ordered the fleet to Be¸sik Bay in January 1878, the strictest neutralists, Carnarvon and Derby, immediately resigned.46 Only Derby agreed to return when the order was canceled.47 It is unclear how this act could have been anything more than a political feint, given that all the available data said military intervention was insane. Granted, Disraeli

42 Home listed figures of £1,672,000 and £960,000 to defend the western and eastern sides of the Bosphorus respectively, for a total of £2,632,000—see Memorandum by Home, 12 January 1877, FO 358/2, f. 32. The military budget for 1877 was £26,200,000—see “Public Spending Details for 1877,” UK Public Spending, http:// www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/UK_year1877_0.html. 43 Simmons to Hardy, 19 April 1877, FO 358/3, f. 288. 44 “Memorandum of Proposed Arrangements in Case of War, with Approximate Esti-

mate of the Cost,” Proceedings of Confidential Committee, 14–19 June 1877, WO 33/ 32. The committee estimated £12,213,300 for six months and £21,114,960 for the year. 45 Richmond to Cairns, 26 May 1877, PRO 30/51/4, f. 7. In this letter, Richmond describes a number of conversations he had with the Duke of Cambridge to this effect. 46 See Derby’s entries on this matter, Derby Diaries, 23–26 January 1878, 489–493. 47 Carnarvon was replaced by Sir Michael Hicks Beach.

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and Salisbury may have been seriously hawkish, but there was no way the Cabinet would ever be totally unanimous in endorsing an initiative that would cost so much for so little chance of a positive outcome.48 The intelligence from the War Office, and Simmons’ task force specifically, had made that impossible. Instead, the arrangement of a strategic possession in the Near East carved from Ottoman territory had much earlier become the dominant motive of British policy. Indeed, even while participating in peace talks at the Constantinople Conference in January 1877, Salisbury had given Home instructions to scope out the primary military positions in the Ottoman Empire, “particularly the islands of Rhodes & Cyprus” and Egypt if Home thought it necessary.49 Seemingly redundant, this set of orders subtly refocused the utility of subsequent intelligence gathered from informing acts that would aid in Ottoman defense to one that would protect the British Empire by territorial expansion. Nonetheless, exactly what that expansion would look like, what its extent would be, and what such a move entailed were not clear. Upon learning of it, Simmons called the project “very vague” and thought it must be a fact-finding mission to “enable H.M.’s Government to seek for and select suitable compensation, should extensive territorial changes take place in the East.”50 Yet if Simmons found this task problematic in February, following Russia’s declaration of war in April 1877 he did not take long to adapt to the new thrust of policy. While Simmons saw the “permanent possession” of a place along the Dardanelles as being as risk-ridden as “resuming possession of Calais,” he reiterated his earlier argument that protecting against any potential conflict with Russia would require a coaling station in the Eastern Mediterranean.51 And though he (and Home) thought highly of the quality of ethnic Turkish (and usually Anatolian) soldiers, Simmons saw the Ottoman state as no longer able to provide a strategic

48 Derby wrote that of sending the fleet both Disraeli and Salisbury seemed honestly “warlike,” while Salisbury’s “natural tendency to pugnacity [was] thoroughly aroused”— see Derby Diaries, 23 January 1878, 490. 49 Salisbury to Simmons, 15 January 1877, FO 358/2, f. 41. For details of the interaction between Salisbury and Home that led to this subsidiary mission, see Home to Simmons, 15 January 1877, FO 358/2, f. 37–40. 50 Memorandum by Simmons, 2 February 1877, FO 358/2, f. 14–15. 51 Simmons to Hardy, 19 April 1877, FO 358/3, f. 288. Emphasis original.

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buffer.52 In May, he drafted a remarkable memo on the state of the Ottoman Empire and Britain’s role in protecting and extending its own empire’s influence in light of the former’s inevitable fall. No longer would the Crimean system serve as the basis for Britain’s Eastern policy. As he put it: “The present Government of Turkey is effete, corrupt, unstable, established by one resolution it may be overthrown by another at any moment and is therefore not to be depended on. Hence if it is to be maintained, it must be in a state of tutelage.”53 In Simmons’ formulation, the most apt tutor for “the Turk” is implicitly an Englishman, whose empire, so the story went, could be portrayed as the reverse of his pupil’s: a vigorous, honest, and stable Western influence on the hapless Easterner. Britain’s actions vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire are thus presented as a kind of firm education in civilized behavior, with the idea of taking over Ottoman territory presented very much in the same manner as the idea that an adult might deprive a child of something “for his own good.” Although the mode of action was now in order, the list of possible places to occupy still took a number of months to settle. The chief candidates were Gallipoli, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, Alexandretta ˙ (Iskenderun, on the northeast coast of the Mediterranean), and Stampalia (Astypalaia, a tiny island in the Dodecanese). Discussion over the relative merits and defects of these places took up the summer and fall of 1877, throughout the intense fighting at Plevna, Shipka, and Kars. Gallipoli was soon ruled out for the reasons Simmons had stated, Rhodes had no good harbor, and both Crete and Egypt were thought too large and too complex politically.54 Stampalia was carefully considered, with a series of detailed surveys made by both the War Office and the Admiralty attesting to its positive qualities.55 Simmons especially considered it 52 Home and Simmons commented on the positive attributes of ethnic Turkish soldiers—see Simmons to Home, 25 December 1876, Defence of Constantinople, 97– 99 (FO 358/1, f. 75–76); Memorandum by Simmons, 9 January 1876, Defence of Constantinople, 99–100 (FO 358/1, f. 76). 53 Memorandum by Simmons, 11 May 1877, FO 358/2, f. 93. A note to Simmons

from Disraeli’s personal secretary, Montagu Corry, says that Disraeli was made intimately aware of the contents of this memo—see Corry to Simmons, 16 May 1877, FO 358/2, f. 516. 54 For a good summary of these points, see Dwight E. Lee, 59–60. 55 “Papers Relative to a Proposed Coaling Station for Her Majesty’s Fleet at the Eastern

End of the Mediterranean,” 27 April–2 August 1877, inclusion in WO 33/31.

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a good location, but those looking for a place that could also raise significant revenue overruled him.56 Disraeli and Salisbury were enthusiastic about Cyprus and Alexandretta, the former singing Cyprus’s praises as the “key of Western Asia,”57 and the latter seeing a land presence in Asia Minor as a way to halt a Russian advance on Armenia.58 Layard was also attracted to the idea of a continental British possession.59 After all of these hypotheticals were mooted, Cyprus, as an island, was ultimately deemed easier to defend, and Salisbury decided that it was close enough to the mainland to mount a defense of Asia Minor.60 Varnava sees the specific choice of Cyprus as deeply impacted by Disraeli’s “romantic imagination” in his novels that featured the place, chief among them Tancred, and his “desire for Britain to establish a multi-religious empire under Queen Victoria.”61 Still, Disraeli was not the only one to favor the choice, and the final decision to take Cyprus—and only Cyprus—probably had more to do with political expediency than anything else.62 What Varnava is right to focus on, however, is that any advance on Ottoman territory with the explicit purpose of permanent occupation required unity in the Cabinet.63 Derby was opposed to this plan, thinking it would be taken as a breach of Britain’s neutrality and thus open up the British Empire to even more insecurity. On March 27, when Disraeli

56 Memorandum by Simmons, 26 June 1877, pp. 3–5 of “Proposed Coaling Station” (WO 33/31); Varnava, 81. 57 Disraeli to Victoria, 5 May 1878, qtd. in W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle,

The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 6 (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1920), 291. 58 Varnava, 82. 59 Layard to Salisbury, 15 May 1878, Layard Papers, BL Add. MS 39,131, f. 90–93. 60 Varnava., 85. 61 Ibid., 87. 62 Northcote’s biographer, the well-known Scottish writer Andrew Lang, noted that in

a reflection on the Eastern Crisis Northcote wrote in 1880, he “hints at a pet plan of his own for buying an island dear to archaeologists,” “desires” which Lang thinks “led to the purpose of acquiring Cyprus”—see Life, Letters, and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, First Earl Iddesleigh (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1891), 289. Also, Derby says that Cairns and Salisbury showed in Cabinet that they were wholeheartedly for Cyprus (Derby Diaries, 27 March 1878, 532), and on p. 82 of his book Varnava cites Lord Sandon, newly appointed in April as the president of the Board of Trade, who wrote in his journal on May 27 that he had set his “heart on that island for England.” 63 Varnava, 81.

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floated the idea of taking over Cyprus and Alexandretta (and perhaps the island of Lemnos, in addition), Derby immediately resigned.64 This time it was for good, and Salisbury—the natural choice—replaced him at the Foreign Office, while Hardy took over for Salisbury at the India Office. Derby’s brother, Frederick Stanley, took over the War portfolio. Once again, the notion of intervention appeared, as Disraeli ordered a military expedition from India to be arranged and called up the reserves. Derby commented that the Russian ambassador, Count Shuvalov, thought the former’s resignation would “be treated in Russia as the definitive triumph of the war-party.”65 But except in terms of costing money, neither the Indian expedition nor the reserves’ mobilization ever came to anything, and I would argue that there is no practical way they ever could have, either from a domestic or international perspective.66 As before, it was political posturing—dangerous brinksmanship based on the Government’s idea that a war could not actually happen. Instead, the supposedly pro-war leaders banked on the belief that Britain’s territorial acquisition from the Ottomans would offset Russia’s gains, which would thus lead to an agreement between the antagonists long before an actual, costly, unwanted fight occurred. Whether or not playing a game of saber-rattling was an ethical act was of no matter, of course, when the protection and extension of the British Empire’s (and the Tories’) power was at stake.

An “Experiment in Good Government,” or Life After Cyprus With the decision now made, the Sultan could do little but agree to it. Britain was, after all, the only country that had made any kind of sincere promise to keep the Ottoman Empire from disintegrating totally. After the Cyprus Convention was signed on June 4, 1878 it was Home who four days later drew up the summary document that would establish Britain’s official—and finally public—logic for the act, to be promulgated first at the Berlin Congress in June and July and thereafter to the

64 See Derby Diaries, 27 March 1878, 532–533. 65 Ibid., 533. 66 The 7000-strong Indian contingent was dispatched to Malta and was eventually returned to India, while the reserves never even left Britain.

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British public as a whole. This memo traveled with Simmons to the Berlin Congress, where he, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Lord Odo Russell would use it to underline Britain’s claims to Cyprus during the negotiations.67 Significantly, Home’s memo laid out a policy that went much further than the earlier argument of mere strategic necessity. Instead, he argued that the basis for expansion should be one that provided an effective solution to the Eastern Question as a whole, both in the sense of it as a problem of protecting British interests and in the sense of bringing order and civilization to the people of the East—the very substance of the “two Eastern Questions” that had been wrangled over from the Bulgarian Agitation on. As Home said: The kernel of the Eastern question undoubtedly lies in the difficulty that exists of getting races of different origin, religion and language to live harmoniously together and give time and scope for the action of Civilization to remove hatred and soften the memories of old wrongs committed one on the other. No one who knows the East will deny that none of the races in the East are sufficiently advanced to take the leading position.68

Using the familiar device of “knowing the East” Home deploys the classic Orientalist hierarchy of societies, building to the obvious conclusion of who exactly should take this “leading position” in the advancement of the sad inhabitants of the East, locked as they were assumed to be in a cycle of racial acrimony and fanatical religious animus. The choice of headcivilizer was clear: “Various denominations of Christians and Moslems, various races to be found in the East all look to England as the country which alone can assume such a position,” given “the well-known integrity of her officials, and the success that has always attended her efforts at administrating Eastern nations.”69 In other words Britain not only was the most civilized country in the West, it was the best at civilizing the East.

67 Simmons wrote a note on Home’s memo stating, “It was upon this paper that the convention, then secret, had been agreed upon with Turkey for ceding Cyprus to G. Britain.” Memorandum by Home, 8 June 1878, FO 358/1, f. 632 (additional note by Simmons). 68 Ibid., 632–633. 69 Ibid., f. 633.

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Therefore, Home argued, the place taken should be “sufficiently large, possessed of sufficient material resources and inhabited by such races of people, as shall allow the experiment of what good government will do being fairly tried.”70 And if this was the “experiment,” the hypothesis was of a rosy success for British interests: The political effect produced by observing the rapid development of a country under English rule—the peace and prosperity that would reign in it and the satisfaction of the inhabitants at the change from Turkish to British government would be incalculable and would do more to maintain English prestige than half a dozen campaigns.71

For Home, it was not just strategic expediency that was needed but a kind of Eastern “Petri dish” large enough, rich enough, and diverse enough to make the civilizing experiment worth conducting. He deemed the Cretan population’s “remarkable homogeneity” and its penchant for Greek unionism as facts against taking Crete, while Stampalia’s problem was that it was “nothing more” than a harbor and coaling station and would not “give the country what it requires in the East.”72 Alexandretta, as a continental possession, would not allow Britain to control the space and the variables of the experiment: it would “compel” Britain “to move too fast.”73 Conversely, Cyprus had the advantage of being an island that was large and resource-rich enough that “good government will quickly produce results.”74 Moreover, it offered a convenient stopping place along the route to India and was “admirably adapted for becoming a dêpot for English manufacturers” that allowed them to “make their way into the East”—a captive market that, as an official possession, would be much like Alexandria in commercial value “but in English not foreign hands.”75 Taken along with its “very mixed race” Home felt Cyprus alone was the clear choice:

70 Ibid. Emphasis added. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., f. 637. 73 Ibid., f. 639. 74 Ibid., f. 640. 75 Ibid., f. 634, 642.

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As an experiment in treating the Eastern question fairly, there could be no better place. What is done in Cyprus will be known all through Syria and Asia Minor. The progress that undoubtedly would follow were this island a British possession would do more to convince Eastern nations of the value of civilization, and the benefits of good government than anything else. The result would extend British prestige far and wide in the Levant.76

The whole shift from a rendering of the problem as an unfortunate strategic necessity to an opportunity for a civilizing mission seems to have been emblematic of Simmons’ task force. Home’s language was not just a consequence of intervening events or pressures from pro-imperial figures like Disraeli, but rather is a more complete demonstration of his earlier ideas about extra-strategic advantages of British imperialism. In January 1877, while discussing the idea of a British-controlled Gallipoli, he optimistically cited the “moral & political advantages” that would accompany any absorption of Ottoman territory, namely the fostering of a “mixed population of varied creed & race well governed & in a happy flourishing condition” that would show the difference between the lives of those “under British rule and those outside its pale.”77 One can draw an almost direct line from this statement to his postConvention memo from June 1878. Taken alongside Simmons’ discussion of Ottoman “tutelage,” this tells us that the Cyprus decision was made according to principles already established in the British mind, now actualized via the process of elite-level policymaking. The positive consequences of British imperialism Home cites complemented those that are presented merely unintended necessities of maintaining global peace and order—a maxim of Victorian restraint and morality that went: “We never wanted to expand, but now that we have the world is a better place.” What makes this example of cultural imperialism even more striking is that it was an initiative of the War Office—the paramount military body of the British state—that articulated the specific non-military elements of this imperial project. Throughout the Eastern Crisis, Simmons’ task force was again and again used not just to compile military data, but also to provide political and cultural information on the Eastern place, its peoples, and whether and where British influence could be effectively implemented. 76 Ibid., f. 640–641. 77 Memorandum by Home, 12 January 1877, FO 358/2, f. 34.

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This complicates our view of the public nature of the imperial program, as the War Office, while of course made up of Britons subject to the same cultural and intellectual forces as the body politic, operated according to principles that do not neatly fit into our understanding of Victorian political thought. In this sense, Bernard Porter’s description imperial officials as a “caste within a class” may be useful.78 Just as colonial officials lived and worked in a context defined by the combination of cultural values and institutional functions, Simmons’ task force was composed of men (and, it bears mention, only men) who could hardly separate their work from their livelihoods. And as in any other case of groupthink, these men do not appear to have been fully mindful that their shift from experts on strategic, material to cultural, intellectual matters may not have been politically appropriate, given that the new form of their task tied them to policies that clearly were controversial in British politics. Perhaps, as John Springhall has written, this conceit proceeded from a more general trend in British society that progressively elevated military men to position of “prestige” because of, by the time of the Eastern Crisis, two decades of largely successful (and, if not, still glorious) “little wars.”79 They felt they had the right to make such decisions because Victorian society increasingly considered military officers, especially the Royal Engineers, to have innate credibility. Whatever the mental hooks upon which Simmons’ task force hung its understanding of the issue, it produced other evidence of this subtle transformation in purpose, especially the clearer it became that an imperial move rather than an intervention would be taken. In August 1877, the War Office commissioned a study of the Caucasus that included detailed information about its inhabitants.80 Couched within the ethnographical language of the document is an emphasis on which groups were most orderly (the “slow, thick-headed” Anatolian Muslim pastoralists),

78 Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 41. 79 John O. Springhall, “‘Up Guards and At Them!’: British Imperialism and Popular

Art, 1880–1914,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 49–50. 80 The Theatre of War in Asiatic Turkey and Transcaucasia—Part II: Papers Compiled in the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General’s Department, August 1877 (London: Harrison & Sons for the War Office, 1877), 139–180 (WO 33/32, f. 853–878).

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the “most unruly” (the Chechens), and the most violent (the Kurds).81 The tone of this document is significant given that the intelligence was intended not only to gauge what kind of relationship the invading Russians would have with the local populace, but what Britain could expect should it intervene and occupy these areas, whether temporarily or permanently. The racial hierarchy the report describes essentially outlines the allies and enemies Britain could expect in a larger war with Russia over Asia Minor and its environs (Fig. 5.1). The cultural benefits of British imperialism became more explicit as the locations under consideration went from being assessed in terms of protecting the Ottomans against an invasion to being thought of—no matter what their Ottoman allies thought of it. In March 1878, one of Home’s subordinates, Captain John Maurice, reported that Russia could be prevented from establishing a commanding presence in the Black Sea if Britain seized the coalfields of northern Anatolia and its coastline from the ports of Erekli (i.e. Karadeniz Ere˘gli) to Amaserah (i.e. Amasra), which would easily provide Britain with sufficient harbors and fuel for their ships “even if the Turkish government were actively opposed to us.”82 Despite this suggestion to infringe on their Ottoman allies’ sovereignty, Maurice thought British control would be easily upheld by support from the local population, claiming on authority that “the traditions of the Crimean War live in their memories.”83 He defended his rather radical recommendation thusly: They remember that time as the one period to which they could look back when wages were regularly paid, and when justice was fairly administered. It is strongly asserted that an English agent has only to appear on the spot to secure services of indefinite numbers, and that, if it were necessary, a force to defend the mines could be easily organized by English

81 Ibid., 153, 152, and 152–153 (f. 860, 859, 859–860) respectively. Significantly, the Abkhazians were considered the most suited to peace and, significantly, anti-Russian feeling—see pp. 151–152 (f. 859). These people would have been recent immigrants to Ottoman territory, with their hatred of Russians a consequence of having fought against Russia’s conquest of Circassia in the preceding decades. 82 Maurice to Simmons, “Memorandum on the Erekli Mines,” 20 March 1878, WO 33/32, f. 459–461. Emphasis added. See Fig. 5.1 for a map circling the location. 83 Ibid., f. 460–461.

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officers, quite independent of any permission from the Turkish government, to which the tendency of the people is now to attribute all of their misfortunes.84

The notion that Ottomans innately trusted British authority is fundamental to Home’s June 1878 memo, showing that it was underlying theme in the Government’s deliberation over the means by which British control would be exerted. Again, this was not a new idea, but Simmons’ task force now actuated it in the preparation of their reports on Eastern intelligence. Indeed, as early as January 1877 Simmons spoke of the defensive advantages of fielding Muslim soldiers under British, rather than Ottoman, control. He referred to a similar arrangement, during the Crimean War, wherein “the Turkish soldiers liked their [British] officers, and their treatment was such that the service became popular

Fig. 5.1 Map Relating to “Memorandum on the Erekli Mines” (Copyright: Courtesy of WikimediaCommons)

84 Ibid., f. 461.

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amongst them, the men and officers (Turks)…carrying away with them most pleasing recollections of their association with British officers.”85 He made sure to note that Ottoman veterans thus held pro-British feelings based on their memory of “the just and considerate treatment they had received from the British Government.”86 The subsequent period up to Home’s June 1878 report only deepened and solidified this notion. In consequence, during the course of the Eastern Crisis it eventually became almost obligatory that any imperial move should include an expressly cultural component. A curious illustration of this shift in policy appears in a report on Alexandretta, which some in the Cabinet supported taking, in addition to Cyprus, all the way until May 1878. In the final review, Alexandretta was ruled out, but the way the discussion went is key to showing how much the motives for British expansion had changed by this point. A late-May report by Lieutenant William Hare claimed that Alexandretta’s advantage as a place to stage a land defense of Asia Minor was outweighed by the fact that Britain, unlike Russia, would have to rely on naval supply routes to keep its soldiers equipped.87 To Home, Hare’s report showed that “that no opportunity for bringing good administration to bear on the peoples of the East is afforded at [Alexandretta],” and Home reiterated that Cyprus was a much better candidate for such a project.88 If one examines Hare’s report closely, though it largely discussed Alexandretta’s strategic attributes, while in response Home argued in cultural terms. The slippage between the strategic and the ideological present in Home’s analysis shows that the matter had already been brought to its conclusion: Cyprus was big, diverse, harbor-ready, and resource-rich—the components Simmons’ task force had judged necessary for a successful imperial experiment. Strangely, this also apparently meant that if a place was better suited for a civilizing project, then it was also more strategically sound. If Simmons had stressed that Britain must decide its Eastern “modus opperandi,” it is clear that in the preceding 85 Memorandum by Simmons, 9 January 1877, Defence of Constantinople, 100 (FO 358/1, f. 76). Readers will recall that the father of Lady Michel, who organized of the Eastern Question character quadrille at the 1876 Dublin Castle ball that opened Chapter Three, had served as one of these British officers in the Crimean War. 86 Ibid. 87 Hare to Simmons, “Report on Alexandretta (Turk.—Iskanderun.),” 23 May 1878,

WO 33/32, f. 797–814. 88 Memorandum by Home, 11 June 1878, WO 33/32, f. 796. Emphasis added.

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year and a half Britain’s Eastern policy had developed into a strategy that mated material concerns with the relative level of opportunities for the application of cultural, “civilizing” values in the East. Moreover, not only did such overseers of this policy as Salisbury and Hardy continue their influence in subsequent years, but so did the agents and authors of imperialism from Simmons’ task force. Home provided a hint of the future goals of the British Empire in his June 8th memo, in which he claimed, “English interests are to be found in Asiatic rather than in European Turkey.”89 Britain’s eastward turn was set in motion almost immediately following the close of the Congress of Berlin. In late July, the Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General for Section D (which oversaw Russia, India, and Central Asia) of the Intelligence Branch,90 Captain F. C. H. Clarke, wrote a memo on the preparations of Russia in Central Asia, recommending that “the decisive policy which we have recently taken with regard to Asia Minor should find its complement in similar determined action with regard to Afghanistan. One is just as much a necessity as the other.”91 Two weeks later Home wrote a memo recommending that Britain “carefully and quietly” conduct a three-year mission to gather information on Asia Minor, which would be performed by “those who do the work as a duty, and who view the question as a whole.”92 In language reminiscent of his earlier Gallipoli and Cyprus memos, Home argued that “clear, distinct, and full information” should be collected “such as would warrant action being taken, if requisite.”93 As before, Home depicts Britain’s hand as being forced toward potential territorial expansion and management; the same beneficent promises for an “experiment in good government” that had gone along with the Cyprus decision lurk not far below the surface. Thus, Simmons’ task force’s methods and logic patterns formed important bases for the next step in Britain’s imperial program. Having found 89 Memorandum by Home, 8 June 1878, FO 358/1, f. 634. 90 The full list of places Section D oversaw is: Russia, Spain, and Portugal (and their

colonies), India, Persia, Japan, Central Asia, New Guinea and Polynesia, and Artillery Issues—see E. H. H. Collen, Report on the Intelligence Branch, Quarter-Master-General’s Department, Horse Guards (London: Harrison & Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, October 1878), 15. 91 Memorandum by Clarke, 26 July 1878, WO 33/32, f. 898. 92 Memorandum by Home, 12 August 1878, WO 33/32, f. 1078. 93 Ibid. Emphasis added.

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that territorial expansion in the East could be considered an apt solution to the Eastern Question, those who had worked on the Cyprus project focused their gaze on the next regions that Britain needed to protect and were themselves in need of Britain’s guiding hand, namely the Levant, Asia Minor, and Central Asia, notably Afghanistan. Home and his fellow Intelligence Branch members were given the task, because they had proved themselves as “experts” on Eastern affairs. In light of the inauspicious experience Britain had had with Afghanistan, the War Office ordered the Intelligence Branch to draw up a detailed military and historical assessment of the First Afghan War, fought from 1838 to 1842.94 Another followed on the Indian frontier, written by (the appropriately named) Major Cecil J. East, who served in Home’s place as Acting A.Q.M.G. after Home became sick with typhoid in the fall of 1878 while working as a part of the Boundary Commission set up to mark the lines drawn by the Treaty of Berlin.95 In the style of Simmons and Home, East chose to look at the matter “both from a political and military point of view,” deducing from this method that Afghanistan “must inevitably fall under the political control of England or Russia.”96 Where Home had taken up the cause of Cyprus, East took up that of Afghanistan, arguing that a “purely defensive policy is not understood by Asiatics” and that thus “it would be rash to state that future events may not compel our annexation of Afghanistan” even if such actions were not presently necessary to meet the current challenge.97 Other Cyprus rhetoric appeared: for Home (and Disraeli), Cyprus was the “key of Asia Minor” for Britain,98 while for East, Kabul was “the key of India” for Russia.99 Like Cyprus, Kabul was played up as a strategic, political, and commercial catch for British interests and imperial defense: it was the “political centre of Afghanistan,” “the focus of all power and wealth” 94 H. Cooper, “Afghanistan—A Slight Sketch of the Two Afghan Campaigns of 1839– 1842, Not Entering into Any Detail, but Showing in a General Way the Movements of the Troops, &c.,” 10 October 1878, WO 33/32, f. 1080–1090. 95 Vetch, “Home, Robert (1837–1879),” ODNB. 96 C. J. East, “Memorandum on the North-Western Frontier of India,” 25 November

1878, WO 33/32, f. 1134. 97 Ibid., f. 1136. 98 Memorandum by Home, 8 June 1878, FO 358/1, f. 634. 99 C. J. East, “Memorandum on the North-Western Frontier of India,” 25 November

1878, WO 33/32, f. 1135. Emphasis original.

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in the country, and the city “to which great prestige attaches.”100 For this reason, East recommended that the town of Kushi (i.e. Khoshi), 44 miles south of Kabul, should be furnished with a British garrison permanently, so as to control Kabul while at the same time offering a respite for Britain’s “chief political agent” to “escape from the inevitable intrigues and petty quarrels of an Oriental Court.”101 Like Home’s Cyprus, then, Major East’s Kushi would serve as a place from which to survey and control the wily Eastern expanse, without the necessity to get one’s hands too dirty or expand too quickly. It is also interesting that, as with Cyprus, theories of future conflict put fears of Russia as a prime mover in British imperialism but took specific regional considerations as more acutely important. The attention that East pays to indigenous power structures and strategy shines light on British officials’ appreciation of the stakes in the Great Game, which Robert Irwin and B. D. Hopkins have argued had as much, if not more, relation with regional considerations of Britain’s Indian possessions as with the broader virtual war between Britain’s and Russia’s Eastern designs.102 Unfortunately, Home himself cannot offer us any insight into the connection between Cyprus and any of East’s Afghan ideas: Home died of his illness in January 1879, cutting short a career which had promised to play a major role in Britain’s future Eastern involvements.103 However, Home was only one of a number of men involved in the Cyprus project who became influential military minds of the age of the “new imperialism.” Many of them had first cut their teeth in Simmons’ task force or in the Intelligence Branch during the Eastern Crisis and immediately thereafter in places like Africa, Afghanistan, India, and, indeed, Cyprus. The most notable figure related to Cyprus, Sir Garnet Wolseley, came late to the party but had a tremendous effect later as a military commander and imperial administrator in South Africa and

100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., f. 1136. 102 See Robert Irwin, “An Endless Progression of Whirlwinds,” London Review of Books,

June 21, 2001; Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan, 35–46. 103 Vetch, “Home, Robert (1837–1879),” ODNB.

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Egypt. Wolseley was a key figure of the modern British Army and of imperial governance, the “Modern Major-General” as Gilbert and Sullivan parodied him in The Pirates of Penzance in 1879.104 Wolseley’s ideas for reform proceeded from the principle that the British armed forces should promote excellence and effectiveness rather than the dogged traditionalism and nepotism represented by his enemy, the Duke of Cambridge.105 This meant changes in everything from adopting new military techniques and equipment, to procedures for the promotion of officers, to an organization of military units that reflected their tactical utility rather than their heritage in British society.106 This forward-thinking view combined with Wolseley’s adherence to another kind of “progress,” namely the advance of a global imperialist worldview. Indeed, Wolseley was an advocate of what Ian F. W. Beckett terms the “imperial school” of defense, meaning that he believed that a war with Russia would take place on the “peripheries” of either empire rather than across the Continent or via Afghanistan to India.107 In Cyprus, Wolseley, who would go on to replace Cambridge as Commander-in-Chief in 1895, saw service as an administrator in one of the key “peripheries” from which he imagined a future Anglo-Russian clash would proceed. Wolseley organized his life and his ambitions around a close group of trusted military colleagues, known as the “Wolseley ring,” whom he used to support and promote his reforming efforts.108 An intimate association with the “Modern Major-General” was a sure line toward achieving that selfsame rank and beyond, and with those ranks came a greater degree of influence over internal imperial discourses and the external policies that resulted. Several of these men also served with him in Cyprus and 104 See “Wolseley, Garnet Joseph, first Viscount Wolseley (1833–1913),” Ian F. W. Beckett in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/36995. 105 See Edwin M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army: 1868–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 39–40. 106 See Beckett, “Wolseley, Garnet Joseph, first Viscount Wolseley (1833–1913),”

OBNB. 107 Ibid. 108 For more information, see “Wolseley ring (act. 1873–1890),” Halik Kochanski in

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/69913.

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had wider connections to the Intelligence Branch and Britain’s imperial affairs. Captain Maurice, who had written the radical memo suggesting the seizure of the northern Anatolian coalfields and their adjoining coastline, went to Cyprus with Wolseley as a “specially employed” officer.109 “Dear Maurice,” as Wolseley refers to him in his Cyprus journal, was a major member and theorist of the ring.110 Eventually achieving the rank of major-general and earning a knighthood, Maurice’s career no doubt benefited directly and indirectly from his place in Wolseley’s inner circle. Wolseley also had with him in Cyprus another member of the ring, Lieutenant-Colonel (later General) Henry Brackenbury, who had served in the Intelligence Branch as D.A.Q.M.G. of Section B, in charge of colonial defense, from 1873 to 1875.111 Another of the “specially employed” officers in Cyprus, Colonel (also, in due course, General) Robert Biddulph, replaced Wolseley as High Commissioner in 1879.112 Biddulph was a reformist in a similar vein as Wolseley (though not a member of the ring), who had served from 1872 to 1878 as Assistant Adjutant-General, having been marked out for support by an old champion and collaborator of Wolseley, Gladstone’s war secretary, Lord Cardwell.113 Not so coincidentally, Cardwell had been one of the main driving forces behind the official establishment of the Intelligence Branch in 1873.114 Others who were considered “Eastern experts” in the Intelligence Branch also made their mark. The affiliate with arguably the greatest influence was Evelyn Baring, the later Lord Cromer, who aided in the formation of the Intelligence Branch from 1870 to 1871 before leaving to serve in India, a decade before he would take up the position he is

109 Anne Cavendish, ed., Cyprus 1878: The Journal of Sir Garnet Wolseley (Nicosia: Cyprus Popular Bank Cultural Centre, 1991), 1, n. 1. 110 Cyprus Journal, 12 October 1878, 128. For more information Maurice’s role in the Ring, see Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 174. 111 Collen, 7–8. 112 Cavendish, 1, n. 1. 113 C. V. Owen, “Biddulph, Sir Robert (1835–1918),” rev. James Lunt, in Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxford dnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/31879. 114 Collen, 6.

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most known for, that of Consul-General of British Egypt.115 At the end of the Eastern Crisis he had just retired from the army and was serving as the British Controller-General of Egypt, effectively in charge of the country’s debt and public finance alongside a French counterpart.116 Cromer’s Egyptian policies are closely associated with the reformulation of British imperialism for new economic and strategic ends in the late Victorian period.117 Indeed, Edward Said in part based the section of Orientalism that deals with Eastern experts, “Knowing the Oriental,” on Cromer’s ideology.118 Further figures from the Intelligence Branch and the Cyprus project had Egyptian and Indian connections. Two of them, Sir Archibald Alison and Sir Edward Hamley, both served during the Anglo-Egyptian War, both with marked degrees of success, with the latter knighted for his performance at the pivotal Battle of Tel El Kebir.119 Later, from 1889 to 1899, Alison would serve on the Council of India.120 Hamley became notable figure in the widening political culture of the Great Game, serving as a Conservative MP in the 1880s and lecturing on Eastern defense, 115 Collen, 4–6. Collen says that in 1870, Cromer was one of only two officers engaged in work in the Topographical and Statistical Department of the War Office, the predecessor of the Intelligence Branch, the other being Captain Charles Wilson, who Home replaced as A.Q.M.G. in April 1876. For more information on this transition, see Thomas G. Fergusson, British Military Intelligence, 1870–1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), 69. Cromer’s younger brother Walter also had Eastern connections: he was the “Mr Baring” attached to the British Embassy in Istanbul in 1876 who provided a report to Parliament on the Bulgarian Atrocities. Walter Baring also proceeded to Cyprus after the Berlin Treaty was signed to prepare the way for Wolseley to take over officially—see “Transfer of the Government of the Island of Cyprus to the British Crown,” London Gazette, 30 July 1878, col. A, p. 1. He continued to serve there under Wolseley, “on loan” from Constantinople—Cavendish, 9, n. 1. 116 Cromer would serve in this position until 1879, when he was replaced as ControllerGeneral by Sir Edward Malet. Malet then was appointed Consul-General, whereupon Cromer would replace him in this position in 1883. 117 See Roger Owen, Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 394–397. 118 Said, Orientalism, 38–49. 119 E. M. Lloyd, “Alison, Sir Archibald, second baronet (1826–1907),” rev. James

Lunt, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/article/30380. 120 Ibid.

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including one in 1884 in which he reiterated his fears of Russian designs on India and hoped to “succeed in arousing…public opinion” on the topic.121 Finally, the D.A.Q.M.G. of Section E, which was largely concerned with Near Eastern affairs, Captain John C. Ardagh, would prove to be deeply influential in providing the information and logic upon which Britain’s post-1878 Eastern policy was based.122 Ardagh, who was assisted in Section E by Captain Maurice, had been active in Simmons’ task force as one of Home’s chief surveyors and served on the Boundary Commission mission that cost Home his life.123 He also accompanied Disraeli, Salisbury, and Simmons to Berlin for the Congress, after which Salisbury personally thanked him for his service and he was rewarded with a CB.124 Ardagh would serve in Egypt as well as the Deputy Assistant Adjutant-General of the occupation, and later in India as the private secretary of two Viceroys, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Elgin—experiences providing him with many political allies who he remained involved with upon returning to take over the entire Intelligence Branch in 1896.125 The Cyprus project thus fundamentally reshaped how and with what logic Britain determined the solution to problems in the international realm, especially in elastic expanse of “the East.” Simmons’ task force and its affiliates in the Intelligence Branch acted as “agents” of imperialism in a groundbreaking and lasting way. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Simmons, Home, East, Maurice, and Ardagh were merely the latest in a long, unbroken line of British imperialists, bent on bringing to fruition their dreams of world domination. It is more helpful—and provocative—to think of Cyprus as a point of departure. Indeed, as Varnava has pointed out, Cyprus was the first place in the 121 Edward Bruce Hamley, “Russia’s Approaches to India,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, Whitehall Yard 28 (1885): 395–425. The lecture was given on May 16th, 1884. 122 Collen, 15. Section E oversaw work on the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Africa, Austria, Sweden, and Norway. 123 Ibid., 12. Home and Ardagh were joined by Section D’s head, F. C. H. Clarke,

and another of Section E’s officers, Lieutenant John Ross of Bladensburg. 124 Ibid. 125 “Ardagh, Sir John Charles (1840–1907),” Edward M. Spiers in Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1. lib.umn.edu/view/article/30437.

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Mediterranean that Britain occupied in peacetime.126 Other possessions in which British rule was secured usually involved at least some legacy of direct conflict, as with India, Burma, Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and South Africa. Other areas came into the British fold because of wellknown global or regional initiatives, like West Africa and Belize in the case of the suppression of the slave trade or Hong Kong in the conflict over the opium trade. Cyprus, on the other hand, had no preexisting relationship with Britain, and it had been ceded not because of war but as a symbol of peace between Britain and an ally, the Ottoman Empire. This is not to say that Britain did not use war as a justification for expansion in the future; Britain in Afghanistan and Egypt bore that principle out immediately following the Eastern Crisis. But Britain’s African adventures and its solidification of control in Southeast Asia certainly show the stamp of the Cyprus project in that many new territories entered the British Empire in similarly measured, negotiated, and peaceful ways. Given the formative nature of a “Cyprus moment,” from a strict viewpoint few of these men were even capable of being agents of imperialism prior to their part in the Cyprus project. Such an assessment would be first simply a referendum on the “kind of people” British military officers were, but worse it would woefully overestimate the power these men had before they had been expressly given it during the Eastern Crisis. Instead, they became agents of empire by being ordered to investigate areas within their purview as military experts on foreign lands. In carrying out this task, they offered imperial solutions, which were then actively followed by elite political forces. This increased the chance that these officers and their units would be asked for their opinions in the future (or British policymakers would revisit their prior conclusions), given their role as widely acknowledged experts and contributors to the new imperial project they helped develop. Thus, the importance of the method in which the Cyprus project was conducted cannot be overestimated in offering insights into the changing methods of British imperialism. Indeed, the fact that the Intelligence Branch and the wider military, like the Crown, lacked an official political affiliation helped them to come by other means to imperial conclusions theretofore associated with politicians and parties. That the information and logic salient to imperial actions could be upheld by men considered

126 Varnava, 24.

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to be of reason and science rather than men of politics meant that the political influences on and implications of their work allowed actual policymakers to bypass the old imperial conundrum of “Is this right?” with a much, much easier question: “Is this possible?” Divested of the stamp of pro-imperial or anti-imperial, such “rational” ideas were then portrayed to be sound and defensible from all angles other than the most opposed ideology. The political details of imperial initiatives were then closely interwoven with the strategic data relevant to such potential moves— an efficient and, indeed, easier approach to making imperial visions into realities.

Conclusion, Public Opinion(s) In late July 1877 the Royal School of Military Engineering at Chatham played host to a military exercise simulating the process and outcomes of a large-scale siege operation.127 With the Duke of Cambridge and other assorted high-ranking officers watching, the exercise’s participants—100 soldiers on each side—concluded a month-long project by blowing a mine in the side of the fortress, while the attacking troops moved in under liveammunition fire from those appointed in defense. At the end of the mock battle, both sides assembled for review in front of Brompton Barracks. Alongside the men themselves the artillery and equipment used in the siege were presented for witness, including two supply wagons that rolled into the parade square with the word “Gallipoli” chalked on their sides, a display which The Times could only conclude “must have been a joke.”128 Much like the modern habit of aerial bomb-naming, though, the thrust of this “joke” is quite clear. No one knew yet about Cyprus or any of the other secretly discussed possibilities for British expansion, but Gallipoli had lately been discussed in the papers as a potential staging zone of a British intervention in the Russo-Turkish War.129 It would not have been surprising if, a year later, the same display would have had a wagon with “Cyprus” on its side. That is, these Gallipoli-emblazoned wagons served as an invitation by the men to consider the exercise proof of their zeal and willingness to work against Russian expansion if called upon to do

127 “Siege Operations at Chatham,” The Times, 30 July 1877, col. D, p. 4. 128 Ibid. 129 See “An Expedition to the East,” The Times, 23 July 1877, col. A, p. 8.

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so. It did not matter what Eastern place acted as the staging point, just that Britons were ready. Yet the distinction between secret and public dialogue about this issue is significant. Indeed, while the “menacing rumours,” as The Times put it, of a Gallipoli occupation might have been recent news in July 1877, as we have seen the details of such an intervention had long before this been laid out and had, by this point, been almost totally discounted by Simmons’ task force and the Cabinet as the preferable course of action.130 This evident, yet imprecise tracking of the more detailed confidential actions undertaken by the Cabinet and the War Office during the Eastern Crisis characterizes the range of connections and disconnections between the elite policymaking apparatus of the British government and the realm of public discourse. For it is clear that while both spheres debated the matters of intervention and empire-building, the details, methods, and means those conversations depended on differed widely. The Cyprus story, however secretly the takeover of the island was arranged, would not be complete without the inclusion of distinct public factors. One might even say that a British Cyprus depended on the expectation of broad public approval upon the project’s eventual revelation—a kind of pro-imperial groundwork constructed concurrently with the deliberations over intervention and expansion that took place on the internal, institutional level. This groundwork was laid both by the design of principal pro-imperial agents and via an organic popularization of an imperialistic vision of Britain’s role in the East. Simply put, the Cyprus component of Disraeli’s “peace with honour” characterization of Britain’s conduct at the Berlin Congress was popular not only because Disraeli and his cohorts had attempted to make such an action palatable, but because the British populace had themselves decided to reward imperial language and ideology in popular dialogue. This created a situation in which physical, territorial actions were taken to be part-and-parcel to Britain’s participation in the international theater. If, as Jeremy Black argues, the ties between the public’s expectation of pro-imperial policies and the actual political, non-military methods by which imperial projects were pursued became evident in the 1880s, it makes sense to conclude by gauging the Cyprus case’s role in this vital shift.131

130 The Times, 23 July 1877, col. A, p. 9. 131 Jeremy Black, A History of Diplomacy (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 168.

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Despite the secrecy of Simmons’ task force’s specific objectives and activities, in the interwoven nature of Britain’s social and political world the news inevitably filtered down from “those who knew” to those who simply read. Pourgouris’s recent book on this topic is a must for those interested in what he aptly terms the media “frenzy” following the public’s discovery of their new Cypriot imperial brethren in the summer of 1878.132 But even as early as November 1876, newspapers reported that the Cabinet was debating an occupation of the Dardanelles and, significantly, “British engineer officers are already engaged in making the surveys requisite for a thorough defence of the Turkish capital.”133 That this was exactly what Home and his cohorts were doing at this time is evidence of the permeation of officially confidential information past the walls of secrecy and into the public realm.134 Later, in May 1877 The Times addressed rumors that an expeditionary force was being arranged shortly after the start of the Russo-Turkish War, stating without any context that there was “no foundation” to claims that “Sir L. Simmons or any other General” had been chosen to lead such a unit.135 The fact that it was specifically Simmons, an engineering and not a combat general, who surfaced in these rumors further indicates that the public had at least some accurate information of events going on out of their sight. But as we have seen in the matter of intervention vs. occupation, without an exact knowledge of the secret deliberations the public’s engagement of the issue was effectively independent. However, the holders of exact information—and thus the power—were quite aware of this fact and attempted to use it to their advantage in mobilizing support for their position. Perhaps predictably, this meant that an aggressive position on Britain’s relationship with Russia was closely tied to the broader domestic power

132 For an overview of this “frenzy,” see pp. 5–9 of Pourgouris’s book. The subsequent chapters focusing on Cyprus reportage from individual journalists each provide excellent depth into the tendrils of the media firestorm. 133 “England and the Dardanelles,” The Times, 18 November 1876, col. E, p. 5. The Times reported that it received this story from the Financier, which had printed it the day before. 134 Indeed, the very name of the report the engineers produced from this period, Defence of Constantinople (FO 358/1, f. 1–246), matched this statement almost exactly. 135 The Times, 10 May 1877, col. E, p. 9.

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of the party and people who supported such a policy, as when Lord Richmond wrote on August 1, 1877 of a conversation he had with the Duke of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) that fascinatingly demonstrates the dynamics of this equation: I have had conversation with P. of W. and D. of C. about affairs in the East both very keen that we shd. have done more than we have done. I pointed out [how] very awkward was our position. The former energetic in his belief said we ought to have occupied Gallipoli with fifteen thousand men [and] that it was no use having a majority if we did not use it: and the usual arguments we have heard so often. Most of which I have seen in the Pall Mall Gazette. I assured him we were fully alive to the situation and then when the Country was able to see what we had done and all the difficulties we have had to contend with, I was sure the verdict would be in our favour.136

Edward’s baldly stated certainty that the Crown (of which Cambridge, a prince and grandson of George III, was also a direct affiliate) was on the side of the Conservatives and that the leading highbrow Tory newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, echoed these values tells us something about the web of power in political matters of this level of importance. Of course, the Conservatives and their Tory social auxiliaries were aware of the power of public politics, and they thus depended on the presumption that Parliament was there to make Tory beliefs public policy. With the Conservatives in power, then, they felt absolutely no need to confirm any of the rumors of the dealings of the War Office and the Cabinet. No one simply needed to know. Nevertheless, Liberal forces fought back against this impulse to mate majority rule with policy by fiat, as when the Southampton Liberal Association met on August 2 (the day after Richmond’s letter) to petition, the Government to adopt a policy of non-aggression and non-occupation. Gladstone and John Bright sent their regrets, but such dignitaries as

136 Richmond to Cairns, 1 August 1877, PRO 30/51/4, f. 20–21. Richmond often wrote carelessly with run-on sentences and missed linking words. I have added the two words in brackets to the prose simply for clarity; if removed the passage is the precise original.

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Sir George Campbell,137 Auberon Herbert, and E. A. Freeman led the proceedings. Campbell and Freeman championed a resolution protesting “any military occupation by England of Gallipoli, Crete, or Egypt,” while Herbert seconded a further resolution that claimed “England has no interests in opposing the opening of the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the Black Sea, to the free navigation of the fleets of all nations.”138 A final resolution reiterated the Bulgarian Agitation’s “solution” to the Eastern Question, namely that Britain should work in “friendly concert with Russia and the other Powers of Europe to place the Provinces of European Turkey on the footing of States enjoying administrative independence.”139 Of course, as all three made up the general shape of the Liberal position on Britain’s Eastern policy, this type of display had little chance of affecting the actions of the Liberals’ political enemies in the Government. The public was gripped, moreover, primarily in a debate over intervention and not imperialism, a tactic that as we have seen was both politically useful for co-opting the Jingoes’ influence and lacked the recommendation of Simmons’ task force, the primary body charged with researching the possibility of intervention. Given that occupation was at least temporarily the necessary consequence of intervention, the subject of a specifically imperial relationship with the occupied place is somewhat more difficult to detach from wider popular discourse on Britain’s role in and response to the Eastern Crisis. But while bellicose behavior may be a part of the history of imperialism, a zeal for military intervention is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of imperial acts.140 Aggressive behavior often was in contrast to the kind of cold mechanics required for empire-building in the Simmons vein. In fact, in the Cyprus case the imperialists took territory to avoid a military confrontation, which satisfied the warmongers only insofar as

137 Campbell was the Liberal M.P. for Kirkaldy Burghs. He is not to be confused with George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, who was also a prominent Liberal politician and frequent commentator on the Eastern Question. 138 “The Eastern Question,” The Times, 3 August 1877, col. F, p. 10. 139 Ibid. 140 Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 12 and 137. The distinction between militarism and imperialism is one of Porter’s stronger points in his critique of imperial culture in Victorian Britain.

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imperial glory served as a sufficient substitute for the martial kind.141 Their calls for war were easily transformed into songs of praise for the expansion of the British Empire, whose condition of power offered a similar opportunity for chauvinism. This provides a possible insight into the political and economic aspects of Britain’s later imperial ventures. Indeed, a tension between intervention and imperialism would prove to be characteristic of the “new imperialism,” with Britain’s invasion of Egypt resulting from fears of economic and political chaos over the prospect of a threat to the Suez Canal, while in Sudan the motivation for direct control was an outgrowth of Britain’s new Egyptian responsibilities and proceeded along a much more measured line.142 As regards the intelligence and rightness of the Cyprus takeover, the British press largely remained closely harnessed to the sides with which they affiliated. Liberal newspapers preached an internationalist vision wherein the Great Powers got together to push the Ottomans out of Europe, while the Conservative papers vacillated between supporting adherence to the diplomatic status quo and saber-rattling Russophobia. Apart from the Daily Telegraph’s defection from the Liberals to the Tories, there was little deviation from the established affiliations of the other papers. The complexity of the positions, though, matched those of politics, leading to some enigmatic results. The Pall Mall Gazette, for example, at first hoped the war would go quickly in favor of Russia and not the Ottomans, so as to allow a general intervention of the other Powers to sort out the situation.143 Its cynicism concerning British interests far outweighed any remnant of the superficial sympathy with the Ottomans it may have employed before the war began. The Northern Echo was even more confused, as it had for so long advocated the goal of dismembering the Ottoman Empire that it struggled with the fact that this issue had lost some of the relevance it had held 141 Black, 169. Black speaks here of the influence of nationalism on European imperial policies, namely in the sense that nationalism and military capability might drive the move to expand but that diplomatic methods had a “striking…ability to manage change” and thus satisfy in another way those who otherwise advocated war. 142 As Eve Troutt Powell discusses, a major aspect of Britain’s goals in Sudan came from having taken over the reigns of Egyptian government policy in 1882, thus giving Britain responsibility over Egyptians’ own ongoing imperial projects in their country’s western and southern regions—see A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 38–41. 143 “Affairs in Constantinople,” Pall Mall Gazette, 2 May 1877, col. A, p. 1.

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earlier in the Eastern Crisis. Indeed, in late March 1878 it even went as far as to criticize the Government for not accepting Austria’s attempts at peace (such as the 1876 Berlin Memorandum discussed in Chapter Three), asserting that the consequence was that “the Ottoman Empire has been destroyed.”144 This was of course exactly what the Echo had always wanted, but now that it looked like Disraeli’s inaction had helped bring this about, there emerged the sticky problem of the Liberal paper seeming to support the policies of its hated political enemies. However, when it came to branding itself as a standard-bearer of anti-imperialism the Northern Echo was much more clear, calling the Government’s policy “a bastard imperialism” whose leader’s personal ambition and “notorious sympathies” with the Ottomans led him to appeal to the warlike, imperialist side of the English populace.145 This was particularly repugnant to the Echo, as Disraeli purported to speak for all of Britain “even though he is not of the English race.”146 Later, after Disraeli had ordered the Indian expedition to Malta, the Echo reiterated the device that a devious, Oriental Disraeli used imperial power to bypass his weaknesses in Britain, claiming “we are being Imperialised daily.”147 It predicted that “the Empress of India and her Grand Vizier” would bring “a million men from Asia” to Europe and asked, “What will it be like when the Grand Vizier can garrison London with Sikhs and send sepoys to maintain order in the North?”148 In other words, if Disraeli championed “India and Imperialism at the cost of England and Constitutionalism,” what was to stop him from creating not just an Oriental empire in the East but an Oriental empire at home?149 On the other side of the political divide, to the Pall Mall Gazette such talk was not only inflammatory but unpatriotic and narrowly self-serving according to party interests. It called the Eastern Crisis a “test question” for determining whether those who contrasted their preference for “humanity” over Britain’s imperial interests in truth actually held “inner

144 “The Hitch in the Negotiations,” Northern Echo, 21 March 1878, col. F, p. 2. 145 “Why Should We Go to War for Lord Beaconsfield?,” Northern Echo, 14 January

1878, col. E, p. 2. 146 Ibid. 147 “Sepoys for Europe,” Northern Echo, 23 April 1878, col. E, p. 2. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid.

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[thoughts]…that the Empire is a burden too heavy to be borne.”150 In other words, if someone sought to “cheapen Imperial interests,” the Pall Mall Gazette felt it should be considered a sign that that person followed a “general, though unavowed, principle that the Empire is a bad thing and ought to be demolished.”151 These thinly veiled smears of Liberal humanitarianism and self-congratulatory statements of Tory patriotism underpinned the paper’s remarkably unnuanced conclusion dividing British society into two competing camps: “We are all either Imperialists or anti-Imperialists.”152 Still, clearly the popularity of Disraeli’s slogan “peace with honour” post-Berlin rested upon some broadly felt aspect of the British mind. And, in this, a closer look at the public’s response to the revelation of the Cyprus Convention offers some closing insights into how proimperialism ended up becoming much more powerful. To be sure, the crowds that met Disraeli on his return from Berlin provide prima facie evidence of widespread support, but the issue of the nature of this support and the opposition to the Cyprus Convention is less clear. Certainly the Tory organs with more casual attentiveness to politics, such as The Era, rejoiced that Disraeli had checkmated the “the Bulgarian howlers…the carpers, the sneerers, the agitators, and the peace-at-any-price party” by keeping the move secret.153 It offered glowing praise for the wisdom of Disraeli’s decision “to protect our path to India” with such a “beautiful island, so rich in biblical, historical, and poetical associations, so fertile and convenient.”154 The Era’s more serious Tory competitors were not so sanguine. Given that the taking of Cyprus seemed to confirm the desires of the Jingoes, which smacked of the chaos of the pro-intervention movement, the Pall Mall Gazette dismissed any connection between the Cyprus Convention and the thrust of Conservative policy: “As a glory; as a triumph; as a splendid success for English statesmanship, only the most noisy and foolish partisanship will speak of this treaty. But as a necessary piece of work, forced on the country…it will be welcomed and defended by every 150 “The Enemies of the Empire,” Pall Mall Gazette, 5 September 1877, col. A, p. 1. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 153 The Era, 14 July 1878, col. C, p. 11. 154 Ibid.

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man of common-sense in the empire.”155 The centrist Economist was even more dour on the prospects, saying that though it “began by hoping that a great undertaking, burdensome but necessary, splendid though formidable, and beneficent to the world if full of cares for England, had been seriously accepted and was intended to be seriously executed,” it now perceived the Cyprus Convention as having a “less and less satisfying aspect.”156 The Liberal press was predictably critical, with the Daily News lamenting acerbically that Britain was “to be responsible to the world for the deeds of the Pachas in Asiatic Turkey. We are to defend Asiatic Turkey against Russians and against Turks…We will live in an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue.”157 Evoking the Northern Echo’s earlier language—and, strangely, Colonel Home’s thoughts on the future of the British Empire as well—the Daily News focused on Disraeli’s racial personality and imperial impulses, saying he used “the craft of the Semitic, to the perfidy of the English, character” to construct “European policy which suddenly proves to be less European than Asiatic.”158 Liberal criticism was not wholly negative, though. While Reynolds’s Newspaper worried that when the “penalty of the obligation comes to be paid,” it would cause more damage than good for British interests, at the same time it also echoed Home’s feelings by hoping that Britain might prove “how easy it is to allow a people to flourish under conditions of equality and justice.”159 And the Northern Echo, generally the most radical national Liberal paper, offered guarded support for the measure, feeling the policy resembled Gladstone’s suggestions in Bulgarian Horrors, namely the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the exertion of European influence in Eastern matters.160 For a British Cyprus to mean the obviation of Ottoman control of the island was “an unmixed good,” while the only worry was what the move meant

155 “The English Compact with Turkey,” Pall Mall Gazette, 9 July 1878, col. A, p. 1. 156 “Turkey and the Convention,” The Economist, 24 August 1878, col. A, p. 998. 157 Daily News, 16 July 1878, col. E, p. 4. 158 Daily News, 12 July 1878, col. E, p. 4. 159 “A Bold Stroke,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 14 July 1878, col. A, p. 1. 160 “The British Protectorate of Asia Minor,” Northern Echo, 11 July 1878, col. E,

p. 2.

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in terms of Britain’s larger responsibilities as a protector in the region.161 Of course, much of this statement can only be taken as a rhetorical ploy to detach Disraeli’s actions from Tory policy and his party’s aims—a redirection of the intent of the measure and of the issue of who could claim the genesis of the move away from support for Ottoman integrity. But at the same time, we are left to wonder, how much did the Cyprus Convention symbolize the consolidation of British political aims, or the mating of two previously divergent sides of British society? A British Cyprus represented the strong, glorious, imperial posturing Disraeli felt was necessary to uphold his vision for Britain’s external policy. Nearly all of those who supported the Conservatives held at least some romantic beliefs about imperial expansion and the evidence of military and political might that imperialism represented. Those who did not share this belief, like Derby and Carnarvon, were easily discarded in favor of the majority. Likewise, the peaceful division of Ottoman territory, a move tactically designed to symbolize to the British populace and to Europe the deliberate obfuscation of the principle of Ottoman independence, was (whether anyone liked it or not) a move in concordance with Liberal demands. Indeed, they had agitated and called for precisely this kind of radical shift in Britain’s Eastern policy. Liberals might chafe at the fact that acquiring Cyprus meant an increase in Britain’s imperial responsibilities and might create problems in its relationship with the other European powers in the region, but it could not be exactly seen as a mindlessly partisan decision. Furthermore, not all Liberals were wholly averse to direct British control if the ideas behind such a policy were couched in the appropriate terms of the morality and liberty that such a new administration was thought to offer—in essence, exactly what Home and all the others promised would happen on the island. The acquisition of Cyprus, then, offered an innovation in imperial reasoning: the knitting together of previously pro- and anti-imperial forces into one that satisfied the pro-imperials by symbolizing British power and placated the anti-imperials by framing a peaceful arrangement that prioritized “good government” over selfishly British ends.

161 Ibid.

CHAPTER 6

Imperialism by Negotiation: Britain at the 1878 Congress of Berlin

An Express from Germany In the late afternoon of July 16, 1878, Prime Minister Disraeli and Lord Salisbury rolled into London on a special train from Dover. As the two men emerged from the carriage, weary but self-satisfied, they were met by a carefully choreographed display of thanks from the London Tory establishment for the men’s victories at the Berlin Congress. On the arrival platform at Charing Cross, a well-dressed crowd awaited them, surrounded by a kaleidoscopic display of crimson fabric, palm trees, and a “profusion of roses” laid on and across the platform structure, as up above flapped all the flags of Europe.1 The initial shaking of hands aside, the men were conferred to a carriage that led them through cheering crowds who stood amid more crimson drapery, while bouquets of flowers rained down on them from the open windows above.2 It was “like attending the most triumphant Royal progress,” as the Aberdeen Weekly Journal provocatively termed it, “one of the grandest, partly because [it was] one of the most spontaneous, expressions of public feeling that the British Metropolis has ever witnessed.”3 1 “Reception of Lord Beaconsfield at Charing-Cross Station on His Return from

Berlin,” Illustrated London News, 27 July 1878, col. C, p. 79. See Fig. 6.1 for image. 2 Ibid., col. C., p. 79. 3 “The Reason Why,” Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 17 July 1878, col. C, p. 4.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_6

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Fig. 6.1 “Reception of Lord Beaconsfield at Charing-Cross Station on His Return from Berlin” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

Actually, it was a testament to the Conservative authorities’ care in having orchestrated the event that the paper could claim there was no party flavor to the proceedings.4 On the contrary however, as Salisbury’s daughter and biographer, Lady Cecil, later stated, the outpouring of public feeling needed to be arranged by the Tory “party machine,” as British society only responded to “combatively inspired” events.5 Indeed, the Daily News reported that London’s Central Conservative Committee stated prior to Disraeli’s return they had “no organized plan of reception,” a disingenuous comment allowing their ample background preparations to unfold in a way that was “enhanced by its spontaneity.”6

4 Ibid. 5 Lady Gwendolyn Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury, vol. II 1868-1880

(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 296. 6 “The Return of Lord Beaconsfield,” Daily News, 16 July 1878, col. B, p. 5.

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There is no doubt that as the crowds thronged the streets in anticipation of the passage of the heroes’ carriage there was a flavor of triumph in the public spirit of London, which the conveniently laid-out celebration offered a venue for expressing. The rapt attention that greeted Disraeli as he addressed the crowd through the window of his house in Downing Street was therefore both genuine and according to plan—a dynamic that subsequently shaped the response to his famous claim that he had brought “peace with honour” to Europe and to the Eastern Question. The British public thirsted for a neat solution to the Eastern Crisis, now over three years old. Britain’s conduct at the Berlin Congress provided that neat solution, even if Salisbury could presciently claim that Tory politicos would “find it out at the polls” that the manufactured public spectacle would eventually backfire on the party.7 Less than two years later Gladstone would home in on Disraelian foreign policy in his famous Midlothian campaign, with Gladstone seizing upon Disraeli’s smug affirmation of his success at Berlin in a drive to defeat Disraeli in a general election. This chapter examines Britain’s conduct at the 1878 Congress of Berlin. Britain’s representatives wanted to accomplish two major goals at the Congress: first, ensure that Russia would not use its gains from the Russo-Turkish War to threaten Britain’s political and imperial interests; second, secure international witness, but not official sanction, to Britain’s takeover of Cyprus. Overlaying these goals was a subtler, longterm object, namely the expression of British power in European politics and the British Empire in ensuring global stability. For as much as the Congress was intended as a peacemaking conference for the European powers, I contend that it functioned as a venue for the British Empire to promote itself as the premier overseer of Eastern order. No longer did the Crimean system, which explicitly depended on the Great Powers’ mediation of Eastern disputes, act as the primary governing principle of Britain’s Eastern policy. Rather, the expectation of international conflict in and around the Ottoman Empire was to be confronted by universal recognition of a calm, yet muscular British Empire acting as Europe’s impartial adjudicator, even (or especially) in affairs that involved Britain itself.

7 Qtd. in Cecil, 296.

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Beyond Britain’s representatives at the Congress, there were members of other powers’ delegations who were for one reason or another friendly to such a policy, while Britain enjoyed political affiliates back home who built support for the idea that British imperial aspirations should be woven into the proceedings of the conference and its result, the Treaty of Berlin. This interventionist mindset helped define the next generation of British external and domestic politics—a vital step in the development of the political reasoning which underpinned the “new imperialism” that extended across party lines and sociocultural barriers. As there would be an even more famous meeting in Berlin in 1884–1885 to lay out European spheres of influence in Africa, a suggestion as to how Europe’s competing empires and imperial policies issues came to be a key issue of subsequent international negotiation—especially for maintaining “European peace”—is also an important part of the Eastern Question’s story.

Der Herr Von Tenterden, Das Ist Der Mann? In contrast to the feeling implied by London’s cheering crowds and Disraeli’s self-congratulatory comments, the Berlin Congress was not defined primarily by individual actions, triumphant or otherwise. Although the British delegation had indeed succeeded in gaining advantages for Britain and the Empire at the conference, such successes were in largest part the result of careful preparation of Britain’s position in the spring of 1878 and the explicit avoidance of bombastic or provocative language by the British delegation once the official negotiations began in June. Despite the charm of Otto von Bismarck’s famous bon mot about Disraeli’s performance at the Congress, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann,” such personality-driven ways of viewing this event are not very helpful in providing an insight into the structure of the British position, how it was made palatable to both a British and an international audience, and how Britain’s future external policy was affected by the conference’s outcome.8 In this aspect, tying together the shrewd calculations that went on behind the scenes in the months leading up to the Congress with the way 8 Indeed, Otto von Bismarck’s and Disraeli’s cozy relationship at the Berlin Congress has held a particular fascination for scholars since 1878, much of which proceeds from the quote from Bismarck about Disraeli that forms the title for this section. For a discussion of this matter, see Stephen J. Lee, 94–98.

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Britain publicly promoted its position in the international arena provides a way to frame the genesis of the diplomatic practices of the “new imperialism” of the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, Britain’s successful use of its status as a leading European state to promote the British Empire as a bulwark against global disorder shows us how British policymakers were able to get international sanction for British imperialism. In framing our view of the Congress of Berlin, we must be careful not to employ a vision of it that takes at face value the kind of assessments that fall around the fault lines of the politics and culture of the time. To be sure, Disraeli’s and Bismarck’s relationship was a notable human element of the Congress. Disraeli admiringly called Bismarck “a complete despot” of the German delegation and fancied his own leaderly qualities of a similar stripe.9 Disraeli gave Bismarck a portrait of himself, which the latter hung in his private study in Berlin as one of the three people most important to him: “my Sovereign, my wife, and my friend,” as Bismarck explained to inquiring visitors.10 Salisbury was less impressed with Disraeli, noting that Russia’s chief representative, Foreign Minister and Chancellor Prince Alexander M. Gorchakov (whom Salisbury, ever acerbic, deemed the “old wretch”), took advantage of the fact that Disraeli was “short-sighted and ignorant of detail” to alter the proceedings in small ways that favored Russia’s position.11 Still, there is no doubt that Disraeli played a prominent role in the Congress, but one must “decenter” him from the proceedings to keep from inadvertently acceding to the promotion of Disraeli’s “manly” role in the Congress. More important is the fact that “professional” diplomats and foreign policy specialists aided the British delegation’s negotiating abilities, such as Lord Odo Russell, who was also in attendance, and Sir Austen Henry Layard working from Istanbul. Both men were incidentally (and significantly) members of the Liberal Party.12 Both also received rewards for their performance in preparation for and at the Congress: the former, the offer of a peerage (which he turned down when Gladstone saw Russell’s 9 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 26 June 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, vol. II, 228. 10 Qtd. in Monypenny and Buckle, 342. 11 Salisbury to Cross, 10 July 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 293. 12 Russell was the nephew of Whig/Liberal Prime Minister Lord Russell, and Layard

had served in Parliament as a Liberal MP for Aylesbury from 1852 to 1857 and for Southwark from 1860 to 1870.

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acceptance as an endorsement of Tory policy13 ); and the latter, a GCB.14 Back at the Foreign Office in London, Lord Tenterden helped from a position conveniently out of view. It is thus clear that no matter the fact of whether Disraeli deserved the praise that he accepted, the British delegation was strongly positioned to gain at the Congress. And, given the circumstances regarding Britain’s limited official role in the Eastern Crisis, there can be no doubt that they did gain. Yet I would argue that it was the vital preparation of the British position preceding the Congress that probably did the most to make the British delegation seem the most in-command upon arriving at Radziwill Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse.15 In this regard, the importance of Tenterden’s role in this process cannot be overstated. The memoranda he wrote during the spring of 1878 concerning Britain’s course of action helped set the tone for the summer’s official proceedings. As the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Tenterden had some flexibility in his relationship with the Government as he was not appointed as an affiliate of Disraeli’s Cabinet but rather was the head of the permanent Foreign Office staff. It is significant that as the political situation during the Eastern Crisis heated up Tenterden subtly adapted his duties to “extend his advisory function” to a policymaking role.16 This shift was in part motivated by the Government’s growing frustration with the dogged moderation of the official head of foreign affairs, Lord Derby, who as Keith Neilson and T. G. Otte neatly put it, “had no difficulty in finding reasons for doing nothing.”17 Just as General Simmons, Colonel Home, and the rest of the Intelligence Branch worked behind the veil of institutional secrecy to search for a “material guarantee” in the resolution of the Eastern Question, so too 13 Russell to Granville, 8 October 1878, PRO 30/29/22A/8. Russell, distressed with the situation, wrote fretfully to Lord Granville explaining the situation, telling him to burn the letter after he had read it. Granville, thankfully, did not oblige Russell this request. 14 Layard’s GCB was officially for his role in the Cyprus Convention, which signed over the administration of Cyprus to Britain and provided a key aspect of the negotiations at the Congress—see Millman, 441. 15 Indeed, Karina Urbach notes that Russell, a veteran diplomat, was “degraded to

the position of messenger” during the Congress, so much had the British position been prearranged—see Bismarck’s Favourite Englishmen: Lord Odo Russell’s Mission to Berlin (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 193. 16 Keith Neilson and T. G. Otte, The Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1854–1946 (London: Routledge, 2009), 47. 17 Ibid., 46.

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did Tenterden use his behind-the-scenes function to affect a policy solution that would protect and extend Britain’s international position. As he lacked an explicitly partisan motivation, Tenterden’s technically “advisory” role to the Government gave him leeway to posit courses of action that swerved from both Tory and Liberal policy, which lent his ideas a sense of impartial, “expert” intelligence. By the same token, as Tenterden’s influence grew the Government was better able to bypass and, eventually, overrule Derby’s moderate sensibilities, preparing the way for Salisbury to take over the Foreign Office when Derby resigned in late March 1878. Tenterden’s role in the Eastern Crisis is often overlooked, probably in part because he died of a stroke in 1882 at the relatively early age of 48 and thus never produced or inspired any retrospective accounts of his career. He was often sick before this and he even thought about retiring in early 1876, just as his influence on the Eastern Question was beginning to take shape.18 Nor was he an imposing or impressive figure: Sir Charles Dilke, commenting on the contradiction between Tenterden’s truly magnificent beard (which, when in top form, reached to his sternum) and his markedly retiring manner in person, called him “a little graminivorous European bear.”19 In fact, in many ways Tenterden was just as cautious as Derby was, and he was certainly more bookishly professional. Just before Salisbury left for the Constantinople Conference in the fall of 1876, Disraeli told him to avoid “Tenterdenism—which is a dusty affair and not suited to the times and things we have to grapple with.”20 Yet such qualities became strengths when applied to the essential skill of the high-level civil servant, namely the memo-writing that forms the logic and reasoning—beyond the crudely political—for constructing policy. In this capacity, Tenterden can rightly be called a master.21 18 Ibid., 47. 19 Qtd. in “Abbot, Charles Stuart Aubrey, third Baron Tenterden (1834–1882),” R. A.

Jones in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib.umn/view/article/13. For a contemporary impression of Tenterden, see Figure 6.2 for a caricature of him by Carlo Pellegrini (aka “Ape”)—“The Foreign Office,” Vanity Fair, 17 August 1878, col. A, pp. 88–89. 20 Disraeli to Salisbury, 10 November 1876, qtd. in Cecil, 95. 21 Millman agrees that Tenterden was an “able and perceptive individual,” yet he feels

that Tenterden’s influence might be exaggerated as he spent most of his energy working at the direct behest (and thus along the same lines of) Derby’s existing policies—see

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Fig. 6.2 “The Foreign Office” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

pp. 508–509, n. 1. But in carrying out this function it was often Tenterden’s words and Tenterden’s analysis that influenced Derby’s and the Cabinet’s actions, not the other way around. This was a dynamic, moreover, that became more pronounced as Derby became more and more estranged from the rest of the Cabinet. Tenterden’s influence, though

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Tenterden’s memos carefully laid out Britain’s position in relation to Russia’s gains from the Russo-Turkish War as detailed in the Treaty of San Stefano, signed on March 3, 1878, which stipulated a vast reduction in Ottoman territory in Bulgaria and in the Caucasus.22 This later allowed the British delegation to portray Britain’s position as practical rather than simply avaricious—a “tactical tone” employed to make Britain seem the most reasonable party at the table. In this sense, Tenterden brought useful skills to the Cabinet’s deliberations, as he was better versed in the formal, restrained language of diplomacy than Salisbury and Disraeli, yet more willing to posit significant changes to policy than Derby was. Such a tone was key to preparing to meet Russia’s territorial demands spelled out by San Stefano. Indeed, Tenterden, Layard, and Britain’s Ambassador to Russia, Lord Loftus, were immediately suspicious of Russia’s intentions beyond San Stefano, especially regarding the specter of a Russian occupation of Istanbul.23 With the same concerns echoed by AustriaHungary, which also saw Russia as antagonistic to their position in the Balkans, Russia soon acceded to the rest of Europe’s consideration of San Stefano as a “preliminary peace” until a general European Congress could be convened.24 As the pro-war, pro-imperial party in the Cabinet (and in the country at large) grew in influence and Derby’s influence waned, Tenterden worked to formulate a response that not only would equip Britain to enter an international conference with a sound platform but would aid stability in the British political establishment, led as it was by a government that was still “groping for a policy” despite its growing popularity with the public.25 Two weeks after the Treaty of San Stefano of a generally hidden manner, was, therefore, evident in the formulation of the actual policies with which more public individuals are credited. 22 Original maps can be found enclosed in MFQ 1/255, showing the proposed borders according to the San Stefano Treaty. Interestingly, these appear to have originated as retail maps, on which officials drew their own lines. 23 Millman, 397–398. 24 Heinhard Steiger notes that the language of San Stefano’s legal existence is not clear,

as it was only when the Berlin Treaty was signed did it officially become referred to as a “preliminary treaty”—see n. 28 on p. 73 of “Peace Treaties from Paris to Versailles,” in Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One, ed. Randall Lesaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59–102. 25 Ibid., 405.

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was signed, Tenterden submitted a memo on Britain’s conditions for accepting a conference, claiming that, first, all questions the other powers had regarding the treaty would be discussed and, second, no alteration of the treaty would be final until all powers consented to it at the actual congress.26 This allowed Britain to claim at once that the treaty needed to be altered and that any changes to it were unacceptable until a plenary meeting of all the powers was convened, which would give Britain the opportunity to be involved in all negotiations. With this accomplished Tenterden could turn to the actual objections Britain had to San Stefano, which was a subject that concerned the Cabinet throughout March and April. In early May, Tenterden produced a memo that neatly encapsulated three “evils” that San Stefano promised: first, “it admits a new naval power” access to the Aegean Sea; second, “it threatens with extinction the non-Slav populations of the Balkan peninsula”; and third, “it places the Porte so much at the mercy of Russia, that it is no longer able to discharge with independence political functions which are still assigned to it, and which deeply interest other nations.”27 As San Stefano called for the creation of a large, independent Bulgaria (what Tenterden refers to as the “Slav State”) and further limited the Ottoman Empire’s territory in the Caucasus in ways that would damage the Ottomans’ ability to trade in the Black Sea or oversee their affairs in Mesopotamia, Tenterden insisted that such territorial changes should be abbreviated or reversed for the reason of international balance.28 In other words, Britain was to be the reasonable one in the dispute. Yet this otherwise sober depiction of Britain’s goals for order and practicality offers a glimpse of the ideas and worldview underpinning British policy, namely in Tenterden’s focus on the Slavic character of the problem. A memo Tenterden wrote two months earlier, at the end of January, might be a better example of the feelings that were later molded into “reasonable” language: No one can doubt that the circumstances which have led to the Turkish war were brought about by Slav intrigues, to which Turkish mismanagement had laid the Ottoman Empire open…[The intrigues] were 26 Memorandum by Tenterden, “Observations as to Conditional Acceptance of Congress,” 16 March 1878, FO 881/3526. 27 Memorandum by Tenterden, 3 May 1878, FO 881/3596. 28 Ibid.

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commenced or incited in Dalmatia, and may have been a part of a scheme which the Austrian Slav politicians entertained, under Prince Bismarck’s inspiration, for compensating themselves, by the acquisition of influence through the Slavs over European Turkey, for the loss sustained by Austria after Sadowa [i.e. the Battle of Königgrätz, which determined Prussia’s victory in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War] of her position in Germany.29

Tenterden went on to describe the chain reaction of intrigues that derived from Slavic affinities: The natural consequence was to arouse the rivalry of the Russian Slav party…the threads of intrigue passed into the hands of Russia; the Bulgarian atrocity agitation paralysed England; the obstinacy and miscalculation of the Turks led them to risk the hazard of war; the Russians pressed on the opportunity, and the result…is the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as a European governing power.30

For Tenterden, the Turcophobes’ momentum proceeded first from Slavic agents from Austria (with aid from a Machiavellian Bismarck), was taken up by Russian Panslavs and championed by pro-Bulgarian Britons in the fall of 1876, and wheeled away from Austrian control as soon as the war began. No mention is made of the motives of the actual Balkan Christians who rose up, nor are non-Slavic forces of any issue—such as from within the Ottomans’ apparatus of control in the Balkans or from within AustriaHungary itself, a state that had many non-Slavic forces of course. For Tenterden, it was all “Slav ambitions,” about which the British public was “imperfectly informed.”31 That this Slavophobic attitude follows the rhetorical convention of claiming, in a telling bit of phrasing, to expose the “truth” should only heighten one’s sense of suspicion as to how cleareyed it actually is. In a sense, then, Tenterden’s analysis of the situation is presented in reasonable-seeming verbiage but is not very reasonable in fact, nor does it appear to be driven by hopes for the reestablishment of an orderly international situation. Rather, he leveraged questionable beliefs about

29 Memorandum by Tenterden, “Observations by Lord Tenterden of Russian Conditions of Peace,” 29 January 1878, FO 881/3469, p. 1. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 3.

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the region, outright conjecture about the motivations of the other Great Powers, and the usual platitudes about a “lasting peace” in the Eastern Question in order to posit as necessary that the Government work to “secure for England a powerful voice in the deliberations of Europe.”32 By this logic, one might also consider the “material guarantees” being deliberated throughout the spring of 1878 as necessary to the goal of increasing the power of Britain as an international voice. Yet with such beliefs carefully hidden behind the cloak of sober, stolid officialdom implied by Tenterden’s portfolio, a veneer of temperance could later be applied even to this radical policy. Tenterden’s discussion, therefore, displays a tension between the ideological motives driving certain policy suggestions and the careful, “reasonable” representation of the British position in general. This is a telling dynamic, given that his memos were central to the preparation of Britain against the provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano in anticipation of the Berlin Congress. Thus, the discursive establishment of Britain as the most reliable manager of the international space—the one least driven by ulterior or toxic goals—was the result of such shrewd political language. Such a line of argument not only masked Tenterden’s personal views on the problems of the Eastern Question, but also the fact that he, Salisbury, and Layard had been hard at work behind the scenes in May, stacking the deck in such a way that the negotiations recapitulated arrangements Britain had made separately. Chief among these private pacts were the Cyprus Convention, which formalized the transfer of Cyprus’s administration from the Ottomans to the British Empire, and the Anglo-Russian Agreement, which stipulated that Britain would tolerate Russia’s possession of Kars, Batumi, and southern Bessarabia.33 The first was signed in secret on June 4, while the second, signed on May 30, was also intended to be secret but, as we learned in the opening of this book, was unexpectedly made public by a Foreign Office clerk named Charles Marvin, who leaked it to the press.34 Salisbury and Disraeli brushed off this revelation and seemed 32 Ibid., p. 4. 33 It is worth noting that Russia’s takeover of southern Bessarabia was a bone of

contention with its ally in the war, Romania, and would not be totally resolved for several years. 34 See David Vincent, “The Origins of Public Secrecy in Britain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1991): 229–248. Marvin later published a book on the affair,

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unconcerned that such non-plenary agreements were in direct defiance of the conditions for Britain’s acceptance of the Congress, giving the impression that British policymakers felt the very rules they had insisted everyone stick to did not apply to them.35 This presented the image of a Britain that transcended the rules—simultaneously of the Concert and above it. Furthermore, this issue shows the tension between how Britain represented itself as an official, central player in the Balance of Powers, i.e. “the United Kingdom” (or, depending on the author, “Great Britain”), and how it represented itself as a global imperial power, i.e. “the British Empire.” We can see this approach in the way the British delegation comported itself when the Congress began on June 13. In comparison with all the bellicose rumblings of the home island, Disraeli and Salisbury were positively restrained in their line of argument, while all of Britain’s goals with a warlike or imperial character were meticulously presented by then as justified according to the old diplomatic standbys of British interests and international peace. For his part as host, Bismarck went along with this tactic, because it upheld his vision of how international relations should be done, namely with material concerns in mind and with an eye toward how to reconcile places where such concerns overlapped.36 Indeed, Salisbury wrote that shortly after the conference began Bismarck took him and Disraeli aside and reproached Prince Gorchakov for his “vanity” and posturing, perhaps in an attempt to build a coalition of realpolitik thinkers against the supposedly retrograde types, like Gorchakov, who were present.37 And although Salisbury’s assessment of Bismarck’s true motives for this hush-hush tête-à-tête was, after his fashion, tartly suspicious, he himself deemed Gorchakov an “insignificant man…having evidently lost his head,”38 complaining to Home

Our Public Offices, Embodying an Account of the Disclosure of the Anglo-Russian Agreement and the Unrevealed Secret Treaty of May 31st , 1878 (London: Samuel Tinsley & Co., 1879). 35 For example, Salisbury attempted to portray the leak as a fake (even though it was almost completely accurate), saying to Tenterden that it was “imperfect and misleading”— see Salisbury to Tenterden (to be sent on to Captain Hamber), 14 June 1878, FO 363/ 4. 36 See Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 472–473. 37 Salisbury to Lady Salisbury, 17 June 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 282–283. 38 Salisbury to Lady Salisbury, 12 June 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 280.

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Secretary R. A. Cross of “unprofitable conversations with shifty plenipotentiaries.”39 Disraeli, for his part, balanced his affinity for Bismarck with a feeling that the German Chancellor was “recklessly frank” about his opinions of the other powers’ goals.40 Of course, Disraeli’s own goals included a domestic element, and it would not serve party purposes for him to embarrass the Tories with frank comments of his own that would drift back to Britain. Yet he still felt confident to write that the British delegation had essentially overwhelmed or converted the other delegates—even Russia’s British ambassador, Count Shuvalov, who had “marvelous talent,” fought a losing, “lone battle” against Britain’s position.41 Much of Britain’s challenge at the Congress had to do with securing sanction for already-defined (and, indeed, already in-motion) initiatives, chief among these Britain’s takeover of Cyprus. Such concerns were not necessarily limited to the conference itself: there was of course angst over how best to make the secret Cyprus Convention known, not least in Britain itself. Even before the Congress began, Salisbury—well aware of Liberal organs’ jibes at Disraeli’s Jewish heritage—joked to Sir Stafford Northcote that if the Cyprus transfer became known on, say, June 25 then it would only take until the 29th for the Daily News to “conclusively [prove] that the idea of taking Cyprus could only have occurred to the Semitic instincts of the Prime Minister.”42 In the event, Salisbury was off by a week: Salisbury told the French delegation about Cyprus on July 7 and the Daily Telegraph published the news the next day.43 Significantly, though, Russia’s quid pro quo for British Cyprus was secured by their own secret treaty with Britain, the aforementioned AngloRussian Agreement, which satisfied Russia insofar as it confirmed British support for key territorial provisions of San Stefano. Thus despite there being no plenary agreement on a British Cyprus, the way had already been mostly paved; it was not really the result of eloquent diplomatic

39 Salisbury to Cross, 14 June 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 281. 40 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 23 June 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady

Bradford, vol. II, 227. 41 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 26 June 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, vol. II, 228. 42 Salisbury to Northcote, 6 June 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 276–277. 43 Cecil, 294.

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oration. Its revelation was, on the contrary, a clever and effective way to make Britain out to be the central player around which the rest of the Concert’s concerns turned. Russia was at once satisfied and contained, Britain looked to the rest of the assembled delegates like quite the organizer of sticky problems—a quality that no doubt contributed to Bismarck’s peculiar admiration of Disraeli, seeing as the former wanted to use his hosting of the Congress to make himself out as similarly adroit problem-solver. Yet gaining international approval of the acquisition of Cyprus and containment of Russia constituted an expansion not only of Britain’s role in European politics but also of its imperial role in global affairs. As the act was considered, a priori, to strengthen Britain’s imperial position, one must consider how the British delegation wove into their argument the notion that a stronger British Empire was somehow good for the other powers and their respective empires.44 Certainly, the language of the Cyprus Convention itself made it out as if the benefit of the action went all to the defense of the Ottoman Empire—a “material guarantee” for the Ottomans rather than for Britain. In Layard’s language, it was a “defensive alliance” and thus a theoretically equal one, which required Cyprus solely as a way to give British troops “necessary provision” for “the object of securing for the future the territories in Asia of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan.”45 Later, during the Congress, the “defensive alliance” was further defined, with Layard and the Ottoman grand vizier (and previous foreign minister), Saffet Pasha, stipulating that it would become null if Russia ever gave back “Kars and the other conquests made by her in Armenia during

44 That is, the initial outlook on Cyprus’s value to the British Empire cannot be considered as impacted by the fact that Cyprus arguably proved later to be either “inconsequential,” as Andrekos Varnava puts it in his book, or actually detrimental to Britain’s imperial and international power. 45 “Convention of Defensive Alliance between Great Britain and Turkey, signed June 4, 1878,” 4 June 1878, inclosure in Turkey. No. 36 (1878).—Correspondence respecting the Convention between Great Britain and Turkey of June 4, 1878 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1878), pp. 3–4.

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the last war” to the Ottoman Empire.46 But the existence of the AngloRussian Agreement had made sure that the possession of Batumi, Kars, and the adjoining regions was acceptable to Britain so long as Russia did not challenge Britain’s right to uphold its interests in Western Asia, which of course was manifest in the adding of Cyprus to Britain’s domain. So, such agreements were offsetting: Cyprus would forever remain British, just as northern Armenia would forever remain Russian. In review, then, the idea of Britain’s and the Ottomans’ alliance as being equal is therefore absurd; it merely served to first placate and then blunt the imperial aspirations of a mutual regional competitor, Russia. The matter of Russia’s gains in the Black Sea also included the symbolic recentering of power in the East around the British Empire. Since 1841, the Dardanelles Straits had been closed to all warships, except in times of war when Ottoman allies were allowed to use it. As Britain was arguably the Ottoman Empire’s closest ally, its navy had a flexibility unshared by the other Great Powers. In what might stand as his most interesting idea on Eastern policy, Salisbury suggested at the Congress that if Russia were to strengthen her naval position in the Black Sea (especially from the newly acquired port of Batumi), then perhaps the delegates should agree to open the Dardanelles to all. This would lessen the need to treat warships in the Bosphorus always as an act of war, and it would moreover allow the British navy to enter the Black Sea, in “peacetime,” to monitor Russia’s expansion of its navy there. As Salisbury explained it to Cross: “The exclusion of Russia from the Mediterranean is not so great a gain to us as the loss resulting from our exclusion from the Black Sea; because we are much the strongest as a naval Power.”47 Even though Disraeli agreed with him, the Cabinet, save for Postmaster-General Lord John Manners, was totally against it and the matter fell.48 Yet the logic behind this idea still colored the negotiations over Russia’s motives at Batumi, where the question was whether it would be used as a naval installation and therefore a base for another attack on Ottoman territory. Although Salisbury had wanted Batumi to be made a 46 “Annex to Convention of Defensive Alliance between Great Britain and Turkey, signed June 4, 1878,” 1 July 1878, inclosure in Turkey. No. 36 (1878). — Correspondence respecting the Convention between Great Britain and Turkey of June 4, 1878 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1878), p. 5. 47 Salisbury to Cross, 20 June 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 291. 48 Ibid.

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free port that was “exclusively commercial” and “disarmed,” he settled for it being described in the treaty as an “essentially commercial” port, consented to in the understanding that Batumi could not be used as “a menace for the Bosphorus.”49 Despite his disappointment, however, the message was clear: Russia was not to use the port to establish itself as a competing Eastern sea power. We can contrast this with the fact that Cyprus could be considered as an implicit Eastern military installation with no international say-so at all. Via its control of the Eastern Mediterranean, Britain was able to monitor the approach to Western Asia in a way unmatched by Russia’s control of the Black Sea. This was an ironic conclusion to a conflict that had involved a victorious Russian military and an officially uninvolved British one. From this point of view, it is remarkable that the British delegation succeeded so completely in directing its counterparts at the Congress along the model of Britain’s imperial role in the East. Even though news of the Cyprus Convention came out earlier than Salisbury had wanted, he still could claim that its revelation had in general been a great success for the British Empire’s position both at the Congress and in general. On July 12, Salisbury wrote to Cross on the matter—the day after the British flag had been raised over a confused crowd of Cypriots at Nicosia, Cyprus’s capital50 : I do not think either Frenchmen or Russians are much disturbed; Austrians and Germans are evidently glad. The Italians are unhappy—not because we have got Cyprus—but because they have got nothing. I fear poor Corti [i.e. Count Corti Lodovico, Italy’s foreign minister and its chief delegate at the Congress]51 will lose his place for his moderation. I was sorry [news of the Convention] came out on Monday as I had just had the copies

49 Salisbury to Cross, 10 July 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 292. 50 “Hoisting the British Flag at Nicosia, the Capital of Cyprus,” Illustrated London

News, 10 August 1878, col. A, p. 121. See Figure 6.3 for image. Nicosia was the capital of Cyprus in the sense that both the Ottoman administration and Cyprus’s Orthodox establishment were centered there. 51 In fact, Corti had previously been Italy’s ambassador to Istanbul and had been at the Constantinople Conference in 1876, where he had experience in negotiating with Salisbury. Corti was, as a matter of fact, kicked out of the government after the Berlin Congress for his lack of gain for Italy’s position—see Wirthwein, 412.

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made out to send to him—when I heard of the Daily Telegraph’s indiscretion. Fortunately—very fortunately—Waddington had been squared the day before.52

Salisbury had assured France’s foreign minister and chief delegate to the Congress, William Henry Waddington (a rising French politician who was, significantly, of both British heritage and education and had written widely of his travels in the Near East), that Britain would not interfere with France’s interests in Syria, nor would it be acceptable to “leave Carthage in the hands of the barbarians,” saying of Tunis: “Do what you like…it is not our affair.”53 This was an impactful and ultimately prescient statement, given that France won out against Italy in the establishment of a protectorate over Tunisia three years later. As for Egypt, where France and Britain shared influence, Salisbury rather dishonestly assured Waddington that a British takeover of Egypt had “never been entertained by Her Majesty’s Government.”54 Of course, it would not have been prudent to mention the secret discussions over a British “material guarantee” that had taken place over the previous year, in which Egypt had in fact been seriously entertained as a possible option. These imperial bargains, with Britain acting as representative and proxy to the Ottoman Empire’s subsidiaries, marked out Britain as the primary manager and adjudicator of Europe’s “ordering” of the East. This radical shift from the cooperation-focused Crimean system also helps explain why Britain worked so assiduously to set up diplomatic barriers against Russia’s competing claim to command the direction of Eastern order. Claims by the British delegation—such as Salisbury’s that Russia’s garrisoning of the fortress at Kars “announced [Russia] to the Mesopotamian and other Asiatic populations as the coming Power”—had to be met with a coded message that only British “prestige” in Asia was good for Europe (and

52 Salisbury to Cross, 12 July 1878, qtd. in Cecil, 295. 53 Qtd. in Seton-Watson, 457. Waddington was educated at France’s premier lycée,

Louis-le-Grand, after which he attended Rugby School and Cambridge. His later journeys in the Near East resulted in such books as Voyage en Asie Mineure au Point de Vue Numismatique (Paris: M. Rollin, 1853) and Mémoire sur la Chronologie de la Vie du Rhéteur Aelius Aristide (Paris: Impr. impériale, 1867). In 1879, he served as France’s prime minister. 54 Salisbury to Waddington, 7 July 1878, inclosure in Turkey. No. 48 (1878). — Further Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Turkey (London: Harrison and Sons, 1878), p. 2.

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Fig. 6.3 “Hoisting the British Flag at Nicosia, the Capital of Cyprus” (Copyright: Author’s Photo of Original Paper Version)

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Asia, for that matter) while Russian “prestige” was not.55 To disseminate and promote this new rendering of political language, Britain had to place itself at the center of the peacemaking process for the gamble to pay off; it had to be seen as acting “for the greater good.” And apparently it was: through Britain’s actions, France and Germany were made happy, the Ottomans were relieved, while Italy’s unhappiness was more at its delegation’s ineffectiveness than at Britain’s success.56 Russia’s goals were effectively discredited by a healthy dose of the same brand of Russophobia that coursed throughout British society (though more politely-worded), while Austria-Hungary’s chief delegate, Count Andrássy, appears to have been completely satisfied as long as his empire got control of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a strip of land bordering the Ottoman Empire (now Kosovo) and splitting Serbia and Montenegro apart.57 To be sure, other actors, like Waddington, were involved in this method of diplomacy-by-dissection, but it was Britain who had set this in motion with its explicitly imperial solution to the dispute. As Lady Cecil later reverently put it, “England, alone among the great Powers concerned, had safeguarded her interests without raising a ripple of disturbance in Europe.”58 The actual Treaty of Berlin bore out Britain’s success in preaching such political innovations while maintaining a symbolically critical distance. Indeed, in its 64 articles Britain is only explicitly mentioned once, and then only in regard to the signatories’ right to mediate in a dispute between the Ottoman Empire and Greece over a border dispute.59 Even France, similarly positioned as Britain was to claim an impartial interest in the treaty’s contents, worked in a mention of the reaffirmation of

55 Ibid., p. 1. 56 Wirthwein, 412. 57 Andrássy wanted the Sanjak of Novi Pazar as a strategic possession to both monitor

the Ottoman border and to keep Serbia from expanding its power by allying with Montenegro—see László Bencze and Frank N. Schubert, The Occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 (Boulder: Social Sciences Monographs, 2005), 23. 58 Cecil, 294. 59 See Article XXIV in Turkey. No. 44 (1878).—Treaty between Great Britain, Germany,

Austria, France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey for the Settlement of Affairs in the East. Signed at Berlin, July 13, 1878 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1878), p. 21.

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France’s right to protection of the Holy Land.60 Germany and Italy also are scarcely mentioned, but in the former case this was by Bismarck’s design and in the latter by Corti either not having the basis or the wherewithal to make Italy’s desires known.61 The affinity shown by Bismarck toward Disraeli must have had something to do with the success of the British delegation in placing Britain and its empire’s interests at the center of the negotiations, succeeding in almost every dispute it entered, and still locating its gains underneath the radar of official record. It is further illuminating that Gorchakov considered the Congress to be the “darkest page” in his long career; the method of balancing power was changing in the Concert.62 Despite the treaty’s claim to a basis in the Crimean system, the shift away from the principles that had upheld that system for the preceding generation led toward a new, more imperial way of understanding international politics.63 If the assembled delegates were “desirous to regulate, with a view to European order” how individual powers followed plenary agreements, the centrality of the British delegation at the Congress shows how Britain used the international realm to make its interests known.64 This tactic offered a way to resolve the tension between Britain’s role in the Balance of Powers and its role as leader of a powerful global empire. 60 See Article LXII in the above document, p. 27. It is possible that the French delegation felt that such rights (given to France in the 1856 Treaty of Paris) needed to be reaffirmed in the treaty if Britain were to occupy a place so close to the Holy Land. The Pall Mall Gazette reported that the République Française thought that their delegation should “[refuse] to sanction by their signatures” a treaty that threatened French interests in the Near East—see “The Congress.—The Anglo-Turkish Convention,” 10 July 1878, col. A, p. 8. In essence, because of Cyprus the French had to give up their diplomatic pretense of impartiality, while Britain could stay out of the treaty itself, having protected its own interests by external means. 61 In fact, though, Corti considered himself to have accomplished his main goal, which was keeping Austria from annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. rather than just occupying it, but this did not go over well with those who wanted Italy to have a greater, more public role in European politics—see C. J. Lowe and F. Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy, 1870–1940 (New York: Routledge, 1975), 20. 62 Qtd. in David MacKenzie, “Russia’s Balkan Policies under Alexander II, 1855–

1881,” in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale, 244. 63 See Turkey. No. 44 (1878), p. 14. The treaty’s preamble declares that the Congress took the relationship of San Stefano to the “stipulations of the Treaty of Paris of 30th March, 1856” as its basis for intervening. 64 Ibid.

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By staging European peace and harmony as the primary motive for all British actions in the international arena, the British delegation could present the protection and extension of Britain’s imperial interests as a substantive part of its image in European politics. This was a subtle and more sophisticated reframing of the same kind of “independent imperialism” that Carnarvon and Salisbury had advocated all throughout the Eastern Crisis, which called for Britain to present its imperial concerns openly and mindfully in the international sphere without making any specific, limiting liaisons with any power or bloc of powers. This tactic thus affected the language with which British policymakers presented the country’s position, both in Berlin, at home, and in the future. Imperial interests, like that of Cyprus, the route to India, and the British Empire’s larger role and reputation in Asia, were hence naturally woven into how Britain went about ensuring that European order was regulated. In these ways, the 1878 Congress of Berlin formed an important foundation of Europe’s diplomatic space as it existed in the “new imperialism” of the 1880s, in which competing and overlapping imperial interests of European states were more and more directly of issue. As noted above, such an imperial dynamic is often associated with the more well-known and remarked-upon 1884–1885 Congress of Berlin, which dealt with officially outlining European spheres of influence in Africa. Imperial issues had obviously appeared in international conferences before, but there had never been one so closely associated with finding solutions to the problems associated with managing growing empires.65 Both the impetus and the outcomes of the 1884–1885 conference depended, in large part, on the reformatting of diplomatic representation around imperial entities rather than merely crowns or states. With the opportunity for massive expansions of land in Africa and elsewhere (the realization of which threatened to bring chaos to Europe’s existing power relationships), the system could no longer be run by the organic deliberations of diplomats across Europe’s various chanceries and state houses. Instead, only a more clearly empire-centered approach would serve to bring order to international politics and stave off the threat of potentially global wars.

65 That is, it was unprecedented in the sense that it was a plenary meeting regarding specifically imperial issues, which was a distinction from previous conferences that included imperial elements as extensions of its purpose.

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Accordingly, new techniques were required to meet this new demand in global politics, many of which were first forged in June and July 1878 by such figures as Disraeli, Salisbury, and Bismarck. Other economic, military, and political factors certainly contributed to Britain’s later success at expanding its empire, but we must also take into account how the British Empire got to a place where Europe not only accepted its power but came to depend upon it as a force of order in the Concert of Europe and in the world. As Disraeli and Salisbury boarded the boat for Dover, they left behind a continent that had experienced the dawn of a new era in British diplomacy—one that promised “peace with honour” by promoting a powerful British Empire.

“Others Will Grumble More Britannico” Although the British delegation’s conduct in Berlin had squared the Government both with the warmongering and more temperate parts of the populace, the former with a promise of a Cypriot garrison and the latter with assurances of a peace favorable to British interests, the Tories steeled themselves for pressure from the Liberals. In general, the reaction was as they expected, with the Liberals objecting to, first, the revelation of Britain’s new imperial responsibilities in Cyprus and, second, the secretive and high-handed manner in which Disraeli had represented Britain at Berlin. Although flowers had rained down in Downing Street, the Parliamentary debates were expected to be more skeptical. As the Pall Mall Gazette preemptively put it on July 17: To-morrow Lord Beaconsfield will make a statement in the House of Lords. Some few who think opposition a duty will cavil and find fault. Others will grumble more Britannico [i.e. in the British fashion]…But the general opinion of his countrymen and the strong approval of Parliament will ratify the acts of Lord Beaconsfield, and place it upon record that he has rendered great service to his country, to Europe, to peace, and to the future prospects of the Empire.66

The Pall Mall Gazette was not far off, as was shown by the dour tone struck by Reynolds’s Newspaper regarding how the Treaty of Berlin’s 66 “The Return of the English Plenipotentiaries,” Pall Mall Gazette, 17 July 1878, col. A, p. 3.

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affected British domestic politics, its editors claiming immediately after Disraeli’s and Salisbury’s return that “the present parliament is moribund, and will, in all probability, be dissolved at the end of the present session.”67 The question of the intelligence of the Cyprus takeover in relation to the Conservatives’ position was of primary concern. Though it did not doubt the service Disraeli had done for the Tory cause, the paper shuddered to think that the Eastern Question had been transformed into an “Anglo-Russian question” in which the Ottomans would “sell their country” to Britain as much as they would to Russia if the price was right.68 Allusions to Shakespeare’s Cyprus-set Othello further warned of the dangers of allowing Disraeli (motivated, we may assume the paper implied, by his old “Semitic instincts,” as Salisbury had put it) to take over the “warlike island”: “This is the ‘witchcraft we have used’—that we have sought to forestall the aggression of one tyrant by buying the connivance of another.”69 In other words, Disraeli’s great victory not only hastened his inevitable fall in Britain, but it put global order at risk by entering into a game of empire with a group of unscrupulous players. The question of whether it was apt to rely on imperialism to ensure order cut to the core of British political culture, as it came up against a fully-fledged, competing anti-imperial legacy in British foreign policy.70 But perhaps the response to the outcome of the Congress of Berlin was not so divisive as it looks, especially since the way had been paved by two years of discourse about the possibility of a widescale war. When a replay of the Crimean War and all its carnage loomed ever and ever closer, most seemed to have felt that the troubles of administering a new territory were a fair price to pay for general European peace. Indeed, to some degree the complaints from the Liberals as to the imperial nature of the Government’s solution seem a bit improvisationally cynical. As the Pall Mall Gazette said, the policy taken was “one at which the Opposition in England have no right to grumble, for it is clearly the fruit of their doings.

67 “The Coming Dissolution,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 21 July 1878, col. A, p. 1. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. For the play’s quotes, see Othello, 2.3.55–57 and 1.3.169 respectively. 70 See Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 94–96.

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They clamoured for peace and for the coercion of Turkey, and they are going to have both, with attendant responsibilities.”71 But, also more Britannico, one could always find reasons to critique a political opponent for a public success that threatened one’s position in domestic politics. Of course, the intelligence of Cyprus was immediately questioned, especially in regard to the placement of its deep-water harbor and to the health concerns of the island.72 When the Irish peer, Lord Oranmore and Browne, said that he had read that Larnaca (the major port and proposed center of British administration) “was the Turkish for ‘coffin,’ so deadly had the place proved” for the Ottomans, he set off a debate in the House of Lords about the rightness of this assessment.73 Lord Granville agreed with Oranmore, saying that he had heard there was no harbor to speak of and that “both air and water are exceedingly bad.”74 Lord Richmond, speaking for the Government, responded that disease in Cyprus “does not amount to three-fifths of the disease in Europe,” quoting “one of the most eminent journals of the day” as saying that the island could act as a “sanatorium for the invalids of Europe.”75 When pressed on the name of this “eminent journal,” a sheepish Richmond admitted it was The Spectator, a paper well-known for its unswerving loyalty to the Conservative Party.76 The Liberal Liverpool Mercury scoffed at this, saying Richmond’s evidence was “utterly vague and unsatisfactory” and that experts on medicine denied the optimism of the “Conservative apologists” in support of Cyprus as the best possible location for a British military installation.77 Yet the question of imperial location is not the same as a question of imperial principle—a distinction even more prevalent in the debate 71 “Continental Views of the Protectorate over Asia Minor,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July 1878, col. B, p. 10. 72 Wirthwein, 411. 73 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 241, col.1433 (15 July 1878). The word that

Oranmore was looking for was “larnax,” which is a Greek, not Turkish, word and probably refers to not to contemporary Ottoman plagues but to the large amount of ancient sarcophagi found in the area—see Clyde E. Fant and Mitchell G. Reddish, A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 348. 74 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 241, col.1435–1436 (15 July 1878). 75 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 241, col.1435 (15 July 1878). 76 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 241, col.1436 (15 July 1878). 77 “The Health of Cyprus,” Liverpool Mercury, 25 July 1878, col. C, p. 6.

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over how Britain, given its conduct at the Congress, now appeared in the eyes of the rest of Europe. On this concern, it was hard for the Liberals to argue, especially to the British public, that Britain’s leadership in the Concert was bad for business. Gladstone, understandably, did try, saying in Parliament that Disraeli and Salisbury (he excepted his Liberal cohort, Russell78 ) had not presented the British position “in unison with the institutions, the history, and the character of England,” as they “took the side of servitude” wherever it was inconvenient to call for liberty.79 He moreover chafed at the idea that the British delegation had “[behaved] in a manner worthy of England to…all the Mediterranean Powers,” saying that it was wrong to cite French sources, like later French Prime Minister Léon Gambetta’s La République Française, which did not present the British Opposition’s position fairly.80 Yet as Tory MP Tom Sidebottom responded, if people were to hold to Gladstone’s claim that “we have given great umbrage to foreign Powers,” one had to ask “where is the evidence of its truth?”81 That is, who of any foreign import was actually truly angry at the result? There was some truth to what Sidebottom said: just as there was a difference between the sides in the British debate and the country’s official position, so too a line separating opinion from authority had to be drawn with regard to the other powers involved. Although French and Italian papers could find something of their own to grumble about— especially in regard to Cyprus—the fact remained that, as the Pall Mall Gazette put it, “Continental statesmen are less surprised at the turn of matters than the journalists appear to be.”82 In other words, to side with a contested, amorphous “European opinion” over the official opinion of European states made the Opposition look like it was transposing its angst about its lack of domestic power (and thus control over British 78 On speaking of the conduct of the British delegation, Gladstone without elaboration said: “I do not now speak of Lord Odo Russell, who discharged, as he was sure to discharge, his duties with great ability; but whose labours were chiefly in a province different from that of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury”—see Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.677 (30 July 1878). 79 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.683 80 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.707 81 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.721 82 “Continental Views of the Protectorate over Asia

1878, col. B, p. 10.

(30 July 1878). (30 July 1878). (30 July 1878). Minor,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July

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policy) onto the rest of Europe—as if all non-British statesmen were somehow complicit in vast conspiracy to subvert the “real” opinion of their respective countries. The fact remained, however, that Parliament (let alone the British public) had not been consulted about the radical measures taken by the British delegation at the Congress. As these had been sprung on everyone outside Disraeli’s inner circle, the Liberals’ leader in the Commons, Lord Hartington, presented several resolutions that questioned the Government’s anti-democratic tactics and other issues he felt would have been considered had Disraeli played fair, especially with regard to giving greater voice to Greek interests in the negotiations.83 However, given the “existing mood of euphoria,” as Patrick Jackson puts it, Hartington had taken on a “hopeless task” and his resolutions failed by a count of 338 to 195.84 Tellingly as to the Liberals’ lack of credibility in the debate, Isaac Butt, the Irish MP and leader of the Home Rule League, took his supporters over to the Government’s side for the vote.85 The points raised by the Opposition are nonetheless telling as to the nexus between democratic principles and the Eastern imperial resolution to the Eastern Question. In presenting his complaints to Parliament, Hartington wove the matter of the “honour” with which the British delegation conducted itself at the Congress into the question of the realities of the “peace” formed by the Treaty of Berlin: I believe, as I have said, that the Treaty of Berlin will not prove a final settlement. I believe that the future of the inhabitants of what remains of the Dominions of Turkey will ultimately be determined by internal and natural causes, rather than causes which are external and artificial; and I rejoice that a temporary solution, temporary though it may be, has been arrived at, which will leave scope for those natural causes to work, and which will not replace the military domination of Turkey by the military domination of Russia or the Slav over unwilling races.86

83 Wirthwein, 407–409; Seton-Watson, 499–502. 84 Jackson, 89. 85 Wirthwein, 410. 86 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.534 (29 July 1878).

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For Hartington, the Christian uprisings were natural outpourings of national, religious feeling, destined for the eventual goal of selfdetermination unless harnessed to the yoke of a cynical interloper, whose ambitions used local causes merely as a convenient pretext for intervening. In this formulation, “Turks” and Russians were two sides of the same coin: neither would help achieve the laudable goals of the Bulgarian, Bosnian, or Serb. The treaty, despite its strengths, just tied the Eastern Question loosely to European power politics; it did not tie up the actual problem at all. To Hartington, this aspect not only showed that the Crimean system needed replacement but that, no matter what the Tory Government said, any future that held an assurance of peace—Eastern or European—had to treat the Treaty of Berlin as inspired by this natural direction: We have always looked at the [1856] Treaty of Paris as an experiment. It was based on the idea that the institutions of Turkey might be reformed, and that with the chances there given her, she might ultimately take her place among the nations of Europe. We have come to the conclusion, sooner than hon. Gentlemen opposite, that the experiment has failed, and that some policy must be substituted for that which was the dominant policy in 1856. We believed that the only substitute for that policy lay in the gradual development of the Christian races of the Porte. You may disguise it if you choose, you may use what phrases you please about the independence and power and direct authority which are left to Turkey; but…that is the principle which is at the bottom of the Treaty of Berlin.87

In the Opposition’s view, there would be no lasting peace to the Eastern Question because, as we have seen, for them the Eastern Question included a distinct component of resolving Ottoman Christian demands for self-determination. As the Government had shown itself indifferent to this problem, the fact that so much of Britain’s official representation to the Congress had been done in the vacuum of the conference room meant that this part of the equation had not been taken into consideration. Without the breath of democracy keeping alive the Liberal view in official negotiations, how could the Opposition sign on to a contract that bound them to legally uphold the decisions made by two men representing only a slim, perhaps dying majority in the same body? As Sir

87 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.535 (29 July 1878).

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Charles Dilke said, the secrecy with which the preparation had been made and the surprises that affected Parliament as much as the Congress’s participants did not hold with the fact that Britain’s democratic Zeitgeist must extend to foreign policy: “It is not in these days that Governments can make Conventions, that will bind free peoples to engage in bloody wars, without the previous consent of Parliament.”88 From this perspective, even the Tory politicians aligned with the Disraeli’s Government should have felt hoodwinked by their leaders’ conduct at the Congress, as very few of those outside the Cabinet had heard anything of the actual course of action. This should, in Dilke’s opinion, startle the entirety of the British political establishment, as it placed upon Britain and its empire certain troubling responsibilities that would undoubtedly be burdensome in many Britons’ minds.89 Chief among Dilke’s fears was that the balance of Britain’s energy would shift away from its islands and Europe to “the East,” even if that space contained the British Empire’s dearest possessions: “I believe that we have displaced the centre of gravity of the British Empire towards the East, and entered upon a course which, if persevered in, must lead to England becoming a sort of rich dependency upon the Indian Imperial Crown.”90 Here again lay the fear that Britain itself would become subject to its own Easterners, with Disraeli having contrived to elevate the British Crown to an overarching, imperial level and thus subvert the indigenous power to which it had been formerly responsible. To Disraeli’s most vociferous detractors, who almost without exception prized racism’s sharp point and blunt edge, the Government’s whole response to the Eastern Crisis seemed like an evil plan forged by an Oriental Disraeli à la Punch’s caricatures: first, as a confidante of the moneyed Jews of London, buy the “key” to the Suez; then, in the garb of the villain Abanazar, exchange Victoria’s British crown for an Indian one; then, as a Christian-hating Turcophile, dismiss the Bulgarian Atrocities and threaten war with Russia

88 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.559 (29 July 1878). 89 The problems found in imperial responsibility formed a core part of Dilke’s vision of

the British Empire, a subject he engaged in his book Problems of Greater Britain (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890). As David Nicholls puts it, Dilke was “contemptuous of the argument that an empire conferred prestige on a nation. On the contrary, history taught that extended empires were a source of weakness”—see The Lost Prime Minister: A Life of Sir Charles Dilke (London: The Hambledon Press, 1995), 25. 90 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.569 (29 July 1878).

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to disrupt the Eastern status quo; finally, “triumph” at a European conference and thus tie Britain to a new, imperial, and Eastern-centric external policy.91 Considering Britain’s highly-charged political atmosphere at the time, one might easily argue that such a conspiracy theory would have been totally convincing to a large portion of the British polity, such as those of the E. A. Freeman and the W. T. Stead brand. In actuality, however, there is little evidence that Disraeli saw his goal at the Congress as the final link in the chain that would bind Britain to some Eastern-led regime. Indeed, his passion for the East had always been playful, even banal.92 A better estimation of Disraeli’s affinity for the East is his remark that the Ottoman ambassador’s reception was charming in that it “had some features of its own in the shape of real pilaws [i.e. pilau rice].”93 Disraeli’s Orientalism was not an inborn compulsion. We may grant that, on a personal level, the East was for Disraeli an “all-consuming passion,” as Edward Said thought it was.94 But unlike Coningsby in Tancred, for whom “the East is a career,” Disraeli’s devotion to the East was a pastime: useful only when it could advance his goals at home and therefore subservient to his ambitions as a Conservative leader in

91 See, from Punch, Figures 6.4 (“Mose in Egitto!!!”), 3.7 (“New Crowns for Old

Ones!”), 6.5 (“Neutrality under Difficulties”), and 6.6 (“A Blaze of Triumph”) respectively. Punch tended to be Tory in some ways and Whiggishly Liberal in others, but it frequently made fun of Disraeli. In fact, in 1878 Punch published a topical collection of around 100 of their cartoons of Disraeli, ranging back to 1845—see Benjamin Disraeli. Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G.: In Upwards of 100 Cartoons from the Collection of ‘Mr. Punch.’ (London: Punch Office, 1878). Also, see M. H. Spielmann, The History of “Punch” (London: Cassell & Company, 1895), 197. 92 Here I would have to agree with William Kuhn, the author of a rather carefree political biography of Disraeli, that his subject took a “Byronic tone of mock heroism” on imperial policy and on the Eastern Question, and that “it could well be that the Conservative party and Gladstone took him much more seriously than he took himself”— see The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 315–319. 93 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 6 July 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, vol. II, 231. Disraeli’s comment from Berlin was little different than when the Duchess of Teck said at a London dinner in April 1878, “you have…the Queen with you, Parliament, and the country, what more do you want?” and Disraeli, looking at his plate, replied, “Potatoes, ma’am”—see “London Gossip,” The Newcastle Courant, 5 April 1878, col. D, p. 5. 94 Said, Orientalism, 5.

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Fig. 6.4 “Mose in Egitto!!!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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Fig. 6.5 “Neutrality under Difficulties” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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Fig. 6.6 “A Blaze of Triumph!” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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domestic British society.95 His Grand Tour as an impressionable youth, which included all sorts of deliciously Oriental travails and intrigues, did not offer Disraeli much insight into, say, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Merchant Shipping Acts, or perhaps even another all-consuming problem of the era, the Irish Question.96 We will see more aspects of this discourse in the following chapter. For now, though, Disraeli’s Eastern affectations express more about the ideas that resonated with those segments of British society from which Disraeli derived his support and power (and thus meant to master) than they do about any motive to tear Britain’s government away from its English moorings and steam it by warship to the Suez and the Subcontinent. “The East,” as a “created consistency,”97 was fascinating and important to a significant portion of the ruling class in Britain, and Disraeli’s mastery of an Oriental vocabulary and lexicon of ideas at once ingratiated him to such people and marked him out as a particular personality in British society and politics.98 To be sure, Gladstone did the same for another portion of the populace, meaning that one could match each figure’s voice to a respective, attendant subgroup, segregating society into competing factions that fit the general dynamics of the political and cultural realm. Disraeli worked for Turcophiles like Henry MunroButler-Johnstone and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, while Gladstone did for Turcophobes like E. A. Freeman and Henry Fell Pease. And as every person had other things they cared about of course, this ideological framing contained other forces and their organs: Disraeli for the Orangemen, Gladstone for the Nonconformists; Disraeli for the Pall Mall Gazette, Gladstone for the Northern Echo. The connection Disraeli’s opponents drew between his Jewishness (and the fondness Jews 95 See Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, ed. Bernard N. Langdon-Davies (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1904), 167. Tancred was originally published in 1847, while Coningsby formed the titular character of a preceding volume of Disraeli’s “Young England” trilogy. 96 For an account of Disraeli’s journey in the Near East, see Robert Blake, Disraeli’s Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land, 1830–31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 97 Said, Orientalism, 5. 98 A compelling look (more so than Said’s, that is) at how Disraeli employed Orientalist

beliefs and passions to “fashion” himself in British society comes from Patrick Brantlinger’s chapter, “Disraeli and Orientalism,” on pp. 90–105 of Charles Richmond’s and Paul Smith’s The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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were thought, at the time, to have for Muslims) and his external policy was, therefore, poetic as much as factual, just as Disraeli’s fiction-asfact arrangement for a British Cyprus—something he had dreamed of in Tancred—evoked the importance of the island in Near Eastern history and strategy as much as it did the realization of any personal ambition.99 Most often, “the East” and its inhabitants acted as referents for the pursuit of other matters. Yet this dynamic is exactly why it is important to think about the debate regarding the Congress and Treaty of Berlin in a way that takes the “Eastern” issues and Orientalist opinions it contained seriously, placing them in relationship to the idea that European, Eastern, and global order would be maintained by the “honourable peace” designed by an imperialist British political faction. It makes complete sense that the idea of a British Empire that was centered on Eastern protectorates chafed at the sensibilities of those who thought the empire was not a worldly project but a British one. To be an imperialist meant thinking globally, not locally. Thus when Gladstone called the Cyprus Convention “an insane covenant,” part of its insanity came from the implication that, in the future, Britain’s external policy would proceed from the periphery and not the center.100 By the same token, if the treaty was supposed to protect India— which as a “source of grave anxiety” had, as Disraeli stated, been of paramount concern—then it had to conform to the principles by which Britain was thought to have constructed its Indian policy.101 Any new shape of policy that had the protection of India as central could not fall below the supposed standards of transparency and decency Britain had set in cementing its power in India.102 As then Radical Liberal and 99 It is important to note, however, that Varnava makes a well-substantiated and

compelling defense of the idea that Cyprus was the direct fruition of Disraeli’s earlier dreams—see pp. 58–60 of his book. 100 From a speech at Southwark on July 20—qtd. in Wirthwein, 409. 101 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 241, col.1769 (18 July 1878). 102 Cleverly, in late July Gladstone evoked this theme in relation to the matter of the Indian Vernacular Press Act, which treated works with an anti-British (or anti-Christian) character as seditious. In objecting to the act (which did in fact pass) Gladstone juxtaposed the principle that British policy in India was for the “good of those in India” alongside the fact that a popular topic of interest to Indian vernacular writers was, just like in Britain, the Eastern Question and that many Indian writers, especially Muslim ones, took a Turcophilic view on the matter. This meant that if an Indian writer were to support the Government’s Turcophilic policy, it could be taken as an anti-Christian (and thus

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later Tory imperialist Joseph Chamberlain put it, if the imperial strategy taken at the Congress were to be “a great work of civilization,” it had to be understood as involving the taking up of “new responsibilities.”103 And whereas it had taken the “care, prudence, foresight, and skill of our ablest statesmen” to harness India to the British yoke, in the case of Cyprus it was thought that the “stroke of a harlequin’s wand” sufficed, as it would in pantomime, to transform a new territory magically into a competently-administered addition to the empire.104 For most Liberal politicians, empire-building was only appropriate if done from Britain’s moral center, and crowd-pleasing, imperialist glory did not fit the model of moral, workable policy. This was all fine and good as a Parliamentary argument, but the reality of the matter was that a significant portion—in that heady moment, arguably the majority—of the electorate preferred a glorious, imperial solution, and it was clear that this segment of the populace felt few moral qualms about their emergent imperialist predilections. As the Parliamentary session ended in mid-August, and the public zeal for the Government largely maintained its momentum, it became clear that it was somewhat disingenuous to pass off the pro-imperial turn as a trick by Tory agents. In response to a speech in late September given by Sir Michael HicksBeach (Carnarvon’s replacement in the Colonial Office), who spoke on the importance of a close connection between imperial possessions and the imperial center, even the generally sober Times felt the Opposition had overstated their case: No doubt many qualifications must be admitted in measuring the value of the Imperialist policy, as presented in the whole course of conduct of the Government during the past four years. The criticisms, however, of many prominent Liberals strike at the root of the Empire as well as Imperialism, and would paralyze not only the activity of this country in foreign affairs, but the energy that has conquered the Eastern, Western, and Southern seditious) tract according to the law, even if such an opinion stood out as the accepted policy of the Britain state. See Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.52–61 (23 July 1878). 103 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.914 (1 August 1878). 104 Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 242, col.913 (1 August 1878). In one variety of

pantomime, the “harlequin” serves as the male lead and carries a “batte,” which is either has a comedic function or can be used to change the scene as if by magic. This type of pantomime, known as “Harlequinade,” was very popular at the time.

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Continents. The mass of the English people are not willing to look upon India and the Colonies as a burden, necessary, perhaps, but inconvenient and irksome.105

The day before, The Times had printed a letter Gladstone had sent to an Australian legislator friendly to the Opposition, in which Gladstone said that it was likely that Britain’s colonial population relied on “the London newspapers” for information on what the metropole felt were the “facts” of the Eastern Question and “the disposition of the people of the country.”106 On the contrary, Gladstone argued, the “Australian public is neither aware of the testimony of the national Press at large” nor did it know that in by-elections, where “the question has been tried,” voters had “returned in large majority those who disapprove the conduct of the Ministry.”107 The Times, one of these “London newspapers,” took umbrage at such a claim, charging Gladstone himself with misrepresenting the British public spirit based on, first, “the provincial newspapers attached to one section of the Liberal party” and, second, on two recent by-elections in which the Liberals had won—one resulting from “a compact with the Home Rulers” and the other due to the fact that “the power of beer was once more made manifest.”108 To The Times, then, it made sense that colonial peoples would support the party that took “a decided Imperialist line,” as the Liberals had for both principled and cynical reasons become “prone to depreciate the central strength of the Empire and have exhibited a restless anxiety to curtail its responsibilities.”109 In other words, to the charge by the Liberals that the Government had used their base and its press organs to score political points, one could answer that the Opposition had done just the same by using its resources to represent a competing, but equally incomplete view of public opinion. But if both sides represented a divided Britain as essentially of one opinion over the other, which one’s view was closer to the truth? Given the fact that, via post-1874 by-elections, the Tories slightly strengthened 105 The Times, 27 September 1878, col. B, p. 9. 106 “Mr. Gladstone,” The Times, 26 September 1878, col. F, p. 8. 107 Ibid. 108 The Times, 27 September 1878, col. B, p. 9. The by-elections were for Newcastleunder-Lyme and Tamworth respectively. 109 Ibid.

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their position in London while the Liberals chipped away a bit more effectively at the Conservative majority in provincial constituencies, it is hard to sustain any sweeping claims as to who was “winning” at this point.110 Nevertheless, I feel that over the course of the Eastern Crisis, Britain had not become so much divided into particular political subgroups as it had in the expression of political opinion. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals were the same parties they had been in 1875 because, of course, significant intervening events had produced significant political change. As the British public traded sides over the Bulgarian Atrocities, the war scare, and the results of the Congress, they coalesced around new ideas and new values. In attempting to gather supporters to a single banner, both sides attempted to appeal to some common, unifying aspect of British political and cultural thought: the Tories leveraged the public’s appetite for British power and imperial glory, while Liberals leveraged the values of democracy and Christian humanitarianism. Nevertheless, popular opinion never gravitates wholly around one pole or another, nor is the “public voice” ever a total facsimile of any political platform. Under the complex, often chaotic conditions of the Crisis a space for a new political language appeared, which gave rise to a discourse that favored imperialist ideals packaged in the shape of democratically approved, morally conscientious policy. The fact that the British delegation, in contrast to the violent tenor of the Government’s supporters in London, had not barnstormed their way through the negotiations at the Congress implies that Tory leaders were fully aware that their party’s behavior was being monitored not just by its most ardent followers but by the whole British populace. A new, consolidated demographic friendly to the preeminence of Britain both at the European bargaining table and in “the East” expected British imperialism to appear useful to European and global order, not merely covetous—strong and direct, yet peaceful and honorable.

110 In fact, by my count the two sides were almost even in winning by-elections during the Eastern Crisis, with only a slight edge to the Liberals. In May 1875, just prior to the Eastern Crisis beginning, the Conservatives had 353 seats and the Liberals had 239. Between then and August 1878, the count changed to 347–245.

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Conclusion: A New British Order Britain’s participation in the Congress of Berlin served an important purpose in the development of a society that was more comfortable giving primacy to Britain’s identity as a globally-recognized imperial entity. More than anything, the public approval that met the British delegation’s achievements at the Congress—and the unsuccessful attempts by the Opposition to divert this approval—speaks to the public’s yearning to think about Britain’s place in the world in a new and innovative way. In exploiting this discursive opening, the Tories had been more successful than the Liberals. As the moderately Conservative Ipswich Journal said of the 1878 Session of Parliament: “The events of the past few months have shown that we are all Conservatives so far as to wish for the preservation of the British Empire, and that a faint-hearted policy which quails before the responsibilities connected with the maintenance of our prestige amongst the nations will not find supporters amongst the people of England.”111 This shift toward agreement on the idea that Britain should promote its empire as a force of global order does not appear to have followed the mere ebb and flow of public politics. The public’s response to the Congress and Treaty of Berlin showed that certain imperial ideals had been engraved into Britain’s standard political language. Anti-imperialists in the tradition of Richard Cobden and John Bright may have been, in their time of prominence, able to maintain their credibility while calling for the substantive end of the empire, but the time for such opinions had long passed its apex. Some of their cohorts remained, such as Sir Robert Lowe, who in late September complained that the Government had “[abused] the prerogative of making treaties,” employing in its defense

111 “The Session of 1878,” Ipswich Journal, 20 August 1878, col. A, p. 2. Emphasis in original. The British Library states that the Ipswich Journal was primarily known from the 1840s to have been an anti-Chartist paper and, as the representative paper to an agricultural region and market town, was “opposed to the repeal of protective duties,” but it was also known to advocate for traditionally Liberal issues like labor reform—see “Ipswich Journal,” British Newspapers 1800–1900, British Library, http://newspapers11. bl.uk/blcs/IpswichJournal.htm.

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to the British public “odious sophisms which, under the vulgar mask of Imperialism, conceal the substitution of might for right.”112 Yet even the Northern Echo, which provided its readers a summary of Lowe’s article with the paper’s implicit support,113 drew a line of distinction between “the true Imperialism and its bastard counterfeit.”114 Despite the fact that the Echo had earlier dissembled on the acceptability of a British Cyprus,115 it saw the Cyprus Convention as a “false” imperialism in that the island had been “seized with the exultation with which a freebooter wrests the purse from the pocket of a victim.”116 This could be contrasted with a “true” example of imperialism like Gladstone’s takeover of Fiji in 1874, which was “reluctantly annexed as an addition to the responsibilities and burdens of the Empire.”117 Having had the way prepared by colonists “of the English race,” a British Fiji existed “due to the natural growth of the Empire,” while Cyprus had no English colony and therefore was British only due to the “vanity and…greed of Lord Beaconsfield’s supporters.”118 In other words, imperialism was fine as long as it was “natural” and was motivated by selflessly taking up the “burden” of spreading civilization to the uncivilized world. Ironically, then, not only does the Echo’s approach resonate with the very logic that had been employed by Colonel Home and General Simmons in regard to Cyprus (i.e. the “good government” principle), but it also shows that a hands-on approach to global affairs was in no way out of the question for those who represented what remained of the anti-imperial position. The very choice of the words “natural” and “burden” (notably, more than a generation before Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of the same on behalf of the “White Man”) underscores the fact that the cultural imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s owed its heritage in part to this faction.

112 See p. 465 of Lowe’s essay “Imperialism” in the Fortnightly Review 24 (new series), no. 142 (1 October 1878), ed. John Morley (London: Chapman and Hall, 1878), 453– 465. 113 See “Mr Lowe on Imperialism,” Northern Echo, 30 September 1878. 114 “Imperialism: True and False,” Northern Echo, 12 October 1878. 115 See the conclusion of Chapter 5 for this instance. 116 “Imperialism: True and False,” Northern Echo, 12 October 1878. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid.

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Indeed, this brand of “reluctant” imperialism more or less sums up the views of another remnant of a more concertedly anti-imperial era, namely the Gladstone himself, who for all his blustering had always held fairly flexible values in relation to the principle of territorial authority.119 The contradictory calls for intervention in the Eastern Crisis over the previous three years—first against the Ottomans, then against the Russians—had led to a situation where everyone left the door open for direct extensions of British control. And after the results of the Congress had been so wellreceived by such a sizable portion of the British populace, it seemed truly anachronistic to characterize the shape of “British opinion” as somehow silently opposed to strengthening the position of the British Empire in world affairs wherever and however possible. The great irony of Disraeli’s “triumph” was that even if Cyprus was taken under Disraeli’s watch, the first major stage of the “new imperialism” took place in the early 1880s under Gladstone, who set himself up in direct opposition to Disraeli’s glorified, militaristic adventures. Given that the promulgation of a Gladstonian empire looms in the narrative of the “new imperialism,” one wonders how truly anti-imperial Gladstone was. Indeed, the “old” anti-imperialism of the Cobdenite variety, represented by aging politicians like John Bright and Robert Lowe, was by this point a remnant of a time in which part of the British population saw Britain’s role in the world as not defined primarily in terms of its empire. To the Cobdenites, Britain’s identity was either a prosperous trading nation, or a “first state” of Europe, or a bastion of temperate democracy protected by the sea from the assault of chaotic European politics. Its greatness derived not from its imperial jewels, but from the enlightenment of Albion. This is not the same as saying that the “old” anti-imperialists hated the empire; they just did not see it as Britain’s best side, whether in terms of its effect

119 In point of fact, though, Gladstone had been opposed to the annexation of Fiji when it had been brought up in 1873, while he was still prime minister. He commented in Parliament that the “chill of old age” kept him from being excited about a tactic that, if taken by a competing power in its own sphere of influence, would be criticized by the same people who supported it in the British case—see J. Ewing Ritchie, The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 118–119. The speech in Parliament, including Gladstone’s direct quote, can be found in Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 216, col.943–949 (13 June 1873). Gladstone had, however, accepted the necessity of intervention in the Gold Coast in 1873, as he had accepted the Cape Colony’s annexation of Kimberley in 1871—see St. John, 228–229.

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on the economy (à la Cobden) or Britain’s reputation as a democratic nation (à la Lowe).120 Gladstone undoubtedly held some sympathies with this view, but we must guard against equating this with his having held a generally antiimperial stance.121 Rather, he posited a particular kind of imperialism that was considered more sober than Disraeli’s, while he took care not to totally alienate the people who were inspired by Disraeli’s imperial spectacle. Indeed, even so skeptical an assessor of British imperialism as Bernard Porter notes that it was Gladstone’s “view of [empire] that went down best” with the voters in 1880, when the Grand Old Man retook the reins of power.122 This was a vision of empire based on building imperial cohesion through “decentralization,” and Gladstone believed that “cultivating the colonists’ affections” strengthened the empire more than Disraeli’s flamboyant territorial whims.123 Hence, the fact that Gladstone held a different view on empire than Disraeli’s is not the same as saying he did not hold imperial values. Given his role in the expansion of the British Empire in the 1880s and 1890s it would be naïve to assume his actions were somehow organized in all ways in contrast to this movement. Instead, he sought to manage the growth of the empire along his established vision, that of gathering colonial “Hearts and Minds” over the Tories’ flaunting of Britain’s military and political might wherever it suited them.124 We might accept this vision as having a reality that stands, as an ideal, separate from events. Certainly, Gladstonians like John Morley have promoted a version of history in which Gladstone struggled mightily—often alone and in vain—against shady imperial forces, as in the case of Africa, which Morley said stood in Gladstone’s mind as an “uncoveted destination” that received British rule by force of his “fate,” not his choice.125 120 That is, Cobden’s anti-imperialism was mostly based on the cost of empire, although it had other philosophical components, while Lowe’s, and one might argue Bright’s, was largely concerned with the morality of imperialism—see Porter, Critics of Empire, 14. 121 For example, in the case of debates in 1873 over taking control of Fiji, as mentioned above. 122 Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 111. 123 Ibid. 124 St. John, 229–230. 125 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. II (1872–1898) (London:

Macmillan and Co., 1907), 312.

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But the problem with this view is that, despite the fall of the Conservatives in 1880, the material and political side of empire continued to move forward. And, indeed, Gladstone took imperial actions when he deemed it necessary or advantageous to British interests, as in Egypt or South Africa. We might even question, as Tony Hopkins has, whether Gladstone’s cultural and philosophical problems with “Eastern” forms of government might have made a takeover of an Eastern country from a Muslim autocracy—especially one considered on the decline, like the Egyptian Khedivate, which for years struggled amid debt and open, often violent dissent—less dissonant with his values than the brand of imperial grandstanding and jockeying in the mold of Disraeli that had been at the fore a few years earlier.126 At crucial moments, Gladstone appears to have been fully willing to ride imperial waves—just as much washed along as any man or woman less grand than him. At first hesitant to intervene in Egypt because meddling in internal struggles smacked of overt imperialism, not long after the invasion he felt fine declaring it “an upright war, a Christian war” and used imperial resources (especially Indian troops) to stabilize Eastern disorder, ostensibly for the good of all involved.127 One must be careful how far one takes this line of argument. I do not intend to argue that Gladstone is to be blamed for the “new imperialism,” nor was he a Liberal imperialist of the stripe of Joseph Chamberlain, who championed an ideology that mated populist Radicalism with proimperialism.128 Instead, if, as Gladstone believed, the voice of the British people deserved to be heeded, for all of his confidence in their enlightenment he received what was perhaps a surprise: they largely wanted a pro-imperial policy and most felt completely comfortable enjoying a pro-imperial culture. Ironically, Gladstone, who thought Disraelian imperialism to be counter to the natural progress of Britain as a liberal people, oversaw a significant portion of the progress of an imperialism that bore

126 Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa,” 384. 127 Ibid., 382 and 384. 128 See “Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914),” Peter T. Marsh in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2011, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp1.lib. umn.edu/view/article/32350.

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the stamp of his hated enemies. In this sense, perhaps the moral, humanitarian ideals he used to combat Disraeli during the Eastern Crisis made him an unwitting abettor to the later crimes of imperialism, as all expansion thereafter was predicated on Britain acting as a moral—and, more importantly, necessary—force of order in the world.

CHAPTER 7

Another Eastern Question: The Eastern Question Expands

An Army of Savages In October 1879, as a wet fall paced toward one of Europe’s coldest winters on record, the Lancashire town of Burnley found itself under siege. An “army of savages” had surrounded and infiltrated the town, in the eyes of local court chairman W. H. Higgin, Q.C.1 One of them, whom Higgin had sentenced to a year of hard labor for drunkenly stabbing an old man in the face, was so monstrous that in Burnley, Higgin declared, “nobody could walk through the streets with safety.”2 The incendiary case, and Higgin’s judgment of the town, was written up in the London papers, leading local organs like the Burnley Gazette to protest that “poor humdrum, harmless Burnley,” a town mainly known for its complex of cotton mills, was a victim of slander from a government representative and resulting libel from Tory papers looking to malign a solidly Liberal constituency, its 50,000 people subjected to a “short homily on the lawless ruffianism of the dark little town among the remote Lancashire moorlands” by none other than the towering Daily Telegraph.3 The charge against Burnley, unlike the crime that inspired it, was of course laughable. Even the pro-Tory Burnley Express implied as much, 1 “Occasional Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, 18 October 1879, col. B, p. 10. 2 Ibid. 3 “Is Civilization a Failure?,” Burnley Gazette, 25 October 1879, col. C, p. 5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_7

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printing letters from concerned townspeople from the serious to the strange, including one that claimed Burnley was infested with “men almost naked” who ran along suburban footpaths hurling abuse at passersby.4 Still, if people wanted a ruffian to blame for Burnley’s iniquity, real or alleged, then the paper’s editors thought it was the town’s Liberal MP, Peter Rylands, who was to blame for the savagery, for “what else could be expected from a constituency which believes in Peter?”.5 Peter Rylands was obviously not an advocate of hooliganism. Rather, it was his vigorous opposition to the Government’s policy on the Eastern Question and the war in Afghanistan, then in its second year, that drew the Burnley Express ’s reproach. In a game of local tit-for-tat spun national and then global, Rylands insulted Disraeli in a speech to his constituents during the height of the “army of savages” fracas in early November 1879, like many others describing the Jewish and infamously Turcophilic prime minister in Orientalist—and thus autocratically disloyal—terms. Disraeli, Rylands said, would soon speak in London, with the “Sphinx of modern politics” likely to employ “riddles of statecraft” to confuse and compel his audience.6 Rylands painted the scene to his listeners, rendering Disraeli as a kind of conjurer or hypnotist: It is quite possible, gentlemen, that we shall have from the Prime Minister another development of the “Asian mystery.” We may, perhaps, in this speech to-night, have the curtain lifted so that we can look into the secret arcana which Lord Beaconsfield tells us are only worthy to be presided over by sovereigns and by statesmen, and there may be announced tonight some new stroke of policy which will disquiet Europe and add to the gloom and distress of the British Empire.7

Turning, then, to a favorite tactic used by Disraeli’s opponents, Rylands cites the former’s novel-writing as a window into the prime minister’s enigmatic inner self:

4 “Burnley & Its Army of Savages,” Burnley Gazette, 22 November 1879, col. C, p. 6. 5 “Burnley and Its Army of Savages,” Burnley Gazette, 8 November 1879, col. C, p. 7. 6 Peter Rylands, “Annual Address to his Constituents at Burnley, Nov. 10th, 1879,” in

Correspondence and Speeches of Mr. Peter Rylands, M.P., With a Sketch of His Career, Vol. II Speeches, ed. L. Gordon Rylands (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd, 1890), 84. 7 Ibid.

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Gentlemen, when Mr. Disraeli was young he wrote a novel, and that novel was called “Vivian Grey,” and it was well understood that Vivian Grey was the prototype of Mr. Disraeli himself. In the mouth of Vivian Grey, Mr. Disraeli put these words—“I want Europe to talk of me;” and Lord Beaconsfield, as Prime Minister, is gratifying the wish of Vivian Grey, and at the present moment the whole of Europe is talking about him.8

Rylands also targeted less openly vainglorious Conservatives, including Lord Salisbury, whom Rylands rebuked for his about-face on the perceived threat from Russia toward India. “Two years ago,” Rylands said, Salisbury “ridiculed the Russophobists” by chiding a “foolish peer” in the House of Lords in mid-June 1877 for “looking at little maps” and, as a result, assuming that Russia and Britain’s South Asian colonies were close together and not “separated from us by a great district of wild mountains and difficult country.”9 In the debate Rylands cited, Salisbury had actually responded to a Russophobic tirade by Lord De Mauley a little more tactfully on the matter of maps (he recommended the use of English ordnance scale), but more tellingly he made it clear to the assembled lords that, contrary to De Mauley’s grandiose claim that “our Empire in India had no known limits,” Britain’s borders in the subcontinent were “very minutely marked out, especially on the North-Western side.”10 Rylands went on that, later that day at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London, Salisbury had poked fun at the delusions of a “colonial friend” who feared that Russia would invade and annex South Africa, proceeding first by way of their occupied territories in Armenia, then to Syria, then Egypt, and so on southward through Africa until they reached the Cape of Good Hope.11 Rylands found this attitude hard to jibe with a foreign minister who resorted to literally biblical histrionics by referencing the Book of Luke two years later, proclaiming in late October 1879 at a Tory meeting in Manchester—where, the Evening Standard reported, 150,000 gathered in the city’s Pomona Gardens12 —that “glad tidings of great

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 91. 10 For the debate between De Mauley and Salisbury, see Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series

3) vol. 234, col. 1561–1566 (11th June 1877). 11 Rylands, 91–92. 12 London Evening Standard, 27 October 1879, col. F, p. 4.

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joy” were in order after Austria-Hungary and Germany signed the Dual Alliance, a treaty that was explicitly anti-Russian.13 Rylands’ points were arguably sound. The central conceit of the Great Game had been downplayed in 1877 by someone helping prosecute a war in those “wild mountains” that started only a little over a year later, and Salisbury’s earlier mocking of domino-effect thinking in imperial defense had been replaced by a pragmatic attitude that Russophobia, regardless of facts, had serious selling power politically. Rylands wanted it to be known that Liberals were not buying it. “They want to bamboozle you,” he said, tricking the British populace into practicing “patriotic self-denial” by supporting a warlike attitude toward Russia, simply as a way to rally people to the Tory banner and thus bolster the domestic strength of the Conservative Party.14 Rylands’ view of the situation was shared by many in his community. According to the Manchester Evening News, about 4,000 “most enthusiastic” people were in attendance at Rylands’ meeting, who “greeted [him] with immense cheering” and, at the end of the speech, voted for a motion of confidence in his favor.15 For a town with only around 30,000 adults and less than 7,500 registered electors, this was an impressive turnout, giving a glimpse of the popular, extra-London base for the kind crowds that would meet Gladstone in his Midlothian campaign when he started his speaking tour in that constituency, encompassing the region surrounding the city of Edinburgh, a few weeks later.16 But despite his local prominence in Lancastrian life, Rylands was not the kind of politician whom most contemporary observers would have expected to emerge as a prominent voice on foreign affairs. And in many ways he was not even that; there is a reason that the first time he makes an appearance in this study is in its last pre-conclusion chapter. He was not even very prominent in the minds of Liberal leaders. He

13 Ibid., 90. Salisbury’s said unto them, Fear not: be to all the people. For which is Christ the Lord”

reference is to a well-known couplet in Luke: “And the angel for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall unto to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, (Luke 2:10–11 KJV).

14 Ibid., 92. 15 “Mr. Peter Rylands, M.P., at Burnley,” Manchester Evening News, 11 November

1879, col. C, p. 3. 16 For figures, see F. W. S. Craig, ed., British Parliamentary Election Results, 1832–1885 (Dartmouth: Parliamentary Research Services, 1997), 71.

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only appears three times in Gladstone’s voluminous, name-packed diaries, for example.17 A “typical Radical of an older generation,” as the Pall Mall Budget called him on his death in 1887, Rylands got into politics mainly because he was opposed in principle to any increases in government expenditure.18 For him, all other issues proceeded from that one, and so like many Radicals he saw questions of the outside world through the lens of their domestic economic implications. So, in this respect, it is significant that the industrialist turned Liberal MP, first for Warrington between 1868 and 1874 and then Burnley from 1876 until his death, found an animating global cause during the Eastern Crisis and its aftermath, as well as found a crowd of large size ready to cheer his coverage issues related to Britain’s external affairs. He surely occupied that zone of “liberty, retrenchment, and reform” that Eugenio F. Biagini has so carefully analyzed in his work of the same title, and this certainly must have helped outline his reaction and contribution to debate over the Eastern Question. But it is the radical shift to apply and rearrange those domestic concerns in an obsessive focus on the Eastern Question (and the imagined “East” at large) in this era that bears further scrutiny. For if, in 1879 and before Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign kicked off in earnest, an MP of little national relevance and no international profile could whip up a giant crowd in “poor humdrum, harmless Burnley”—its denizens otherwise consumed with such vexing concerns as public drunkenness and indecent exposure—with a, by my count, nearly 5,000-word speech almost entirely focused on Eastern affairs, then it is clear the summer of 1878 marked no shift away in British attention to the topic. Instead, what the ensuing years would see is an application of the Eastern Crisis, its dramas, and its debates to both bedrock issues in British society and politics and to new preoccupations at home and abroad that would come to define the next generation. In this regard, the period between the signing of the 1878 Berlin Treaty and the invasion of Egypt by Britain in 1882 acted as a juncture for the activation of a markedly Eastern-focused rendering of British external affairs. This development

17 This figure is by way of my review of H. C. G. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries: Volume XIV: Index (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 18 “Death of Peter Rylands, M.P.,” 10 February 1887, col. B, p. 20.

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tracks with a concomitant emergence of a new discourse of imperialization of the world and Britain’s place in it. Colin Eldridge marks the late summer of 1878 as the moment that British imperialism became, with apologies to Bernard Porter, present-mindedly associated with foreign affairs. In a key example, on July 27 Salisbury spoke at Knightsbridge to a Tory group, ridiculing Liberals “who have tried to persuade you that all the past history of England was a mistake” and who had argued that it was not Britain’s duty to “entangle herself in foreign policies.”19 To Salisbury, these were “men who disdained empire, who objected to colonies, and who grumbled even at the possession of India.”20 Patriotism, international relations, and imperialism are intermixed here to create a potent set of associations, the ideas pointing back and forth at each other and eliding all distances between them. Taken alongside Disraeli’s and other Tories’ jubilant speeches and articles post-Berlin Congress, it was clear that, Eldridge writes, that “the fusion of Britain’s foreign policy and her imperial policy was complete. It seemed that a new imperial age was being born.”21 It has been the intention of this study thus far to investigate that moment of “fusion” in the context of the Eastern Question. However, I would modify Eldridge’s formulation, first, to say that this fusion mainly revealed to the world a deep connection that, as we have seen, already existed. It was the inscription and popularization of imperialist terms and goals at this time that is of note, as Eldridge carefully outlines in the vigorous Liberal counterattack against openly imperialist rhetoric from mid-1878 on.22 This counterattack was mindful, quick, and often a match for pro-empire forces, as exemplified by Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign but by no means limited to it. Indeed, after Berlin the focus of British popular politics shifted northward, to Burnley’s and Manchester’s Lancashire, to the industrial cities of the Midlands (especially Birmingham, where from mid-1877 Joseph Chamberlain’s National Liberal

19 Qtd. in C. C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868–1880 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973), 226. 20 Ibid. 21 C. C. Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism (Cardiff: University of

Wales Press, 1996), 60. 22 Ibid., 60–62.

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Federation attempted to take the rudder for the party), and eventually Scotland.23 The popular response outside London in the span before the 1880 general election illustrated a Liberal energy and shrewdness that, at least at that time, either matched or exceeded that of the Tories. For example, Salisbury’s “glad tidings” speech in Manchester in October 1879 was answered a few days later by a demonstration in the exact same spot and of, by the Evening Standard’s estimate, equal size, led by Liberal leader Lord Hartington and the old Radical champion John Bright.24 The Standard deemed it evidence not only of Manchester’s “impartial hospitality” but of the “ingenious skill with which the Liberals of Manchester have contrived to bring into the same firmament, for once, two political planets that usually move in different quarters of the heavens.”25 The two sides were wise to each other’s game at every stage, but the Liberals increasingly had the edge. Second, it thus seems clear from that this mating of foreign policy and empire in the summer and fall of 1878 was seen by many at the time as merely an attempt by leading Tories not just to spread the gospel of empire, but specifically to use empire as a lever to deem unpatriotic any domestic opponent who held opposing views—Rylands’ “patriotic selfdenial” vis-à-vis Russia inflated to encompass the entire globe. And this tactic seems to have ultimately worked, as the goal of obscuring of British anti-imperial voices and themes by champions of empire, who were at this crucial point looking to capitalize on the Eastern Crisis and its outcomes, was eventually so fully completed that the Victorian era would later stand to most as an imperial era throughout, with anti-imperial attitudes obviated and an alternative to territorial expansion never pursued enough to challenge the general trend of the “new imperial” era.26 The question then becomes the teasing apart not just the speeches and writings of the major figures in this moment, but what was said about those speeches and

23 See Swartz, 110–112. 24 London Evening Standard, 27 October 1879, col. F, p. 4. 25 Ibid. 26 This is, indeed, part of Bernard Porter’s beef with the whole field of imperial studies, as his focus before Absent-Minded Imperialists was largely on the anti-imperialist component of British society, which he feels has been pushed aside in favor of the idea that the entirety of British society was pro-imperial.

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writings by those observing—in the moment—the project of defining the terms that would define the coming generation.

“An Inheritance of Hatred”: Tying Two Easts Together in Afghanistan On December 31, 1878, the Scottish Liberal daily The Scotsman published its annual retrospective on the past year. In it, the writer (most likely the paper’s editor, Robert Wallace) outlined a new facet of the Eastern Question amid an unfinished resolution of the Eastern Crisis in the summer.27 While granting that Disraeli had recently toned down some of his anti-Russian rhetoric, The Scotsman lamented that not only was “the Eastern Question in its Turkish phase is as far from a permanent settlement as ever,” but that “during the last few months, another aspect of this vast question has absorbed the attention of the Government and the nation to the exclusion of almost every other topic.”28 The problem that paper referred to was Britain’s ongoing intervention in Afghan affairs over the issue of whether the country’s ruler, the Amir Sher Ali Khan, would accept a permanent Russian or a British mission in the capital of Kabul. When Britain’s viceroy in India, Lord Lytton, heard that Sher Ali had received a Russian delegation in Kabul in late July 1878, he accused the Afghan ruler of siding with the Russians and began planning the political and military groundwork for the war that started a few months later.29 Fought between 1878 and 1880 in two periods, the first from November 1878 to May 1879 and the second from September 1879 to September 1880, the British were successful in forcing Afghanistan into the British Empire’s catalog of tributary states.

27 On Robert Wallace, see J. R. MacDonald, “Wallace, Robert (1831–1899),” rev. H. C. G. Matthew, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., Lawrence Goldman, https://doi-org. proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/28542. 28 “1878,” The Scotsman, 31 December 1878, col. D, p. 4. 29 In fact, the Russians had planned on the contingency of war with the British and

staged a force in Turkestan to invade India via Afghanistan. The mission to Kabul was the first step in this process, and even though it was recalled on its arrival (peace having been assured by the Berlin Treaty) it stayed for about a month, leaving in late August for Russian territory. See Meyer and Brysac, 184 and Hopkirk, 380–382.

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It was long the tradition among historians to assume that the war began as a personal project of Lytton, as he was the latest viceroy who called for an active, “forward policy” in defending India’s frontiers, in contrast to those, like Lytton’s predecessor the Earl of Northbrook, who favored a wait-and-see policy of “masterly inactivity.”30 Lytton saw his opportunity and took it, that version of the story goes, gambling successfully that a Russophobic, pro-imperial ministry back home would back him. But as Martin Bayly carefully documents, like all of India’s British administrators Lytton was an inheritor of an policy attitude that targeted Afghanistan for control due to its perceived threat to British India: historically, by means of the practice of informal, dynamic influence via local agents and, incipiently, by resolving the Afghans’ position in a formal, static rendering of Britain’s Indian domain—a concept that came to be known as a “scientific frontier” after Disraeli’s use of the phrase in a speech at the Guildhall in early November 1878.31 Evocative of the operational mindset of General Lintorn Simmons’ task-force during the Russo-Turkish War, the “scientific frontier” idea stemmed from the belief that data-driven military science could be combined with the predictive capabilities promised by rising theories of social Darwinism to develop a system whereby British administrators could reliably transform independent barbarians into civilized colonials.32 Above all of this, in fitting with the era of this study’s focus, loomed a proximal influence on the specific course of events that Lytton responded and contributed to, namely the sense of Russia as an imminent threat to British interests and territory throughout the Eastern expanse. This said, although the backdrop to the dispute extended far beyond a clash between the British and Russian Empires, the war’s role as a doublefeature showcase for the Great Game and the Eastern Question was the salient feature that concerned most British observers, then and later. In particular, the conflict helped forge a dialectical linchpin in popular British discourse, bringing more fully into conversation “Eastern affairs” as they related to the Balkans and the Levant and “Eastern affairs” as they related 30 See Hopkirk, 5–6. 31 Martin J. Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International

Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 246–254. For a transcript of Disraeli’s speech, see “The Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Last Night,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 10 November 1978, col. B, p. 1. 32 Ibid., 252–254.

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to India and its frontiers, thereby enhancing and further ornamenting any discussion over the seriousness of such affairs to British life and livelihood. In this regard, the invasion of Afghanistan was not just an aspect of Britain’s Indian interests or its competition with Russia, but instead it could be read as an “Asiatic phase” of the Eastern Question, as The Scotsman put it.33 Whether or not such a label would have been specifically applied to Afghan issues pre-Eastern Crisis is less clear in the record, although the idea of secondary and tertiary Eastern Questions abound throughout the era, in fitting with Holly Case’s and others’ investigation of the genre of question-asking and question-naming in the nineteenth century.34 From the 1850s forward, for example, matters related to the politics and finances of Egypt were often put under the heading of a “second Eastern Question” in British reportage. Just a few months after the Treaty of Paris was signed settling the Crimean War, the Tory Morning Post reported that a new wrinkle in Anglo-Persian relations posed a “second Eastern Question” for Britain’s Ottoman ambassador, Lord Stratford, to address.35 In 1866, the Liverpool Mercury answered the query of “What is the Eastern Question?” by naming Greek independence the “first” one, Egyptian autonomy the “second,” and a “third” one in the shape of Russia’s goals in the Crimean War.36 A decade later in April 1876, just prior to the emergence of the first reports of the Bulgarian Massacres, The Times ’s Paris correspondent, Henri de Blowitz, complained that French imperialists who attempted to subvert British influence in Egypt were raising “voluntarily and uselessly a second Eastern Question.”37 For him, “there is but one national interest in Egypt, that of England.”38 So, the expansion of the Eastern Question to encompass subjects beyond those specific to Ottoman political and territorial integrity had already been in motion for decades prior to the Afghan War.

33 Ibid. 34 See Case, The Age of Questions. I also raised this possibility of overlapping and

propagating questions in the conclusion to my PhD thesis in 2012. 35 “The New Turkish Ministry,” Morning Post, 12 December 1856, col. D, p. 5. 36 “What Is the Eastern Question?,” Liverpool Mercury, 7 November 1866, col. B, p. 6. 37 “France and Egypt,” The Times, 14 April 1876, col. C, p. 3. 38 Ibid.

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In particular, it is significant that the phrase “another Eastern Question” was a near-cliché in British newspapers between the Crimean War and the First World War, trotted out during any flashpoint that occurred in the part of the globe east of Italy, north of Ethiopia, south of Poland, and west of—well, west of somewhere in the eastern reaches of the entire Asian continent and its surrounding islands. Writers and editors could deploy the phrase for a vast array of both summary and expository purposes, affording an additional degree of elasticity to an already hyperelastic concept. Further notable is its frequency as a title for reprinted excerpts in local papers taken from influential national organs, particularly those headquartered in London: the news of the world bottled up and shipped around the British Isles bearing a catchy brand label. In the hundreds of articles, books, and speeches I have come across that warn of the appearance of “another Eastern Question,” one sees a seemingly limitless variety of places, peoples, and issues could, by the Eastern Question’s expansion, be reduced to the Western conception of the East as a space of sociopolitical anxiety, entropy, and even a kind of humorous absurdity available for wordplay and winking references to the saturation of the news with Eastern themes.39 In only a sample of the many out there, one learns that possible additional Eastern Questions include: *In 1872, the “preposterous idea” to shift the focus of Britain’s Eastern policy from Istanbul to Cairo, due to the energy of Egyptian imperialism in Abyssinia.40

39 This use of the figure “hundreds” is not hyperbolic. Recent advances in optical character recognition (OCR) technologies have allowed us to accurately capture the use of quoted phrases in original sources. In my case, this has accounted for 300 + articles as a minimum number—namely those I have located and reviewed myself using several comprehensive online databases that employ the appropriately sophisticated OCR systems. Notably, many of these references are duplicates of articles that appeared in bigger newspapers, not diminishing the impact of the incidence of this phrase but actually emphasizing it via a sort of “meme-ifying” of the “another Eastern Question” trope, implying that the British media was saturating the body politic, from metropolis to village, with a sense that the Eastern Question was expanding (and so too, then, the British Empire’s world-ordering responsibilities). 40 “Another Eastern Question,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 24 January 1872, col. B, p. 3. This is a reprint of a short article in the Pall Mall Gazette, itself titled “Eastern Questions” (23 January 1872, col. A, p. 8).

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*In 1870, Ottoman-Egyptian rivalry over access to European loans.41 *In 1862, the question of whether the British Empire should intervene in the Taiping Rebellion to help reestablish Qing rule over China.42 *In 1877, a letter expressing a “humanitarian view” in extending the Factory Acts to Indian cotton workers, whose abuse was enabled by “odious duties” on British imports to India.43 *In 1861, an official British complaint to the French about their occupation of Syria.44 *In 1896, criticism of Salisbury over failing to stop the ongoing massacres in Armenia and hesitating to support Christian interests in the “unfortunate island” of Crete.45 *In 1885, attempts by the Raj to force Burmese authorities to halt restrictions on trade with India and accept a British mission, in the run-up to the Third Anglo-Burmese War.46 *In 1854, an attempt to “trace the identity of the Cuban with the Turkish question” in the context of Spanish-American competition 41 “Lord Clarendon and the Egyptian Loan,” Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 5 May 1870, col. A, p. 8. 42 “Another Eastern Question,” Western Daily Express, 29 November 1862, col. C,

p. 2. 43 William Edward Taylor, “Another Eastern Question—To the Editor of the Manchester Courier,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 9 March 1877, col. B, p. 6. Taylor was a frequent letter writer on this topic, even printing a collection on the topic—see Letters on the Indian Import Duties, Reprinted from the Manchester Guardian, Examiner and Times, and Courier (Manchester: A. Ireland and Co., 1876). 44 “Another Eastern Question,” Dublin Evening Post, 5 January 1861, col. C, p. 2. 45 “Another Eastern Question,” Carlisle Journal, 14 August 1896, col. E, p. 4. The

Armenian massacres here are those in the 1890s that saw the deaths of thousands of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman-supported mobs. Often called the “Hamidian massacres” to attach blame specifically to Sultan Abdülhamid II, this precursor to the later Armenian Genocide was a major concern in British domestic politics and society. See Michelle Tusan, The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Leslie Rogne Schumacher, “Outrage and Imperialism, Confusion and Indifference: Punch and the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896,” in Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art, ed. Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 305–333. 46 “Another Eastern Question—Threatened War with Burmam [sic]—Despatch of an Ultimatum,” Shields Daily Gazette, 19 October 1885, col. F, p. 3.

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in the Caribbean, which was heating up to the degree that “the new ‘Eastern Question,’ we have reason to fear, is in the West.”47 *In 1877, an advertisement claiming that this other Eastern Question was “Which to drink, tea from China or Assam?” and promising MacKay’s shop in Inverness had the answer.48 *In 1881, a joke about an Algerian hotel whose name sounded funny in English.49 *In 1879, an All Saints’ Day sermon by the Rev. Sir Frederick Ouseley, contrasting the Bulgarian Atrocities’ “music of despair” with the “music of triumph” after the Israelites’ “national hero” Moses parted the Red Sea and drowned the Pharoah’s men—a joyful resolution of “another Eastern Question” 3,000 years before the modern one troubled the world.50 *In 1885, a summary of an Egyptian magazine article whose author claimed that the riding of tandem bicycles by mixed-gender pairs was an “ugly habit” of the English.51 *In 1910, a complaint that Broxburn F.C. had not followed the rules set down by the East of Scotland F.A., having played an unsigned footballer in a cup qualifying match.52 Obviously, as several (and especially the last) of these examples indicate, British debate over the Eastern Question and its innumerable reformulations was not always earnest or even very serious. One senses, in fact, a cultural fatigue with the “turbulent East” routine as the era wore on. Thus, the mere recurrence of “another Eastern Question” is probably less important than the way that this phrase and its other variations served as a way to prepare the surfaces of various issues to be adhered together and thus joined into a single epistemological unit. The fact that there 47 “Spain, Cuba, and the United States,” Leeds Times, 27 May 1854, col. E, p. 4. 48 “Another Eastern Question—Which to Drink, Tea from China or Assam?,” Inverness

Advertiser and Ross-shire Chronicle, 2 February 1877, col. C, p. 1. MacKay ran his ad campaign in the paper weekly until April 27th. 49 “Another Eastern Question,” Civil & Military Gazette, 1 September 1881, col. D, p. 5. The “New Mustapha Hotel” sounded to “’Arry in Algiers” like an argument for why it needed to be built: “Must ’ave a ’Otel.” 50 “The Parish Church,” Leamington Spa Courier, col. C, p. 6. 51 “Another Eastern Question,” Banbury Beacon, 26 October 1895, col. A, p. 2. 52 “Another Eastern Question,” Scottish Referee, 4 November 1910, col. E, p. 1.

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is not, in my view, an obvious political or cultural valence to expansive invocations of the Eastern Question, i.e. such that the practice can be easily associated with one or another person, group, or party, is key. As in the case of the Tory vs. Liberal definitions of the Eastern Question during the Bulgarian Atrocities that I identified and explored earlier, the “another Eastern Question” formula was a bromide available to all, to serve whatever end that person or organ may have had. British writers and speakers of all stripes could draw energy from a supposedly essential Eastern Question and, at the same time, divert attention away from it, thereby refocusing audiences on other places, issues, and populations while retaining all the memories, grandness, and urgency of the original one. It goes without saying that Britain’s imperialists could use the threat of an ever-emerging, ever-expanding Eastern Question to push for military and political conquests. But global master narratives always hold broad-based appeal because of their explanatory breadth. In 1877, the Liberal author J. Arthur Partridge suggested that the Eastern Question had expanded beyond its “locally specialized” origin to encompass the futures of British influence in Egypt, Persia, and Afghanistan.53 He deemed the British public’s attitude toward the Eastern Question to be “vague and variable, for it has had ignorance for its guide, and zeal for its charioteer.”54 To the “undefined dread” about the East poisoning the British mind and spirit, he offered as an antidote the acquisition of Alexandria and the Suez Canal in Egypt and of the southern Afghan passes to settle the defense of Britain’s Mediterranean and Asian interests once and for all.55 The Westminster Review, the original organ of the Benthamite “philosophic Radicals” and, after 1851, noted for its progressive but party-independent status under its editor John Chapman,56 53 J. Arthur Partridge, The Policy of England in Relation to India and the East; or, Alexandria, Ispahan, Herat (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1877), v. 54 Ibid., 91–92. 55 Ibid., 94 and 104–106. 56 On the Westminster Review’s early history, see Elisabeth K. Chaves, Reviewing Polit-

ical Criticism: Journals, Intellectuals, and the State (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 37–53. On Chapman, see William Baker, “Chapman, John (1821–1894),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., Lawrence Goldman, https://doi-org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1093/ref: odnb/5123.

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summarized the Eastern Question as asked by Partridge as “the vastest question, perhaps, heretofore asked on this globe,” breaking it down into a connected pair: a “European Eastern Question” focused on Russian expansion at the expense of the Ottomans and an “Anglo-Eastern Question” focused on British interests in India and Australia.57 And it was not just the pragmatic Liberals who sought a resolution of these various facets of the Eastern Question. In January 1879, Gladstone wrote to Louis Berg, a Jewish Liberal who had called on him to reach out to Britain’s Jewish population, that because “we now have another Eastern question before us, freed from the disturbing associations and traditions of the old one,” there was “an excellent opportunity…for resuming the co-operation which we all so highly value.”58 He meant, of course, that Britain’s invasion of Afghanistan was before them, and the opportunity was that British constituencies could rearrange their associations in their approach to this new Eastern Question. Gladstone was not the only one who felt that way. Many Liberal voices in the fall of 1878 noted the sudden focus on Afghanistan seemed like a case simply of transferring energy spent on one Eastern locale to another, rather than a moment for a reconsideration of Britain’s approach. As Parliament would not sit again until December, political debate on the growing conflict proceeded outside Westminster. Although it chastised Sher Ali for dealing with the Russians, the Daily News lamented on September 11 that “the result of the arrangement concluded by our Government for the defence of Asia Minor has been to create or revive another Eastern Question in Afghanistan.”59 Even if Britain won in a military confrontation, that victory would be of “doubtful value to the national interests, and…chiefly necessary to gratify a taste for theatrical display.”60 As usual, W. T. Stead’s Northern Echo went further, stating plainly that “the Affghan difficulty springs directly out of the Eastern policy of the Government” and arguing that Russia’s attempt to influence Sher Ali was just a countermeasure against Britain having moved Indian troops 57 See pp. 200–201 of “The Eastern Question,” Westminster Review 108, no. 1 (1877), 200–213. 58 Excerpt from letter in “Mr. Gladstone on the Attitude of the Jews,” Daily News, 11 January 1879, col. F, p. 5. 59 Daily News, 11 September 1878, col. E, p. 4. 60 Ibid.

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to Malta in May and June of 1878 as a way of signaling its preparations to intervene on the Ottomans’ side in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War.61 “The wilder, the madder the scheme,” thundered the Echo, the more the “Hebrew Earl” liked it, needing only to “label it anti-Russian” to ensure his followers’ support.62 Charles Bradlaugh, his profile raised by his role in the Hyde Park Association demonstrations early in the year, told a Liberal crowd (in none other than Rylands’ Burnley, as it happened) amid laughter and cheers that the only reason Russia was interested in British territory was because “she had got our bad example to copy by” and that, rather than “steal” Afghanistan, Britain should “let India have a Parliament of her own” so that it could decide whether to challenge Russia.63 There were plenty preparing for battle, though, in fitting with the surplus of Russophobic energy that had built up in the winter and spring of 1877–1878 and had never totally dissipated over the summer and throughout the Berlin Congress. This was a group for whom “peace with honour” was a disappointing outcome to the Eastern Crisis compared to “war with glory.” To them, Afghanistan conveniently extended the Eastern Question but promised a tidier answer: invade, defeat, solve, and celebrate. This feeling only increased when a delegation sent by Lytton to Kabul was turned away at the Afghan border on September 22, an outcome that was both expected and welcome to those who wanted a proper invasion.64 Illustrating again the speed of the telegraph and the energy of the British press, just two days later the Morning Post condemned the rebuff and promised that “Englishmen are prepared to meet Russia” anywhere it tried to push back against the terms of the Treaty of Berlin, adding that “Russia is capable of greater atrocities” than the Ottomans and as such was a far greater threat to humanity.65 The Evening Standard

61 “The Threatened War with Affghanistan,” Northern Echo, 11 September 1878, col. F, p. 2. 62 Ibid. 63 “Mr. Bradlaugh in Burnley,” Burnley Advertiser, 28 September 1878, col. B p. 7. 64 See Pierce G. Fredericks, The Sepoy and the Cossack (New York: World Publishing

Company, 1971), 192. 65 Morning Post, 24 September 1878, col. C, p. 4.

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deemed anti-imperial opinions like Bradlaugh’s “unpatriotic denunciations,” claiming that the Raj was “a just, a beneficent, and a prosperous rule” and that by invading Afghanistan Britain could “vindicate its Imperial position and strengthen its frontiers.”66 As we have seen before in this study, a powerful, emotive frisson could be created by the juxtaposition and thus association of British Innenpolitik, the Ottoman Empire, and India. Few sources draw the three spheres together—with Afghanistan in the intersection acting as an avatar for Russia—more clearly than the Daily Telegraph, which noted that the Steads and Bradlaughs of the world were out of step with the British public, who were “too much Englishmen to feel like Russo-Afghans.”67 Ever bold, the paper issued a warning to politicians who would criticize the Government and the army to maintain their anti-imperial bona fides: For such a person there would be no future in Parliamentary life; for it is not now a question of Turkey in Asia, but of England in Asia, and the recollection of past misadventures in this frontier region inspires the nation, not with any feeling of pusillanimity, but with an earnest desire to make an end of such perturbations, and grapple with the real evil, Russian encroachments near our Indian confines.68

It would seem that it only took a few weeks for a small affront in a distant land to somehow be connected to everything that mattered in British life and, if that challenge went unconfronted, then the whole empire and all of its peoples were at risk of spiraling into ruin. Yet Bayly cautions us not to assume that the war arose solely from an “imperial urge,” but instead it was the “permissive environment” afforded to Lytton and his predecessors that was to blame.69 To be sure, the truth was that almost everyone outside of Lytton’s orbit had misgivings about the enterprise, only later coming around to it after the Viceroy pushed the boundaries of his authority on the ground to escalate the conflict and interested parties in the metropole themselves saw an opportunity to capitalize on it.

66 London Evening Standard, 27 September 1878, col. E, p. 4. 67 Daily Telegraph, 1 October 1878, col. D, p. 4. 68 Ibid. 69 Bayly, 262.

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Salisbury, the former India secretary who had worked with both Lytton and Northbrook, was against an invasion at first.70 And Lord Carnarvon gave a trenchant speech at the end of September in which he declared, in fitting with a stubborn political independence that had led to his earlier resignation, that “it would be better to meet [Russia] in a fair fight in Europe than to entangle ourselves in…Afghanistan.”71 Carnarvon’s speech led to questions of a divided Conservative Party, though Disraeli wrote to Lady Chesterfield a few days later that he had not bothered to read the speech or any of the responses in the press.72 Yet even Disraeli was angry at Lytton at first, and as late as October 10 he wrote to Lady Bradford that none of it would have happened had “distant and headstrong counsels” (i.e. Lytton) not recognized his authority.73 The only leader in the Government who was adamant for an invasion was Gathorne Hardy, raised to the peerage as Viscount Cranbrook in April 1878 when he moved from the War Office to take over for Salisbury at the India Office after the latter became foreign secretary.74 Cranbrook sat at the center of a web whose threads included the military-political maneuvering that it took to survey and acquire Cyprus, familiarization with the work and capabilities of Intelligence Branch operatives like Colonel Robert Home and his pro-Afghan invasion successor Major Cecil East, and a sense of the ways that the “permissive environment” of Britain’s India policy could be turned to the empire’s (and party’s) advantage.

70 On Salisbury’s path from skepticism to support, see Martin Ewans, Securing the

Indian Frontier in Central Asia: Confrontation and Negotiation, 1865–1895 (London: Routledge: 2010), 71–80. 71 “Lord Carnarvon on the Eastern Question,” Glasgow Herald, 23 September 1878,

col. C, p. 5. 72 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 27 September 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 246. 73 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 10 October 1878, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 250. Elsewhere, Disraeli complained that Lytton had been told to send the mission via Kandahar, where it was thought it would be more likely to get through to Kabul, rather than the Khyber Pass, where it was likely to be intercepted—see Meyer and Brysac, 186. 74 Indeed, already on September 13, Hardy wrote to Disraeli that “inactivity will not meet the case” on Afghanistan. See Alfred E. Gathorne-Hardy, ed., Gathorne Hardy, First Earl of Cranbrook: A Memoir with Extracts from His Diaries and Correspondence (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 84.

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In supporting Lytton, then, Cranbrook was less of a radical, rabid imperialist than he was simply a person operating imperialist levers that already existed. It is thus not much of a surprise that, at least from the standpoint of momentum (or mission creep) involved in the opportunity for territorial outcomes of the Eastern Crisis viz. Cyprus, that it was arguably Cranbrook who was most influential in bringing Disraeli around to the idea of an invasion in September and October, as the pro-war, antiRussia, pro-empire, and anti-anti-imperial chorus grew in the press.75 By the time the Cabinet met on October 25 to discuss a path forward, Cranbrook had convinced Disraeli and that convinced Salisbury and everyone else.76 An ultimatum was then sent to Sher Ali, who had until November 20 to respond. He had to allow the British to set up a mission in Kabul and issue a formal apology for stopping the September delegation, or else the British would invade.77 Despite the Daily Telegraph’s admonitions about heeding the rise of war fever, plenty of political and cultural figures opposed the war as the November 20 deadline loomed. When Sir Stafford Northcote visited the Midlands on a speaking tour in support of the Government, he arrived in Birmingham only to face a small crowd who “took to shouting ‘Hurrah for Gladstone,’ giving cheers for Mr. Chamberlain and Liberalism” as Disraeli’s chancellor of the exchequer sat waiting unhappily in the pouring rain until the committees of Tory clubs arrived to drown out the hecklers with their own cheers and escort him to the city center.78 In an illustration of Britain’s Eastern preoccupations and the complex realities of domestic forces, with Northcote rode Captain Frederick Burnaby, a famous soldier and adventurer who had parlayed his recent exploits in Central Asia and Asia Minor to launch a Tory campaign for Parliament in 1878.79

75 Ibid., 82–103. 76 Meyer and Brysac, 186–187. 77 Ibid. 78 “Sir Stafford Northcote in the Midland Counties,” Manchester Times, 26 October 1878, col. A, p. 7. 79 Ibid. Burnaby had a hit in 1876 with his book A Ride to Khiva: Travels and

Adventures in Central Asia (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1876), which sold out through many editions. His follow-up book, On Horseback through Asia Minor, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877) came out the following year from Sampson Low, the same publisher that had had such success with J. A. MacGahan’s book on Khiva in 1874.

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A heavily muscled mountain at 6' 4'' and over 250 pounds, Burnaby was already widely known in British society for stories of his achievements in carrying small ponies around under his arms, twisting fireplace pokers into neckties, and speaking multiple foreign languages freely—a dynamo of brain and brawn wrapped up in one package, it seemed.80 Evidently, Burnaby and his party’s leadership felt these things would be appealing to an electorate that was, by now, steeped in Eastern and imperial affairs. But amid Gladstone’s Midlothian-led landslide in 1880, Burnaby would later lose to Birmingham’s Radical triumvirate of Philip Henry Muntz, John Bright, and Chamberlain, the last of which complained in Parliament that the Afghan invasion had been secret and whose underlying imperialist sensibilities were mitigated by his personal contempt for Disraeli.81 That in 1878, Chamberlain—Birmingham’s Radical firebrand, beloved former mayor, and founder of the Birmingham-led National Liberal Federation that sought to unite England’s Liberal groups under one umbrella—could act as an avatar for popular opposition to Tory publicity stunts like Northcote’s tour and Burnaby’s candidacy, shows that the “new imperialism” was still in many ways in an inchoate state. Once safely inside and on the speaker’s dais, his soaked woolens steaming above his party brethren, Northcote gave a subdued speech in which he stated, almost diffidently, that on Afghanistan “he hoped the people of England…would be content to trust the Government.”82 This hope quickly became the target of indignation and jokes at the Tories’ expense. The Carlisle Journal called Northcote’s speeches “prosaic and stupid” and, along with Home Secretary R. A. Cross’s earlier speaking tour in his home county of Lancashire, merely a stunt contrived by the Government to “sound their own praises.”83 Speaking in Bristol at a Liberal charity banquet in mid-November, the former Cabinet Minister

80 For details on the myths and realities of Burnaby’s larger-than-life reputation, see J. Redding Ware and R. K. Mann, The Life and Times of Colonel Fred Burnaby (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), 16–17 and 340–341. 81 See pp. 22–24 of T. G. Otte, “‘Intimately dependent on foreign policy’: Joseph

Chamberlain and Foreign Policy,” in Joseph Chamberlain: International Statesman, National Leader, Local Icon, eds. Ian Cawood and Chris Upton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 17–47. 82 Sir Stafford Northcote in the Midland Counties,” Manchester Times, 26 October 1878, col. A, p. 7. 83 “The Policy of the Government,” Carlisle Journal, 1 November 1878, col. D, p. 4.

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Lord Carlingford lamented that “to-day…we seem to have no home affairs,” such that Cross was now “a sort of extra-Foreign Minister” whose eyes were “bent upon Eastern Roumelia and the Kyber Pass” rather than anything in Britain.84 As the British Isles were in the midst of an ongoing period of crop failures and slow recovery from the Panic of 1873, Carlingford’s charge against Cross (and by extension Disraeli) was appealing to those already inclined against the Tory line. In the Radical stronghold of Leicester, Gladstone’s former (and future) colonial secretary the Earl of Kimberley told a meeting of the local Liberal club that, unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals would not “govern the colonies by mere fair words, mere brilliancy about Imperialism, and mere talk about founding an empire.”85 Instead, it would be domestic affairs that would drive imperial acts, not the other way around. And in approaching the Afghan people, he said, the Liberal position would be to avoid, as The Scotsman quoted him, “leaving behind us an inheritance of hatred.”86 For a normally modest orator, Kimberley’s words were enthusiastically received as a “treat for Liberals,” as one J. Treddle wrote in the Leicester Chronicle.87 Writing under the byline of “a Working Man,” Treddle assured his readers that the response to the speech was a “sudden outburst of popular fervour” and “had not been purchased with roast beef.”88 This was a dart at the widespread practice of “treating,” in which political agents offered food, beer, sometimes money to entice votes. As with Rylands’ and others’ Disraeli-as-magician trope, the Liberal line on Afghanistan and all other Tory-led imperial acts was that they were fantasies made to look alive, while the Liberals promised to present only the true, unvarnished reality. Perhaps the most striking accusation that the Government’s focus on Eastern affairs was an intentional distraction from growing domestic issues 84 “The Colston Banquets at Bristol,” The Scotsman, 14 November 1878, col. E, p. 5. Carlingford had served as Gladstone’s president of the Board of Trade and would go on to serve in other cabinet roles in the 1880s. 85 “The Earl of Kimberley in Leicester,” Leicester Journal, 15 November 1878, col. C,

p. 6. 86 The Scotsman, 11 November 1878, col. A, p. 4. 87 “Earl Kimberley in Leicester—A Treat for Liberals (By a Working Man),” Leicester

Chronicle, 16 November 1878, col. F, p. 5. 88 Ibid.

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came from the Earl of Rosebery, who would soon become a household name by his central role in Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. In Aberdeen, Rosebery stated amid “loud and prolonged cheering” that trusting the Government, as Cross and Northcote recommended, was impossible when its leaders approached politics like a “magic lantern” show, “where all the audience sit in complete darkness watching a succession of brilliant but fleeting pictures drawn across the orbit of vision.”89 “That may be amusing,” Rosebery said, “but it does not promote confidence.”90 Quite literally describing the Tories’ approach to public relations as phantasmagoria, Rosebery painted a portrait, à la Walter Benjamin, of his opponents as presenting and reiterating exciting images of exotic, far-off places to activate a mimetic impulse in the British mind to match and surpass its predecessors, in whose footsteps Britain trod eastward. Turning this formula on its head, Rosebery argued that Britain should learn from the demise of the Romans: Corrupted by unwieldy power and enormous wealth, enervated by contact with the East…they had at length to partition their empire themselves…[Then] finally finding their home population inadequate to defend their extended frontiers, even though they recruited it by that spirit of weakness to an imperial race, the admixture of inferior nations, they finally drivelled through every succession of degradation till they reached the outer darkness of extinction.91

Rosebery was, of course, only the latest Liberal to attack the Conservatives for papering over the risks imperialism entailed with the kind of glorious scenes of British triumph overseas that, in word or woodcut, sold by the millions in the media. Later Liberal leader Sir William Harcourt, who would take over from Cross in the Home Office when Gladstone won in 1880, had even joked that Disraeli’s Suez Canal shares purchase in 1876 was a “great political phantasmagoria” that immediately lost its glamour when it came time for the always-staid Lord Derby to go over the

89 “Lord Rosebery in Aberdeen,” Banffshire Journal and General Advertiser, 22 October 1878, col. B, p. 2. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.

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details.92 And Gladstone would also refer to phantasmagoria-as-policy, possibly under Rosebery’s influence, in one of his Midlothian speeches in December 1879.93 But it is Rosebery’s specific belief that empirebuilding in the East was not just risky but enfeebling that is telling and prescient here, with a foreign contaminant passing into the national blood and leading to a vulgar degeneracy. “We are a great empire,” Rosebery said, “but our weakness is our colonies, and our strength is our people, and we have enlarged the source of our weakness without increasing our source of strength.”94 For Rosebery, the future foreign secretary and Gladstone’s successor as prime minister, Liberal democracy was a genuine expression of the will of the electorate, and thus the British Empire under its watch was cautiously built and maintained to suit their proximal interests. Tory democracy, the theory went, was just a spectacle and a new one at that. A return to Liberal rule would refocus energy on the sturdy old cause of reform, rather than the glossy fakery of imperialism. Even after Sher Ali missed the deadline, this line held. “No one believes,” The Scotsman declared in mid-December, that “if the issue of the Afghan war were put to the country, there would be a majority in favour of that war.”95 But by then the campaign’s victory was already a fait accompli. On November 21, three armies composed chiefly of Indian troops and under Generals Sir Samuel Browne, Sir Donald Stewart, and Frederick Roberts crossed via mountain passes into Afghan territory at Kyber, Bolan, and

92 Qtd. on p. 22 of John P. Rossi, “The Transformation of the British Liberal Party: A Study of the Tactics of the Liberal Opposition, 1874–1880,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69, no. 8 (1978), 1–133; also, see Andrzej Diniejko, “Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred as an Imperial Utopia,” The Victorian Web, https://victorianweb.org/ authors/disraeli/tancred.html. Diniejko quotes Leslie Stephen, a respected scholar and more famously the father of Virginia Woolf, as calling Tancred a “strange phantasmagoria” in 1876. 93 For example, in his speech at Glasgow on December 5, 1879: “It seems to me, gentlemen, that for the last two years we have been under what calls itself a policy; but it is no policy. It is what is better known by an outlandish term, yet one not inapplicable—it is a phantasmagoria.” See W. E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1879), 204. 94 “Lord Rosebery in Aberdeen,” Banffshire Journal and General Advertiser, 22 October 1878, col. B, p. 2. 95 The Scotsman, 16 December 1878, col. C, p. 4.

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Kohat, respectively.96 All three generals were veterans of the Indian Rebellion, and within two months their troops had occupied virtually all the strategic positions in the country. Sher Ali attempted to travel to Russia and return with a Russian field force, but he was turned back at his northern border like Britain’s delegation had been a few months earlier at his southern one. This sent him into a spiral of depression, and he died at the end of February 1879 of a combination of self-imposed starvation and gangrene from a leg wound he had received during his flight north.97 It would take until May for the Treaty of Gandamak to be signed by Sher Ali’s son and successor, Mohammad Yaqub Khan, formally ending the first chapter in the conflict. Already in January, though, the Daily Telegraph had made its judgment, declaring that despite Liberal naysayers it was clear that the Afghans would soon experience the firm embrace their neighbors to the southeast enjoyed from Britain: “When the wolf’s teeth fall out he gives up biting,” says one of their own proverbs, and the well-known method which has tamed Pindarree, Bheel, Punjabi, and Mahratta will eventually turn these robbers into peaceful goatherds and cheesemongers. All has gone thus far excellently well, and we may confidently trust that similar devotion and skill will soon procure a friendly and peaceful Afghanistan, with an India behind the mountains relieved, for good and all, from the demoralising shadow of Russian encroachment which was the most expensive and mischievous side of all the Eastern Question.98

For supporters of the Government, the Afghan glue between the Eastern Question of the western East and the Eastern Question of the central East had apparently set. But while this initial phase of the war went quickly and with few setbacks for British forces, these were not the only troubles that Britain faced nor were those other troubles new ones. Apart from the most sycophantic Conservative voices, the “peace with honour” slogan had gone from a label for a British triumph to that of a Tory branding

96 Meyer and Brysac, 187; also, see Michael Barthorp, Afghan Wars and the North-West Frontier 1839–1947 (London: Cassell, 1982), 67–68. 97 Tamim Ansary, Games without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 77. 98 Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1878, col. G, p. 4.

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strategy—an attempt to sell a chimera in which the Government had a handle on circumstances in the Balkans and the Near East that were in actuality far beyond Britain’s (or any country’s) capacity to control. The Eastern Question’s instability as an idea, particularly its flavor of metastasis over remission at every stage, meant that it chafed against a Western insistence that a powerful, modern country was so because it had conquered disorder in its jurisdiction. But attempts to extend these aptitudes for domination and management outward and into zones of other powers, whether by feat of strength and application of will, ran up against the sticky problem that multiparty decisions contrive to undermine unilinear narratives. Even more, the essence of any outcome can only be looked back on, not perceived in the moment. In a sense, at the time it was not even clear whether the current crisis had really abated, with the conditions of the Berlin Treaty yet to be carried out on the ground in such a way to satisfy all involved that war would not break out again. Adding to this, in the British Empire’s immediate orbit, were ongoing or preceding factors in conflicts against the Burmese Empire, the Maories, Egyptian nationalists, and in South Africa. Of the last two, the war in Afghanistan had hardly begun when it was joined by another one against the Zulus, while the Khedival government in Egypt found itself in a state of crisis in 1879 that would soon lead to an uprising led by Colonel Ahmed ‘Urabi. The Anglo-Zulu War would in part precipitate the disastrous First Boer War, and ‘Urabi’s revolt would eventually inspire Britain’s invasion of Egypt in 1882. Still more questions remained, then, particularly in the category of the East but not, as we saw in the above examples, limited only to that locale but operating in any place where entropy’s odor was detectable. In a sense, by this point the sum of all agents’ actions was a British society gripped by foreign problems that had intruded into the life of the metropole. In the space of the ensuing months of 1879 after the Treaty of Gandamak and into 1880 and the general election, the new struggle was over how to most effectively apply the anxiety undergirding the Eastern Question. Should the British public “trust the Government” and enjoy the clarity of purpose in the struggle for global domination, or should it take that foreign-focused energy (and money) and apply it to the homeland’s mounting struggles? Could the Eastern Question contract as well as expand, in the world and in the mind?

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“Good Old Liberal Medicine”: Race, Class, and Imperialism’s Discontents Condemning the conflicts in Afghanistan, South Africa, and beyond presented as many opportunities as risks for the Liberal Party, as the wars entailed real material and human costs unlike Disraeli’s previous actions that achieved British success mainly via negotiation and pressure. Although more pragmatic Liberals had already noted that an anti-war posture might be read as anti-patriotic (like Harcourt’s comment that electors would largely prefer to see their leaders present a “united front” in defending India from “octopus hand of Russia”), 1879 would see the Liberals coalesce around a dual patriotism to combat the Tory version.99 First, the party line went, Liberals should support the success of the troops currently engaged, and, second, they should support only those policies which made invasions like that of Afghanistan rare or unnecessary in the first place. This would ultimately prove to be an effective tactic, as it allowed readers, public meeting goers, and electors to maintain a sense of solidarity with the empire’s forces and thus enjoy the exciting war reportage resulting from their engagement in a faraway land against exotic foes. At the same time, because their political and thought leaders were adamant that such imperial adventures never would have happened had the Liberals been in charge, they were able to claim the moral high ground in debates over Britain’s use of force in international affairs. It is also in 1879 and in the context of the post-Berlin Eastern Question that, as noted above, we see an intriguingly self-aware debate over imperialism as a term and a metanarrative for Britain’s global posture. In their seminal study of the word, Richard Koebner and Helmut Schmidt marked out imperialism’s emergence “as an anti-Disraeli slogan” in first few months of 1876 as a way of casting the prime minister’s proposal to name Queen Victoria as Empress of India as something foreign (particularly French) and unconstitutional, with Liberal attacks on imperialism in this manner later reaching a crescendo during the Midlothian campaign.100 This point of departure seems to have inspired Bernard Porter’s pre- and post-1880 framing of imperialism in his study of it as a 99 See “Parliament Out of Session,” Evening Mail, 27 September 1878, col. E, p. 8. 100 Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance

of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 118–134; also, see Eldridge, 54–55.

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concept and force in British domestic society, with imperialism concealed before 1880 and out in the open afterward.101 Porter’s laser focus on semantics is best expressed by his or his editors’ telling decision in the index to direct readers looking for details on “imperialists” to flip forward to “zealots.”102 In reality, the term “imperialism” had been applied in and to Britain before 1876. For example, in 1870 the pro-Gladstone Spectator complained that a former co-owner and editor, A. H. Louis, had cited his connection to the paper in advocating for a union of Anglo-Saxons with the Americans in charge and the British as junior partners, dismissing Louis as a remnant of a period in which the editors, under the direction of the Thornton Leigh Hunt before he went on to the Daily Telegraph, had positioned the paper to be “rather more bumptious in its British imperialism than the [Evening ] Standard itself.”103 In 1868, the Scottish North British Review spoke of an “earnest opponent of English Imperialism” who attacked Britain’s Eastern policy for flooding Indian markets with industrial goods.104 The word also appeared with increasing frequency in the 1860s and 1870s in Irish newspapers and books, applied directly to the island’s English overlords.105 In this regard, Carnarvon’s oft-referenced pronouncement in November 1878 that, although having “heard of Imperial policy” and having “heard of Imperial interests,” the term “Imperialism” was a “newly 101 See Porter, 111 and 164. 102 Ibid., 467. 103 “News of the Week,” The Spectator, 29 January 1870, col. A, p. 125. 104 See pp. 98 of “The Financial Relations of England and India,” North British Review

95 (1868), 86–108. 105 See, for example, Mary Francis Cusack, Illustrated History of Ireland: From the Earliest Period (London: Longmans, Greene, & Co., 1873), 491; John Mitchel, The Life and Times of Aodh O’Neill, Prince of Ulster; Called by the English, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, with Some Account of His Predecessors, Con, Shane and Tirlough (Dublin: James Duff, 1860), ix. Among other Irish organs, the Munster News often employed the term and its varied constructions with regard to Britain, such as in a striking case in impugning those in England who criticized France’s Irish Brigade (a long-time unit composed of Irish exiles) by saying that British leaders should remember that the brigade’s prominence meant that Irish troops “will carry a higher price in the British military market, in the persons of those who offer their swords—souls and bodies, for promotion and pay, to British Imperialism.” See “The Irish and the French.—The Brigade in Paris.—The Sardinian Gaolers.—The Release and Restoration of the Brigade Men to Their Homes.—The Vindication of the Faith and Fame of Ireland,” Munster News, 7 November 1860, col. E, p. 2.

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coined word” rings both true on a societal level and smacks of dissimulation on a personal one.106 As colonial secretary or beyond his portfolio, it is unlikely that he would have missed this term’s rising use over the years. If he was playing dumb, it might have been because it was an inconvenient development given his connection to a prime minister against whom the term was now deployed as an epithet. Still, Porter’s relentless emphasis on Victorian terminology belies his larger point: people at the time were coming into awareness of the imperial structures and systems around them, and they were concerned about the language used to describe those aspects of their world. To be sure, even with the benefit of more sophisticated indexing and OCRdriven databases in present-day scholars’ toolboxes, Koebner and Schmidt remain correct that it really was the Eastern Crisis and the Midlothian campaign that saw imperialism explode into use as a Liberal slur to mock and deride a Conservative Party in the grip of a foppish huckster. And it is in this predicate where a further investigation is needed of Liberal tactics in painting Disraeli and his supporters as imperialists, namely in that this particular brand of anti-imperialism exposes a set of race- and class-based prejudices at work in the lead-up to the 1880 general election and even in the embedded assumptions of Gladstone’s Beaconsfieldism as a worldview, policy, and practice. That is, if Disraeli had reached the top of British society and politics despite his Italian-Jewish “alien blood,” as John Bright put it,107 his modest upbringing, and his career as a writer of autofictional novels often evocative of Eastern locales, then his opponents clearly believed it was due to some sinister path that only a stranger-within could dream up. The leading voices who embodied this perspective were the Northern Echo’s Stead, who preferred “Hebrew Earl,” “Hebrew monarch,” or “Hebrew conjurer” as racist jabs,108 and the notorious antisemite E. A. Freeman, who referred to Disraeli solely as “the Jew” in all his personal

106 “Lord Carnarvon on Imperial Administration,” London Evening Standard, 6 November 1878, col. C, p. 3. Also, see Koebner and Schmidt, 153–154, and Eldridge, Disraeli and the Rise of a New Imperialism, 61. 107 Qtd. in Seton-Watson, 281. 108 In addition to the above note referencing the Echo, see also “England’s Betrayal of

Greece,” Northern Echo, 29 August 1878, col. B, p. 3; “A Famine in the Land,” Northern Echo, col. F, p. 2; “Working Men and the War,” Northern Echo, 12 April 1878, col. E, p. 2; “Special Correspondence,” Northern Echo, 12 April 1879, col. C, p. 3.

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letters.109 But there were many derivations of the theme both before and throughout the Eastern Crisis. There is no reason to believe that this would dissipate after the Berlin Congress; in the right hands, Bismarck’s “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann!” quip was as much a sneer as a slogan. It is clear that anti-imperialists’ search for the origin of Disraeli’s plans for world domination in the context of the Eastern Question was almost a genre unto itself by the end of the 1870s. As we saw with Rylands, Disraeli’s critics combined literary criticism with vague references to social Darwinist ethnography to construct a sort of specialized hermeneutic, involving poring over the prime minister’s novels, connecting them with his words and acts, and analyzing the results based on antisemitic, Orientalist, and otherwise racist assumptions presented as basic facts any reasonable person must accept. Added to this brew was a soupçon of non-interventionist, reform-minded values that, of course, were contrary to the Conservative platform and emphasized the plight and potential of the smaller classes—literally in Britain, figuratively everywhere else. This model held true not just in penny papers, crowd-pleasing speeches, and private correspondence, but in intellectual Liberal organs. In 1878, for example, John Morley’s Fortnightly Review published a series of four attacks on Disraeli that treated him as an overgrown novelist with suspicious racial and national origins and allegiances.110 Departing from the journal’s rule of named attribution, these articles were unsigned.111 The author may have been the traveling scholar and Liberal activist Goldwin Smith, a frequent contributor whose personal hatred of Disraeli

109 See Anthony Brundage, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 127. 110 “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 136 (1 April 1878): 477–493; “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 137 (1 May 1878): 691–709; “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 138 (1 June 1878): 867–888; “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 24 (new series), no. 140 (1 August 1878): 250–270. 111 Given the journal’s guiding principles, the anonymity of this series stands out as an aberration. And, indeed, the final and most abrasive article doesn’t even appear in the otherwise complete table of contents in the Fortnightly’s biannual collected volume. See Fortnightly Review 24 (new series), no. 140 (1 August 1878): iii–iv.

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and antipathy toward Jews rivaled Freeman’s.112 However, there is a certain rhyme and rhythm to the prose that, I think, points toward Stead, especially the articles’ unrelenting racial insinuations, religious outrage, and an idiosyncratic penchant for the word “grotesque.”113 Given that Morley and Stead would soon work side by side to redesign the Pall Mall Gazette as a pro-Gladstone paper, it is also likely that the politically astute Morley saw in Stead’s work at the Echo a growing demand for adding a populist flavor to intellectual debates on foreign and imperial policy. Regardless of their provenance, the articles’ inclusion in a journal that was arguably the most erudite piece of British media at the time shows us that a passionate hatred of Disraeli, and thus a centering of him in policies developed under his auspices or with his approval, played a role in the mind of the Liberal elite and not simply the masses. The first article insisted that Disraeli’s novels’ theme of the pursuit of fame and fortune showed that it was “the Jewish people who are really [Disraeli’s] country and church,” and thus his career was not “that of an English statesman, but that of a foreign political adventurer.”114 The second focused on Disraeli’s representation of wealth and nobles’ privilege in his writings, concluding that the author’s “angry sense of exclusion and the greed of coveted possession” underscored all of his political pursuits.115 Disraeli, holding the resentment of a “manumitted slave” to his former masters, was the frontman of a dark cabal of rootless moneychangers and extortionists: “Sinister interests, and powerful influences which are not English, sway English politics. Finance and religion are cosmopolitan, and men whose country is their counting-house indirectly govern us. The rulers of the synagogue are more largely than is suspected the rulers of England.”116 112 On Goldwin Smith’s marked antisemitic worldview, see Bernard Glassman, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), 90–92. 113 My suspicion, though presently unprovable, is based on reading hundreds of foreign policy leaders in the Northern Echo during Stead’s tenure there from 1871 to 1880. These leaders were generally Stead’s responsibility as chief editor, and the term “grotesque” appears with abnormal, often repetitive frequency. 114 “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 136 (1 April 1878): 492. 115 “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 137 (1 May 1878): 702. 116 Ibid., 704.

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The third article took its readers further into the conspiracy’s sanctuary. The author saw in Disraeli’s 1844–1847 Young England trilogy (made up of Coningsby, Sybil , and Tancred) a concrete plan to banish the Whigs, build a Tory working class, and bring the West and the East together—on the last point by compelling the Church of England “to return to is proper work of diffusing Asian ideas among the flatnosed Franks.”117 “Flat-nosed Franks” comes from Tancred, in which the narrator indulges in a racist diatribe against Christian Europeans, depicting them as half-civilized forest-dwellers unworthy of an Eastern heritage that they simultaneously laid claim to and derided.118 To Disraeli’s anonymous Fortnightly critic, the prime minister’s awareness of his status in the West’s racial hierarchy was dangerous, his impudence in daring to reorder that hierarchy blasphemous.119 It all added up, it seemed. Disraeli’s contempt for the land he held sway over and his plan to make an Eastern colony of it was all there on decades-old pages, with every indication that “his practical politics are but the accommodations of an Eastern mind and character to the habits of the foreign country in which he lives.”120 The final article’s attack on Disraeli is the most striking—a peroration that took the pronounced antisemitism, ethnic nationalism, and suspicion of the moneyed classes in the previous pieces and spinning it into an Orientalist, classist, and anti-imperial peroration. Speaking to, in Robert O’Kell’s words, “intensely paranoid reactions” among many Liberals to 117 “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 23 (new series), no. 138 (1 June 1878): 884. See Diniejko on Young England’s broader context and impact. 118 Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred: Or, The New Crusade (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1847), 154. I tend to agree with Anthony Wohl’s opinion that in using this phrase Disraeli intended to hint at the other extremity of physiognomic obsessions about nose shape and size, i.e. a primitive flat nose to contrast with a Jewish “hook nose.” See “‘Dizzi-BenDizzi’: Disraeli as Alien,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 375–411. 119 Although it is hard to set aside Tancred’s frequent musings on a sort of Jewishfocused, all-encompassing Orientalist ontology, it is also possible Disraeli was more interested in the theme of the passions and excesses of youth. Nils Clausson believes that Tancred is really an exercise in irony, with Disraeli playing with the voice of the narrator to move back and forth between different, often exaggeratedly caustic, viewpoints to explore the “youthful idealism” of its title character—see “‘Picturesque Emotion’ or ‘Great Asian Mystery’? Disraeli’s Tancred as an Ironic Bildungsroman,” Critical Survey 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–19. 120 Ibid.

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Disraeli’s rise to national prominence, the author focused on tying the prime minister’s Eastern policies to his fictional musings on the potentials for British power in the East in Tancred.121 In that book’s “grotesque passages” one could find, it seemed, “the secret of some of his wildest freaks of policy.”122 “Emir Beaconsfield,” the author thundered, was a “grotesque foreign accident,” holding “an Oriental imagination [rather] than a European intelligence” and having injected “the wild dreams and projects of his Eastern heroes into the practical politics of the West.”123 What is more, Disraeli knew “how to appeal to the blatant and blustering Chauvinism of the coarsest and least educated part of every class in the community, from the highest to the lowest,” such that “the noisiest and vulgarest noblemen and the noisiest and vulgarest mobsmen have been upon his side.”124 The author’s intent here is as obvious as it is tidy: to evoke and mock, in one fell swoop, tacky peers like the Duchess of Teck at her Jingo parties and the grimy, fez-wearing crowds of cat-throwers hoisting the Ottoman flag in Hyde Park. All were stupid, all were obscene, all were elements alien to the nation’s rich heritage. Rather than guide politics toward the betterment of the life of the average worker in the home isles, Disraeli’s goal as prime minister was “to exercise paramount control over foreign affairs, and to devote himself to those considerations of high imperial policy.”125 Thus, the writer concluded, “the history of Lord Beaconsfield’s second administration is the history of the Eastern Question,” and Britain and its peoples were all the worse for the repositioning of their kingdom in the orbit of the East.126 O’Kell, in a bit of ingenious documentary triangulation, notes that Gladstone mentioned that he had read the last article in the series in his diary, which any reader of those diaries will know usually means it was the

121 Robert O’Kell, Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 493–494. 122 “The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield,” Fortnightly Review 24 (new series), no. 140 (1 August 1878): 269. 123 Ibid., 268. 124 Ibid., 269. 125 Ibid., 268. 126 Ibid.

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most notable thing Gladstone did that day outside his religious and treefelling routines.127 What he thought of it we cannot say, but he liked Morley enough to act as his unofficial patron after Morley’s entry into Parliament in 1883, eventually appointing him chief secretary for Ireland in 1886 during the push for the First Home Rule Bill. Before this, Gladstone certainly benefited from Morley’s (and Stead’s) work at the Pall Mall Gazette when they took over the paper from Frederick Greenwood just after the 1880 general election. Unlike Edward Levy-Lawson at the Daily Telegraph, Greenwood’s reputation was not solely dependent on his, and thus his paper’s, political affiliation. Indeed, Gladstone made sure to note in his first Midlothian speech at the end of November 1879 that Greenwood’s paper was “by far the cleverest” of London’s Conservative organs.128 The Liberal reorientation of the widely respected paper just after Gladstone’s victory in the 1880 general election provided his new ministry with the support of a higher-brow London daily whose detailed and thoughtful political analysis had a texture of sophistication lacked by the Liberal penny papers. As for any truth to be found with regard to Disraeli’s goals amid the litany of denunciations the Fortnightly printed, Andrekos Varnava has interestingly documented the connection between Tancred’s plot and Disraeli’s case for taking Cyprus.129 And of course it was Disraeli himself who enjoyed irreverent turns of phrase like “the East is a career” and “all is race” in that same book.130 As O’Kell’s work makes clear, no one can doubt that Disraeli thrived on imparting to politics a sense of romance and exoticism to match his own interests and those of his audience. Disraeli was an open adherent to same Orientalist epistemology to which he was subjected by those who hated the Eastern peoples and places that he clearly loved. The key point, though, is that any Eastern affiliations Disraeli postured at to give his own existence meaning or to amuse his readers and listeners were, as Stuart Jones notes, seen by many of his

127 O’Kell, 493. 128 William Ewart Gladstone, “The Midlothian Campaign: Opening Speech (November

25, 1879),” in Gladstone’s Speeches, ed. Arthur Tilney Bassett (London: Methuen & Co., 1916), 561. 129 Varnava, 58–60. 130 See Disraeli, Tancred, 289 and 303 respectively.

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political rivals as beguiling forms of evil.131 As Colin Holmes, Simone Beate Borgstede, and Anthony Wohl have shown, this atmosphere of deep resentment and suspicion led Disraeli’s opponents to use his empirefocused foreign policy to paint him as an anti-Christian foreigner bent on converting Britain into an Oriental despotism via the absorption of Eastern lands, ideas, and values.132 Still, notwithstanding a minority of imperial divestment advocates like Charles Bradlaugh, the fact remains that the vast bulk of Liberals still wanted to feel good about Britain as a positive moral force and their empire as a league of merchants and freeholders. The gullible-Toriestricked-into-imperialism routine hence provided Liberals with a way of painting Disraeli as an aberration in a great tradition, allowing them to draw energy from an ideology rendered synonymous with him by denouncing it, its alleged sole author, and his venal abettors as febrile and self-serving. In defeating this Oriental vizier posing as a British premier, Liberals could save the beloved empire from imperialism. This approach helped thread the needle for Liberal papers’ ideological and economic interests, a factor most neatly encapsulated in the illustrated press. The Graphic, whose essays by such giants as Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins and its high cost at 6d made it a product for Britain’s wellhealed and arts-minded literati, stated in January 1879 that, though “the ‘scientific frontier’ has been cheaply gained,” the attention on Afghanistan had distracted the Government from the bank failures, strikes, and Home Rule concerns that should have been their focus after the Berlin Congress ended.133

131 See, especially, p. 126 of Stuart Jones, “The Victorian Lexicon of Evil: Frederic Harrison, the Positivists and the Language of International Politics,” in Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.1830–2000, eds. Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill, and Bertrand Taithe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 126–143. 132 See Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979); Simone Beate Borgstede, All is Race: Benjamin Disraeli on Race, Nation and Empire (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 9–17; Anthony S. Wohl, “‘Ben JuJu’: Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon,” Jewish History 10, no. 2 (1996): 89–134 and the aforementioned “‘Dizzi-BenDizzi’: Disraeli as Alien”; also, the work by Benjamin Glassman cited above covers much of the same ground in more detail. 133 “The Year 1878,” The Graphic, 4 January 1879, col. A, p. 14. The editor of the Sunday Times at this time, Joseph Hatton, describes the foundation, management, and audience of The Graphic in detail on pp. 232–239 of Journalistic London, Being a Series of

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On the other end of the Liberals’ socioeconomic spectrum, the Penny Illustrated Paper, whose weekly circulation numbered in the hundreds of thousands and was focused on working-class audiences,134 opened its first issue of 1879 with a full-page cover image of the Battle of Ali Masjid that took place in the Khyber Pass’s choke point on the first day of the war, with affecting images of skirmishers, injured troops, looting, and the fortress and mosque from which the battle took its name.135 Readers could thrill or tsk-tsk at the illustrations, while at the same time maintaining a common sense of pathos at the sacrifices undertaken by loyal British subjects. But on the next page, the paper appropriated and turned the for-the-troops attitude of the pro-war contingent on its head, with the lead article stating that “England stands face to face with a formidable Enemy” whose defeat would be “a victory more needed even than the triumph which seems within our grasp in Afghanistan”: Shoulder to shoulder, Tories and Liberals, not separated by Party, but united by the bond which should bind all Britons together, must march to the assault of the common Enemy who has passed within our gates, and is playing sad havoc in thousands of humble homes. Misery is the dread Enemy. General Privation is the Commander. While we have been too steadfastly regarding the East—gloomy darkness rather than a “Star in the East”—this insidious General has been sapping and undermining our industries, has spread discord between Master and Man by fomenting strikes, has driven Trade from the country, has sacked great Banks of millions of sterling, and has occupied every city in the land with his gaunt hordes.136

The Penny Illustrated Paper is not among those papers that scholars usually look to for nuance. Yet that might be an advantage, as too often we prefer to sift through the soil for fragments rather than observe the

Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882). 134 See Hatton, 231–232. 135 “The British Attack on Ali Musjid,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times,

4 January 1879, col. A, p. 1. Musjid is a common Arabic word for mosque. See Fig. 7.1 for image. 136 “Our London Letter,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 4 January 1879, col. A, p. 2.

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Fig. 7.1 “The British Attack on Ali Musjid” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)

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looming castle right in front us. As we have seen with the Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Reynolds’s Newspaper, and the Daily Telegraph, the Penny Illustrated Paper was among those papers willing to “say the quiet part loud,” as the modern-day saying goes, leaping over the quagmire of layered meaning and subtlety on legs of provocative, uninhibited imagery and prose. Thus, via such consumer-focused, populist reportage, we may even be able to reconcile the views of the era from such competing voices as Edward Said, David Cannadine, Bernard Porter, and Catherine Hall. Namely, we see in the Eastern Crisis and its wake an increasingly routine and general focus on the nexus between Britain’s imperial anxieties and its domestic affairs, based as much on race as on class and plainspoken in its interlocked racism and classism. As testified to by the antisemitic attacks on Disraeli and British Turcophobes’ profound racism during the Bulgarian Agitation and the Russo-Turkish War, that openly racist language and imagery appeared in Liberal organs in the context of fervent anti-imperial disquisitions is key, given that it was the Conservatives who most championed the political centering of an imperial culture that enabled such racist worldviews to become systemic rather than parochial. Of equal importance is the fact that it was also the Liberals who most advocated for non-elite interests in Britain directly in opposition to a Conservative elite, whose intrigues for global dominance, Liberal voices insisted, were borne aloft by a Tory working class that had succumbed to exotic new forms of trickery, rendered torpid by party-provided beef, foolish by beer, and violent by calls to arms for any perceived slight. Although Gladstone would soon achieve success in drawing on the notable undercurrent in British discourse that deemed imperialism an immoral act against free peoples, in 1879 the chief problem with empire to most Liberals remained its cost to Britain’s workers and not its racist premises and motives. “It was England’s mission to plant the Englishspeaking race in the waste spots of the earth,” a writer to Reynolds’s agreed in May 1879 shortly before the Treaty of Gandamak was signed, but “the pomp of Indian durbars and the glitter of viceregal sway in the tropics is paid for by the British. The toilers of Manchester and the moilers of Sheffield toil and moil in order that that indefinite something called the ‘British empire’ shall go on widening and broadening, costing

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yet more and more money.”137 It was only the “daily sight of English sabres” that kept “covert mutiny among the tribes” Britain ruled at bay.138 This extended beyond Afghanistan to Britain’s ongoing conflicts with the Zulus, the Burmese, and the Maories. In other words, civilizing the uncivilized across the globe was wrong not because such races were on a level with Britain’s, but because it was expensive and futile. In June, the Leeds Times —a noted Radical paper and, moreover, former leading Chartist organ—wrote that even if Britain succeeded in defeating “30,000 naked savages” in South Africa, then war would inevitably return when the “added fuel of new tribes” required Britain to reengage.139 So too was the Afghan campaign as much a failure as a success against the Zulus’ tribal counterparts in Central Asia. In midAugust 1879, Reynolds’s satirized the Conservative platform in Parliament that year by indulging in pro-worker righteous indignation by way of a casual racism that, even for the time, was strikingly extravagant: [Disraeli] went to war in Afghanistan in order to compel the new Ameer to accept £60,000 a year, and all the time our workhouses were so full that the paupers had to sleep five in a bed. Then he wanted to give next year’s taxes to a tribe of jabbering idiots who live somewhere around the Rhodope district, and the same week three men and one woman died of starvation in London. Finally, he made up his mind to cut a few thousand n——s’140 throats in Zululand, and nearly got England’s own jugular tickled with a knife instead. Here’s a good, intelligent, Christian-minded [Parliamentary] session for you!141

137 “Empire or Hearthstone,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 4 May 1879, col. A, p. 3. 138 Ibid. 139 “Sir Stafford Northcote’s Apology for the Situation,” Leeds Times, 21 June 1879, col. E, p. 4. On the political position of the Leeds Times, see Derek Fraser, A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 285. 140 This plural possessive of the indicated slur is not struck through or otherwise concealed in the original. Here, I am following the lead of Vanessa M. Holden in referencing primary sources’ use of this word without reproducing it—see the forward to her book, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021). 141 “Under the Surface: Or, Folly and Fashion,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 17 August 1879, col. C, p. 3.

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Thus, Kimberly’s warning of an “inheritance of hatred” for involving Britain in foreign lands like Afghanistan was read, by many, as more of a monetary point than a moral one. There are no heartstring laments for foreign suffering à la the Bulgarian Agitation, but instead a vulgar isolationism. To a nonchalant dismissal of African victims of British imperialism was added an Orientalist gibe at Northcote’s proposal in Parliament in mid-December 1878 to send aid to about 150,000 Muslims refugees in the Rhodope Mountains, which sheltered those who had fled a post-1876 campaign of anti-Muslim massacres by Russian and Bulgarian troops.142 Resonating with Reynolds’s view, the Liberal frontbench in the Commons found this idea so absurd that they responded with total silence, inspiring one backbencher to promise to match the chancellor of the exchequer’s motion with one of his own saying that “widespread distress prevailing in our own country” was great enough that giving taxpayer money to refugees was an “extraneous benevolence.”143 This was anti-imperialism of a simpler, cruder kind: it was pricey to get wrapped up with uncivilized, unhappy natives, and people in Britain who had their own problems paid the price. Imperialism appeared to be basically a policy of using British taxes to kill foreigners or pay them to not kill British troops, or alternatively a policy of sending money to unknown foreigners to shore up support for British interests. In this rendering of the British Empire’s place in the world, imperialism’s immorality was implied but was also not really the point. Instead, the point was to stay away from the immoral parts of the world and their peoples’ corrupting influences, focusing instead on those areas of domestic policy that had been ignored by the diversion of money to foreign adventures—money that could have otherwise been used to alleviate the suffering of the empire’s needy subjects in the metropole. Such a worldview depended, said imperialism’s critics, on rewarding leaders for being power-hungry. Of a speech by Northcote in London’s workingclass East End in late June, in which he said Parliament’s duty might not just be lawmaking but “to preserve the honour of the Empire,” Lloyd’s sarcastically concluded that Northcote was saying that it was MPs’ duty

142 Rodogno, 167. 143 See “Turkey—The Rhodope District—Grant in Aid,” Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series

3) vol. 243, col. 735 (13th December 1878).

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was “to become Jingoes” rather than hew to the constitution.144 To this brand of Tory critics, then, promoting the empire was to say that you cared more about the world beyond Britain’s shores than you did about the “comfort of the English hearthstone.”145 Yet with the Treaty of Gandamak signed and the Zulus finally defeated in July 1879 after a historically disastrous opening campaign, the Conservatives had some cause to hope that such victories would allow them to build new momentum before calling a general election to renew their mandate. But even if things progressed like this, it was still likely that the Liberals would have won given the economic problems facing the metropole, especially the poor start to a growing season that would end up being fully 50% lower than normal.146 The question Liberal leaders had was whether a majority could be reached given the rising power of the Home Rule League, which was expected to gain seats beyond the 60 it had won in 1874.147 In the event, though, a surprise tragedy in Afghanistan further strengthened the Liberal position, while not providing enough animus or glory on the part of the Conservatives to redirect it to their domestic power. On September 6, readers opened their Saturday evening papers to see that an attack on the British mission in the Kabul had occurred, the fate of the embassy’s forces under Major Sir Louis Cavagnari was unknown, and that General Roberts had returned to the field to retake the Afghan capital.148 On Monday the 8th, the India Office made public what they already knew: Cavagnari and all but seven of his troops had been killed in what turned out to have been a mutiny over unpaid wages owed to Afghan troops by the amir.149 This setback only restored the potency of Afghanistan as the mythically indomitable “graveyard of empires.” 144 “Sir Stafford Northcote in the Tower Hamlets,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 June

1879, col. D, p. 6. 145 “Empire or Hearthstone,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, 4 May 1879, col. A, p. 3. 146 H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,

1996), 300. 147 See T. A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 102–105. 148 See, for example, “Attack on the British Embassy in Afghanistan,” Pall Mall Gazette, 6 November 1879, col. A, p. 8. This and other reports all appeared in the afternoon and evening editions. 149 “Revolt in Cabul,” Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1879, col. D, p. 5.

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Although Roberts’ ensuing campaign would prove successful, the reopening of the conflict came at precisely the time that Britain’s war spirit had begun to curdle from years of near-constant anxiety. Vigorously prowar, pro-imperial organs, like the Evening Standard, tried to claim that the “first thought in the minds of all Englishmen will be how best to avenge Cavagnari and his brave companions” and that, for the massacre, “the whole [Afghan] race must be held accountable.”150 But these martial exhortations fell flat except among the most committed Jingoes. More reflective of the growing public mood was that of Reynolds’s Newspaper, whose own account of the aftermath of the massacre ran on the first page and in the first column under the title, “Our Latest Blunder in Cabul.”151 In it, the paper ridiculed Disraeli, yet again, as an eastwardlooking dreamer of suspicious national origin and allegiance, as well as Lytton, who infamously moonlighted as a poet under the pen name “Owen Meredith”: The difficulty has been created by one man in England with the imagination of an Asiatic, and one man in India with the imagination of a poet. Vivian Grey and Owen Meredith are the appropriate authors of a policy un-English to the core, destructive of our good name, because it has caused us to invade the countries who are unfortunate to stand in the way of a “spirited foreign policy.” Who is likely to believe that England is a friend of the oppressed, of peoples aspiring to be free, when we are sure to continually destroying the independence of peoples, and concerned only to sustain the worst Governments in the world?152

The Liberals’ ability to capitalize on the aftermath of the Kabul massacre is not, in fact, that surprising. The costs of external conflict were much greater in the cold, rainy fall of 1879 than the potential benefits, and this was a tragedy in the East not an adventure. Here again we can see that the Eastern Question’s flashpoints offered a volatile mixture of both histrionics and heuristics, providing infinite opportunities for competing individuals and factions to construct contrary interweavings Britain’s inward- and outward-looking worldview. An astonishing piece 150 London Evening Standard, 8 September 1879, col. D, p. 4. 151 “Our Latest Blunder in Cabul,” Reynolds’s Newspapers, 14 September 1879, col. A,

p. 1. 152 Ibid.

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in the Penny Illustrated Paper following Salisbury’s and Hartington’s massive events debating the Dual Alliance in Manchester in October 1879 saw the paper depict a British society under assault by imperial, Disraelian vices, pulled this way and that by the forces of Liberal good and Tory evil. Under the byline of “The Showman,” the paper’s art and literary editor John Latey broke down a three-panel cartoon on the day’s politics, or “our daily food” as he called them.153 In the lower right of the cartoon, a French Marianne laments her isolation by the Dual Alliance, rejecting the idea of Bismarck as a “saviour of nations” given the results of the Franco-Prussian War less than a decade before. To the left, “Captain Cockle Burnaby” sells “patent Conservative pills” to a Birmingham audience, from which one member rises to yell, “No no! Birmingham sticks to its old liberal Medecine!” Above, a “Lancashire witch” with a calm expression stands in front of a scene of sketched industrial smokestacks, with her “rival suitors” abreast. Holding her right hand, Hartington doffs his cap and promises that her “looms will go, and Prosperity return to Lancashire” if only she would agree to “plump for liberalism.” Salisbury grips her left hand, on one knee declaring, “Bunkum Imperialism shall be your dower, if you’ll only be mine.” Below, Latey attacked the “sacrilegious absurdity” of Salisbury’s “glad tidings” speech: The Foreign Secretary must have been corrupted indeed by constant association with a Jew Premier when he can bring himself to tacitly hail Bismarck, the Prince of Blood and Iron, as a second Christ, and can welcome the unholy alliance of the Imperial despotisms of Germany and Austria…as “Glad Tidings of Great Joy!” Happily, Mr. Gladstone, the People’s Premier, has just made firm and fast friends of the French Republican Leaders.

Latey then moved to the Conservatives’ attempt to win a seat in Birmingham by rallying drunks singing “By Jingo!,” trotting stuffed-shirt nobles out to wow the easily impressed, and most insulting of all fielding Burnaby for a seat against Birmingham’s trio of Radical heroes. Burnaby, 153 “The Showman,” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 25 October 1879, col. A, pp. 13–14. On Latey, see W. B. Owen, “Latey, John (1842–1902),” rev. Joanne Potier, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., Lawrence Goldman, https://doi-org.proxy. library.cornell.edu/10.1093/ref:odnb/34415. See Fig. 7.2 for image.

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Fig. 7.2 “The Showman” (Copyright: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive [www. britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk])

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Latey said, was not only an Eastern adventurer but the “military quack of the Tories”: I’ll warrant ye Birmingham is so staunchly Radical that the vapourings of all the Peers and Burnabys and Jingoes put together will not shake that City’s Liberalism one iota. Birmingham—despising all Empirical Government and Empirical candidates—will still be true to the good old Liberal medicine of Bright, Muntz, and Chamberlain.

Teasing apart these figures and references would not have been difficult for the paper’s vast audience, as they were designed to be understood easily and resonate with readers’ existing relationship with the publication. The “Lancashire witch” refers to the 1612 Pendle Hill witch trials, whose fame was revitalized in the Victorian era by the runaway success of a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth that was originally serialized in The Sunday Times in 1848.154 Ainsworth’s book later came in the form of a much-reviewed illustrated version with engravings by the Illustrated London News ’s John Gilbert,155 whose pieces frequently appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper by means of its tactic of recycling old woodcuts from its pricier competitors.156 Romanticized female caricatures are contrasted by identifiable male figures, even in the margins of the images. Salisbury appears in Marianne’s frame, fingers tented, behind the Dual Alliance’s chief negotiators, Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Austria-Hungary’s Foreign Minister Gyula Andrássy. Meanwhile, observing the fight over the witchly damsel are John Bright, who pats Hartington on the back, and R. A. Cross, who rests his hands on Salisbury’s shoulders. Finally, the identity of the heckler in Burnaby’s crowd is given away by the combination of monocle, broad tie, and the distinctive sideburns that Chamberlain wore at the time. Embedded in the images lie other contemporaneous references and jokes. Burnaby’s Eastern exploits may have bought him renown in the 154 Ainsworth’s novel came out the following year in a three-volume set—see The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (London: Henry Colburn, 1849). 155 William Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest, illus. John Gilbert (London: George Routledge & Co., 1854). Routledge also reprinted this edition the year before Latey’s satire. 156 On the Penny Illustrated Paper’s reuse of engravings, see Thomas Smits, The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870 (London: Routledge, 2020), 105.

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libraries and drawing rooms of Britain’s peers, but to Latey and his readers what set the giant captain apart was his bizarre habit, in print and in person, of telling stories of dosing himself and the “natives” and “sheiks” he met on his travels with large quantities of a notorious patent medicine called Cockle’s Antibilious Pills, a supposed miracle cure that everyone knew was just an overpriced laxative.157 A more on-the-nose metaphor for the anti-imperialist charge against imperialism is hard to imagine! Like the Daily Telegraph did for its hundreds of thousands of Conservative readers, the Penny Illustrated Paper really left nothing to the imagination of its even larger audience. It is all broad strokes, with an aim to amuse and insult: Latey pokes the Liberals lightly as overpromising on their platform and skewers the Tories as poisonous conmen. In the clearest and most cutting of his charges, Conservatives followed a “Jew Premier,” compounding Salisbury’s sacrilege in quoting the New Testament to defend European empire-building and insulting the observance of a British Christendom assumed to be naturally aligned with the “People’s William.” Of course, as we have seen throughout this study, such prejudices were available to any party, faction, or class. It is the target and the goal that matters. In this sense, it is thus telling that the most significant case of Tory antisemitism at this time happened in the summer of 1879, when the aptly named Conservative artist Tracy Turnerelli turned on Disraeli after the latter declined to accept his gift of a Roman-style laurel wreath made of gold, which Turnerelli intended as a symbol of thanks for the Berlin Treaty and which he had paid for with 52,800 pennies solicited from Conservative workers’ organizations.158 Deeply embarrassed, Turnerelli caused a buzz of gossip by sending out over a dozen feverishly written, self-published pamphlets to various anti-Tory organs, including the Northern Echo, charging that the Conservative elite had deserted his cause and that his gift of the wreath had originally been 157 On the origin of Burnaby’s nickname, see Thomas Wright, The Life of Colonel Fred Burnaby (London: Everett & Co., 1908), 192. On Burnaby’s habit of giving Cockle’s Pills to “natives” and “sheiks,” see Roger Jones, What’s Who?: A Dictionary of Things Named after People and the People They Are Named After (Leicester: Matador, 2009), 45. 158 On Turnerelli, see F. M. O’Donoghue, “Turnerelli, Edward Tracy (1813–1896),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XIX, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford: OUP, 1917), 1297. For Punch’s caricature of Disraeli’s muted response, see “On View (at Hunt and Roskell’s),” Punch, 26 April 1879, col. A, p. 187. See Fig. 7.3 for image.

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intended “to prove that I was a Christian gentleman—not a vindictive, spiteful, unforgiving Jew.”159 The wreath, which turned out to be silver-gilt anyway, ended up at Madame Tussauds.160 As ever, when racism may be a weapon to the user, there it always is to hand. Turnerelli knew that the vitriol deployed to such effect by the Echo and other voices was powerful—particularly so by the middle of 1879, when it looked like Disraeli’s star was falling rather than rising like it had been when Turnerelli had dreamed up his triumphal wreath. Conservatives were not unaware of the irony involved in Liberal attacks on Disraeli, given that it was by far and away the Liberal Party that championed inclusion and equality as sacred principles. In its review of Francis Hitchman’s 1879 biography of Disraeli, the Tory John Bull invoked and inverted the antisemitic formula to argue that had Disraeli, “by birth a Jew, and not even boasting a drop of English blood,” decided to “[take] service in the Liberal ranks…his success would have been hailed as a glory to democracy, and the noblest triumph over prejudice and bigotry.”161 Citing Rosebery’s marriage to Hannah de Rothschild in 1878, John Bull wondered that “when a Scotch earl marries the richest Jewess in the world, the champions of civil and religious liberty are in ecstasies of delight; but that a moneyless Jew should carry off the prize in the political contest is downright sorcery.”162 It is an apt counterfactual, but what the paper did not say was that no Liberal could plausibly be contorted into the embodiment of Victorian society’s dual anxieties about the East and the empire like Disraeli could be, via his own words and deeds or those ascribed to him. For many Liberals, hatred of Disraeli as an individual, distrust of foreign ideas, disgust with Tory domestic policies, and suspicion of imperialism were tangled up together, with the Eastern Question providing a deep well of possibilities for conspiratorial minds to fulminate at the

159 “Tracy Turnerelli on Lord Beaconsfield,” Sheffield Independent, 13 August 1879, col. F, p. 3. Also, see “Literary and Art Gossip,” Northern Echo, 7 July 1879, col. A, p. 3. 160 “Death of Tracy Turnerelli,” Edinburgh Evening News, 25 January 1896, col. B,

p. 5. 161 “Earl of Beaconsfield,” John Bull, 18 January 1879, col. D, p. 10; also, see Francis Hitchman, The Public Life of the Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G. etc. etc. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1879). 162 Ibid.

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Fig. 7.3 “On View” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

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hydra of global threats facing Britain. Still, considering this discourse’s proximity to Gladstone’s Midlothian triumph, laying a charge of personal antisemitism, or even that of encouraging it, at the feet of Gladstone is a red herring. He was not very antisemitic in fact, but that does not seem to have really mattered to those who lionized him as a Christian contrast to Disraeli.163 Instead, pivoting from Gladstone the person to Gladstone the lodestone leads us to consider why this antisemitic craze in Liberal quarters was so neatly aligned with a crisis of foreign and imperial policy centered on the Eastern Question. For such-minded Liberals, it appears to me, the pile-on allowed them to harness a nebulous set of longheld Orientalist obsessions and fears vaguely at work in British society and directed them against a unifying bad actor of old repute, Disraeli, and a unifying bad idea that was seemingly (if not actually) new, imperialism. In this regard, the inclusion of race, class, and other elements that sat at the center of domestic political, economic, and sociocultural debates in disquisitions about solving the Eastern Question makes total sense. Given, in 1880, the political victory of an approach to the East and to the empire that was explicitly presented as contrary to the preceding form, the question that would soon face British leaders and concern the British public was whether imperial solutions to the Eastern Question had been a dramatic exception or the new rule.

“The Anarchies of the Eastern World, the Rights of the Savage”: The Eastern Question and the Midlothian Campaign On April 10, 1880, The Scotsman wrote jubilantly of the most recent results in a general election that, though less than halfway through, was shaping up to be a Liberal landslide. Latey’s Lancashire witch, taking her cue from Scotland, had made a decision:

163 Gladstone was in fact rather mild for the average Liberal during the era, as regarded the issue of the integration of British Jews into the common Whiggish fold. Lightly antisemitic comments still were in evidence, such as Gladstone’s judgment that Disraeli expressed a “Judaic feeling” in the general shape views and policies—see Shannon, Gladstone, Volume II , 191.

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The victory of the Marquis of Hartington in North-East Lancashire crowns the Liberal triumph in England, as the victory of Mr. Gladstone crowned the Liberal triumph here. Never was a man answered more conclusively than Mr. Cross has been answered by Lancashire…Lancashire thinks today, for the most part, what England thought yesterday, and what Scotland has always thought…This is what Lord Beaconsfield’s policy has done. It has enormously injured the country; it has ruined the Conservative party.164

Hartington’s success and Cross’s failure, especially given their arduous crisscrossing of the county for almost two years, had a certain poetry to it. For in the 1868 general election, Lancashire had been the site of surprise losses for the victorious Liberals. Hartington had lost his race for North Lancashire while, in South West Lancashire, Cross had beaten Gladstone himself. Feeling betrayed given his frequent boosting for the county’s peerless “civic virtues,” only a win in a backup race for Greenwich had saved Gladstone from the embarrassment he would have faced had he won the general election but not a seat.165 Having run unopposed since toppling the People’s William in 1868, Cross barely held on to his seat in 1880 against a strong push by the Liberals in South West Lancashire. The Conservatives had maintained regional strongholds in England, but, even then, these were mostly rural consolation prizes amid crushing urban losses. Disraeli would formally resign on April 21, but it was over long before that. The Conservatives’ humiliation unfolded amid cries of lament in the Tory press. On April 14, the Daily Telegraph put out an exhaustive premortem for the Tories, starting with a pout about the “direful penalties” the paper had suffered for deciding to support “the National Government, for the sake of National interests, through the dangers of the Eastern Question.”166 What these penalties were, considering the paper’s roaring success in going Tory during the Eastern Crisis, is unclear. What was clear was that apparently Disraeli was just a victim of circumstance. “Deluges of rain ruined our English fields,” the Telegraph mocked,

164 The Scotsman, 10 April 1880, col. F, p. 6. 165 On the Liberal weakness in Lancashire in the 1868 general election, see Shannon,

Gladstone, Volume II. 166 Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1880, col. H, p. 4.

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“mainly because Heaven was incensed against the policy of Lord Beaconsfield; but the Liberal majority has brought back good seedtimes.” And to the crime of Beaconsfieldism, which Gladstone used as a euphemism to cast Tory policies as a mixture of aloof neglect at home and egomaniacal nihilism abroad, the paper accused the Liberals of engaging in hyperbole they did not actually believe in. Before the election, Disraeli “filched” Cyprus, Northcote loved “human gore,” and Cranbrook’s only joy was “burning Afghan villages.” After winning, though, Gladstone “blessed everybody all around” and “recovered himself so far as to call the Empire ‘glorious.’” With this charge that Gladstone’s diatribes against Beaconsfieldism were as much tactical as deeply felt, the Telegraph doubled down on its support for Tory foreign policy and imperialism: Without a war or a war tax, they have saved Constantinople from Russia, rendered India impregnable on the Central Asian side, and provided for our future control of the Eastern Question. In the Colonies they have rescued South Africa from terror by savages, augmented splendidly the appanages of England, and knit closer the noble children of the realm to their Imperial mother.

To the verdict that electors had been deceived was added the Evening Standard’s simpler view that the working class showed “an eager desire, amid unusually arduous circumstances, to place the affairs of the country in new hands.”167 As support, the paper turned to the Catholic activist and Liberal-turned-Home Ruler Sir George Bowyer, whose decision not to stand for reelection gave him space to voice his skepticism about the incoming ministry’s mandate.168 Of the “working and poor people” who went Liberal in 1879 and 1880, Bowyer asked “what did these people know or care about the Zulus, the Berlin Treaty and Cyprus, and the Eastern Question? They knew that Mr. Gladstone said that the Government had ruined the country, and they hoped he would do something for them.”169 If Bowyer was right that “a good harvest and an improvement of trade would have made them Conservatives,” then perhaps the foreign 167 “Why the Conservatives Have Been Defeated,” London Evening Standard, 13 April 1880, col. C, p. 2. 168 J. R. MacDonald, “Wallace, Robert (1831–1899).” 169 “The General Election,” London Evening Standard, 12 April 1880, col. E, p. 3.

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focus on the campaign was more often tolerated than thirsted for by those drawn to the Liberal cause. Fittingly, the most complex view of the election’s outcome that emerged out of the Conservative orbit came, on May 1, in the shape of Greenwood’s last leader as editor at the Pall Mall Gazette. Under the title “Political Morality,” he charged the Liberal campaign with hypocrisy given its authors’ own broken promises in the British Isles and abroad between 1868 and 1874: “Our moralists cannot apparently keep to the single highway, though they are infallible guides at the cross-roads.”170 In the middle of the paper, a brief notice amid the evening’s miscellany stated that Greenwood was out.171 All of this garment-rending from the losing side leads us to question some of the precepts emanating from the Midlothian campaign that took up so much of Britain’s attention in the long winter of 1879–1880, especially the idea that the emphasis on morality taken by Gladstone and his imitators was seen, at the time, as the activation of some innate national capacity for compassion. That is, all evidence points to the fact that Gladstone was genuinely moved by the condition of the oppressed, especially when their plight came as a result of British action or inaction. Less clear is whether his audience was as devoted to such beliefs as he was, or whether their support of his take on the Eastern Question predicted any radical departure from the preceding course of action on it. Further, in the ensuing months and years after the 1880 general election, the Eastern Question would come to be repackaged by Gladstone and his closest supporters as a less dangerous issue precisely because it had been removed from the Conservatives’ (and particularly Disraeli’s) hands. This authoritative deemphasis appears to have eventually borne fruit, in that the Midlothian campaign stands in scholarship as a crest of public interest in the Eastern Question, even though the record illustrates a persistent centrality of the issue in Gladstone’s Second Ministry. In this regard, the task is one of assessing the degree to which the Eastern Question played a role in certain signal events in the campaign, as well as the crowd response to those parts of his speeches that promoted a “moral” alternative to imperialism.

170 “Political Morality,” Pall Mall Gazette, 1 May 1880, col. A, p. 1. 171 “To the Readers of the Pall Mall Gazette,” Pall Mall Gazette, 1 May 1880, col. A,

p. 8.

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Our story now moves north from the Midlands and Lancashire to Scotland. Gladstone’s decision to run in Midlothian placed him in a context where, first, his voice would not be lost in the churn of London’s public opinion and, second, he could face a weak Conservative incumbent with Rosebery’s promise to deliver a majority.172 His opponent, the Earl of Dalkeith, was immediately overshadowed by Gladstone’s superior experience and abilities. Dalkeith’s record was also assailed by Rosebery, who had a shrewd sense of political propaganda. Infamously, during the latter half of the campaign an anonymous pamphlet titled Political Achievements of the Earl of Dalkeith made the rounds in the county.173 On opening it up, readers discovered it was entirely blank. Given Rosebery’s role as Gladstone’s campaign manager, it seems unlikely that this joke was not perpetrated under his auspices. Although the Eastern Question and its many faces were clearly at the center of Gladstone’s and Rosebery’s strategy, in the former’s speeches the coverage of issues was both broad and detailed. Due to its many connections to other strains of history, then, the Midlothian campaign, like the Bulgarian Agitation, is among the most commented-on aspects of the Eastern Question, although it was traditionally ignored in diplomacyfocused works on the topic.174 Writers of political histories from the 1960s to the 1990s, like Terry Jenkins, Richard Shannon, Marvin Swartz, and Colin Matthew, were more likely to discuss it than Eastern Question scholars.175 The chief insight of these works is the politically and socially revolutionary nature of the campaign as an event, in terms of 172 Ian St. John, Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 246. 173 Political Achievements of the Earl of Dalkeith: Carefully Compiled from Trustworthy Sources (Edinburgh: “Printed for the Author,” 1880). 174 For example, the Midlothian campaign escaped the attention of classic außenpolitik

scholars like J. A. R. Marriott and W. N. Medlicott throughout their books’ many editions. This model was followed by M. S. Anderson’s otherwise much more sophisticated study— a strange omission given the author’s appreciation of the importance of domestic politics and culture otherwise. Walter Wirthwein’s, R. W. Seton-Watson’s, and Richard Millman’s foundational books on Britain and the Eastern Crisis end in the aftermath of the Berlin Congress. As the PhD thesis that this project originated in uses the same general endpoint, such points of demarcation are not in my view inappropriate. These junctures simply were not perceived as quite so clearly defined at the time in question. 175 All of these authors are discussed in this and/or other chapters of this work. In particular, Swartz’s work is most useful on this topic in relation to the Eastern Question’s relation to British involvement in Egypt—see pp. 112–144 of his book, cited above.

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both the daily coverage of it by the media and its effect on the Liberal Party, which over the 1879–1880 winter saw everyone from establishment types like Hartington and Harcourt, to old firebrands like John Bright, to up-and-comers like Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke draw energy from Gladstone’s speechifying and Rosebery’s electioneering. In particular, as Jenkins discusses, Liberal leaders’ well-documented surprise at the public’s vigorous response to Gladstone’s speeches shows that his return to power was not perceived at the time as an inevitable turn of events.176 Perhaps Gladstone’s explosive victory served to obscure and eventually obviate other aspects of public passion, among them the Eastern Question. But, as with all campaigns, rhythms of continuity ran throughout the event, and contemporaries held recent memories of the campaign after the excitement died down. Recent scholarship from Stéphanie Prévost, Michelle Tusan, and others testifies to this fact.177 Tellingly, it appears that the downplaying of the Eastern Question’s role in Victorian society occurred even in the midst of Gladstone’s mounting oratory crusade, the cover-up conducted by many of the same people who had been so animated against the Conservatives’ Eastern policy and imperial solutions. Prévost cites the Duke of Argyll’s 1879 history of the Eastern Question, in which Gladstone’s often friend and sometimes foe declared that “the Eastern Question has no bearing upon domestic politics.”178 In essence, Argyll insisted that the Eastern Question existed only in the foreign realm, had no relationship to matters at home, and had been inserted into British life by a Tory leader looking for a wedge issue to divert attention from his own misrule.

176 Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 102–105. 177 Stéphanie Prévost’s work tracking the Eastern Question in the context of Liberal

politics and pressure groups does the best job in this area, with Michelle Tusan’s and Gary Bass’s on humanitarianism, and Biagini’s on Home Rule providing additional points of contact between Eastern, imperial, and domestic affairs related to the Midlothian campaign. See Stéphanie Prévost, “New Perspectives on the Eastern Question(s) in LateVictorian Britain, or How “the Eastern Question” Affected British Politics (1881–1901),” Représentations dans le Monde Anglophone, CEMRA, 2015; Tusan, The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, 31–37 and Smyrna’s Ashes, 27–30; Bass, 305–312; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 20 and British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 161–168. 178 Prévost, 93. It is also worth noting that R. W. Seton-Watson himself promoted Argyll’s study as the most “sane” of the era—strange for an author focused on arguing the opposite of Argyll’s opinion on Innenpolitik. See Seton-Watson, 279.

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But clearly Argyll’s view of the Eastern Question runs counter to what he and most of his fellow Liberals had been saying throughout the era, not least because the damage to Britain’s moral fiber by ignoring Ottoman Christians’ suffering was held up, again and again, as a product of a moral degradation of British society, most visible in Tory neglect of British Christians’ suffering. Argyll, for all of his well-earned stature, was being disingenuous. After all, it had been he who said, in 1877, that “sentiment rules the world…all moral feeling is founded on sentiment” in criticizing Lord Derby’s unsentimental approach to the question of whether the oppression of Ottoman Christians affected British interests and required some kind of pressure or intervention to render them aid.179 Thus, stripping the Midlothian campaign of its reliance on the Eastern Question in preference for its home-and-hearth elements served as a way for Liberal leaders to retract from the Beaconsfieldist glamour of the external, Eastern, and imperial after they had won. But this was an aspiration not a reality, as made clear both in terms of Gladstone’s speeches and the response from the overflow crowds that came to see him speak. Any reader of the speeches can see the intermingling of the domestic, foreign, and imperial in every speech of the campaign, which ran in two phases from late November to early December 1879 and mid-March to early April 1880. In his first speech, at Edinburgh’s George Street Music

179 See p. 202 of George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, “The Eastern Question: Address in Answer to the Queen’s Speech in 1877,” in Famous Speeches: Selected and Edited, with Introductory Notes, ed. Herbert Paul (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1912), 198–203. There were other subject-specific ironies here, as it had been Argyll who, while serving as India secretary in Gladstone’s First Ministry, cautioned the Cabinet against Viceroy Northbrook’s proposal to send military aid to Amir Sher Ali Khan after Russia’s conquest of Khiva in 1873, which led the amir in turn to reach out to Russian agents after the denial of British help. Later, in December 1878, Sir Robert Peel (the former prime minister’s son and a Liberal dissident who supported Disraeli during the Eastern Crisis) accused Gladstone in Parliament of blaming the problems with Sher Ali Khan on Disraeli and Salisbury, alleging that Argyll had admitted in a letter to The Times that the problem started with him. Such insinuations so infuriated Argyll that, the same year as his twovolume Eastern Question study came out, he published a nearly 300-page defense of his and the Liberal Government’s Afghan policy. On the denial of British aid to Afghanistan in 1873, see Meyer and Brysac, 182; for the debate between Peel and Gladstone, see Hansard, Parl.Debs. (series 3) vol. 243, col. 530–622 (10 December 1878); for Argyll’s letter to The Times, see George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, “The Afghan Question,” The Times, 28 November 1878, col. D, p. 10; for Argyll’s defense of his response to Northbrook, see George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, The Afghan Question from 1841 to 1878 (London: Strahan & Company, 1879), 103–105.

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Hall on November 25, 1879, Gladstone detailed to the 1,000 or so in attendance the responsibilities undertaken by the British Empire in the East.180 Britain had “annexed the island of Cyprus,” taken on with France “the virtual government of Egypt,” made itself “responsible for the good government of Turkey in Asia,” and “undertaken to defend the Armenian frontier of Turkey against Russia” despite the geographical challenges of doing so.181 What is more, Britain had “caused [Afghanistan] to be added to the anarchies of the Eastern world, and we have become responsible for the management of the millions of warlike but very partially civilized people whom it contains.”182 In response to the speech, Edinburgh’s Daily Review applauded Gladstone for having found, in attacking the Government’s Eastern policy, a formula to distill all of the various complaints of the last half decade, his mastery of oratory giving “old materials” a “charm of novelty.”183 Gladstone’s innovation was the packaging of the issues into a single, compelling unit. First breaking with the “generous traditions of British policy” by ignoring the oppression of Ottoman Christians, the paper summarized, the Conservative Party had then taken over an Ottoman island and fought an unnecessary war in Central Asia. This made Britain responsible in the East for “evolving order and peace out of that complex chaos,” without solving anything for anyone. The next day in Dalkeith, Gladstone spoke at the town’s Corn Exchange to a crowd of about 3,000 from mostly farming villages and a few small industrial towns. This was prime territory to attack the Government for ignoring agricultural and economic problems in preference for Eastern adventures. Gladstone immediately explained his reason for focusing on foreign matters when, as he and the bulk of his party had been saying, domestic problems had become so acute. To cheers reported by the Dalkeith Advertiser, he declared that “domestic questions are to a great extent absorbed in foreign questions.”184 The British 180 The publisher Andrew Elliot’s collection of the speeches states that the hall held about 1,000 people and was filled. See William Ewart Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1879), 25. 181 Ibid., 49. 182 Ibid. 183 Daily Review, 26 November 1879, col. B, p. 4. 184 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 62; “In

Dalkeith Yesterday,” Dalkeith Advertiser, 27 November 1879, col. A, p. 3.

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Empire had become like Swift’s Gulliver, “tied down…by all sorts of covenants” across a chaotic globe, with the Tories promising “new and strange entanglements” rather than an escape plan.185 When Gladstone left the Corn Exchange, a procession of 300 “youths of the locality” bearing torches escorted him and his wife, Catherine, to the Foresters’ Hall.186 In the hall waiting were at least 800 people, with most of the tickets reserved for women and Catherine joining him on the dais alongside Rosebery’s wife Hannah and other prominent local women.187 In the gallery, committees of women from the local parishes had hung a banner reading, “Welcome from the Ladies—Peace, Retrenchment and Reform.”188 Taking the first goal on this list, “peace,” and stating that he would speak to crowd “as women,” Gladstone focused on the Eastern Question and the consequences of imperialism rather than on granular issues.189 “The harder, and sterner, and drier lessons of politics are little to your taste,” he explained, “You do not concern yourselves with abstract propositions.”190 Unlike Argyll, he felt that the “grinding oppression” of the Balkans’ formerly great races was “no matter of dry political argument” but a case of defending liberty.191 After painting affecting scenes of Zulus’ “naked bodies” torn to shreds by modern weaponry and Afghan women and children dying in the snow amid the burning remains of their village, the most dramatic moment came when he called on the women to reject the “deadly fascinations” of war and be suspicious of any “appeals to national pride.”192 The Lilliputians whose problems now bound down the British colossus were, if only left alone, not such different or bad people: Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the

185 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 66. 186 “Torch-Light Procession,” Dalkeith Advertiser, 27 November 1879, col. E, p. 3. 187 “Meeting in the Foresters’ Hall,” Dalkeith Advertiser, 27 November 1879, col. E,

p. 3. 188 Ibid. 189 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 90. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid., 92. 192 Ibid., 94.

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hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.193

After the speech, the women, deprived of a choice in the election of the man in front of them, exercised the franchise they did have in that space, namely the right to vote to officially thank the visitors for coming.194 Outside, the torchbearing youths had formed a fiery corridor. Folding into a mass behind the Gladstones as they processed by and following them into the train station, the youths then piled their torches on the tracks to make a bonfire and “cheered to their heart’s content” around it as the dignitaries’ train chugged off into the night.195 Often erroneously folded into his speech at the Dalkeith Corn Exchange, the women’s speech at the Foresters’ Hall is, in my mind, the most noteworthy event in the whole Midlothian campaign. In it, Gladstone imparted to the Eastern Question a pathos evocative of Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East and not replicated with the same poignancy in the remainder of the campaign. The gender of the crowd was key, as was his cognizance that, because of its gender, this was not a speech to electors. In avoiding minutiae and focusing on core moral values in this speech, as Tusan notes, Gladstone sought to highlight the duty of women, in keeping with Victorian domesticity, to protect “the values of hearth and home.”196 Moreover, within Gladstone’s patronizing of women’s intellectual capacity and interests lay a telling sense that, absent the need to speak to electors, he thought that the Eastern Question and Britain’s role in it to be the most accessible topic and the one most likely to resonate with the public at large. Indeed, much has been made of the most famous occasion in the campaign, namely his address in Edinburgh’s Waverley Market on 193 Ibid. 194 “Meeting in the Foresters’ Hall,” Dalkeith Advertiser, 27 November 1879, col. E,

p. 3. 195 “Torch-Light Procession,” Dalkeith Advertiser, 27 November 1879, col. E, p. 3. 196 Tusan, The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide, 34.

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November 29 in which 20,000 attended—a surreal spectacle that featured a tangle of bodies floating atop a “vast living sea of heads,” in the words of The Scotsman, people having fainted in the crush and been pushed up to bob along on the hands of their still-standing neighbors.197 But, given that events I have profiled in earlier chapters drew attendance into the six figures and featured much more chaotic scenes, what is most remarkable is how closely the context and speech matched that of his day speaking to Dalkeith’s female inhabitants.198 Here again, the target was less those who would vote for him but the public in general, for the city of Edinburgh had its own constituency and thousands of out-of-towners had traveled there for a chance to see Gladstone speak.199 And like before, the Waverley Market speech was his second of the evening, as he first gave a long, detailed address at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange to about 4,700 Edinburgh electors (including a jam-packed women’s gallery).200 Here again, excitement was built by the city’s youth, this time students at the University of Edinburgh—wielding not torches but “huge sticks” that they used to push their way to the front of the throng waiting at a barricade that had been built around the market entrances.201 Here again (and as at every event in the campaign), women made up a significant portion of the audience, with the barricades nearest the entrances to the gallery, which had been reserved for female ticket-holders, soon “so besieged with ladies” that a police detail was sent

197 “Drive to Waverley Market,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. G, p. 5; also, see Shannon, Gladstone, Volume II , 239. 198 Perhaps it was true that 20,000 in an interior space was unprecedented in Scotland, but the frequent claims then and since that it was unique in all of British history are hyperbolic. A few days earlier, on November 25, John Bright recorded that he and Hartington spoke to the same number inside Manchester’s Pomona Palace, with an estimate of 40,000 waiting outside—see John Bright, The Diaries of John Bright, ed. R. A. J. Walling (London: Cassell & Co., 1930), 430. 199 See H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58–59. 200 W. E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 130; “Gladstone Meeting in the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh: The Ladies’ Gallery,” Illustrated London News, 6 December 1879, col. A, p. 520. See Fig. 7.4 for image. 201 “The Waverley Market Meeting,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. G, pp. 5– 6. It is worth noting here that it is likely that most of these students were themselves ineligible to vote, in Edinburgh or anywhere else, given the property requirements and the fact that the voting age was 21.

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Fig. 7.4 “Gladstone Meeting in the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh: The Ladies’ Gallery” (Copyright: Courtesy of HathiTrust)

to keep them from breaking in.202 Eventually, the women had pushed the barricades to their breaking point and the police opened them up. As the women rushed into the gallery, the floor below them was rapidly packed tightly, mostly with men associated directly or simply by class and gender with the city’s workingmen’s organizations.203 After Gladstone arrived and took the stage, he remarked to “this great ocean of human life” that, like at the Foresters’ Hall, this was not the place for “minute criticism” of the Government.204 He would focus

202 “Drive to Waverley Market,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. G, p. 6. 203 Ibid. 204 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 159.

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instead on a single subject: Britain’s “unhappy position” if it continued to support the Ottomans over the “struggling provinces and principalities of the East.”205 As he had to the women of Dalkeith, Gladstone’s call to the women above him and the men below him was to support only those policies in which Britain used its “vast moral influence” for the cause of freedom and not of slavery.206 Influence over politics in formerly Ottoman lands was not Russia’s right, not Austria-Hungary’s right, and not Britain’s right (even, he joked, if the Ottomans agreed to it, as in the case of the Cyprus Convention).207 The Ottoman “succession,” Gladstone said to great cheers, “is to pass to the people of those countries; to those who had reared them to a state of civilisation when the great calamity of Ottoman conquest spread like a wild wave over that portion of the earth, and buried that civilisation under its overwhelming force.”208 Instead of dominating the East like British forces had in Cyprus and Afghanistan, he promised that a Liberal Government would support Eastern peoples’ self-determination, giving them “cause to remember the name of Great Britain among the names of those who have contributed to the happy and blessed change.”209 As in the Foresters’ Hall, the speech’s poetic impact was aided by its brevity. Any longer, as he said at the outset, and “my strength would not suffice; your patience must be exhausted.”210 This was true: so much heat and carbon dioxide had filled the overpacked building that, at two points, Catherine handed down her own supply of smelling salts to revive men who had fainted.211 Given these anxious circumstances and without 205 Ibid. Gladstone noted that the topic had been mentioned in the opening address by Rosebery. The relevant portion of that address reads: “We would also express our hearty concurrence in those principles of foreign policy which you have advocated in Opposition, and which we believe to be consistent with the true and highests [sic] interests of the British Empire. We owe it in great measure to your resolute and courageous opposition to the Eastern policy of Lord Beaconsfield that we have escaped the calamities of a European war and responsibility for the misgovernment of the Turkish dominions.” See “The Waverley Market Meeting,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. C, p. 6. 206 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 163. 207 Ibid., 160. 208 Ibid. The Scotsman reported “loud cheers” during this section—see “The Waverley Market Meeting,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. D, p. 6. 209 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 162. 210 Ibid., 159. 211 “The Waverley Market Meeting,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. B, p. 6.

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Gladstone having a need to sway the electors of a specific constituency, it is clearly that he saw a supportive crowd and decided to talk about something that he knew everyone had been exposed to for years and, even more importantly, reliably animated them if they liked him even a little.212 He knew also that the whole affair would be written up by reporters there and reprinted throughout the country; by now, he knew that the Eastern Question sold papers.213 Gladstone’s tactic worked, and by the time he began his summation the crowd was roaring its approval at the end of almost every sentence. Feeling confident, he commented that their enthusiasm must mean that they agreed with his view of the role of the British Empire in the East.214 When the cheering of that statement died down, a lone voice cried out “Beaconsfield for ever” into the silence, which immediately dissolved into “loud groaning and hissing” and calls to eject the Beaconsfieldist in their midst.215 This was a tidy illustration of how the general election would end up going for the Conservatives. After they unexpectedly won a by-election at Southwark in mid-February 1880 by a healthy margin, Disraeli decided to take a gamble, dissolving Parliament on March 8. His stated reason was that tackling the mounting calls in Ireland for Home Rule required a clear mandate from the electorate—a conspicuous divergence from foreign and economic troubles that Gladstone dismissed as a ploy to “work upon your fears by dark allusions to the repeal of the Union and the abandonment of the Colonies.”216 Perhaps it was a ploy, but it was also accurate: settling the issue of Irish reform and self-government would sit at the center of every ministry for the next two generations. Gladstone set out 212 Colin Matthew says that Gladstone’s speeches “were addressed to an electorate assumed to be highly politicized,” a fact testified to both here and before in my documentation of contemporary accounts of public meetings, petitions, and demonstrations—see Gladstone 1875–1898, 51. 213 Ian St. John notes on p. 247 of his book that The Times devoted at least 250,000 words of transcripts of Gladstone’s speeches. The Scotsman’s own account on December 1 ran to over 25,000 words in a single issue, including editorial comments, scene-painting, speech transcripts, and detailed bracketed comments about crowd response. 214 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879, 162. 215 “The Waverley Market Meeting,” The Scotsman, 1 December 1879, col. E, p. 6. 216 Qtd. in Vol. 1 of Thomas F. G. Coates, Lord Rosebery: His Life and Speeches

(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1900), 334. Disraeli’s letter to the Duke of Marlborough, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the time, on the topic can be found in the same work on pp. 332–334.

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from London on March 16 for Scotland and, for the next three weeks, he often spoke in the same places he had in November and December 1879.217 However, Gladstone’s laser focus on how Britain should appropriately respond to the Eastern Question specifically and to global disorder in general remained the same. The previous tour had proved that this was the winning issue, and he doubled down on describing the connection between it and Britain’s domestic context as both obvious and critical. As Gladstone said at Davidson’s Mains, just northwest of Edinburgh, on March 19, the rift in the Concert of Europe that had opened over the Russo-Turkish War “is not limited to foreign relations. It reacts upon you,” citing how the war had hurt trade and thus cost jobs.218 Gladstone remained most effective when speaking in universals, and his first tour had proved that what his audience wanted was its own version of national pride and imperial glory to revel in. The Jingoes could not be allowed to have a corner on the interests and cause of Britain and its empire. At Stow on March 30, Gladstone told a crowd of 3,500 that Liberal leaders had always relied on Britain’s unique reputation for morality rather than imperialism to solve European and Eastern problems, ending with the promise that the Liberal Party would never abandon its “steady, unflinching regard [for] the interests of our own Empire.”219 The crowd erupted in elation.220 This is the performance they came to see, not a dour, routine disquisition. When a man attempted to ask a question about religion in the next census while people were still applauding, the Daily Review reported that the crowd shouted him down with “hisses and uproar” and jeers to get to the point or be quiet.221 Gladstone, rising again, replied that the question was not relevant to his campaign.222 Still, Gladstone was already preparing for the complex work of taking over the country’s foreign and imperial policy. He addressed criticism that

217 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 409–410. 218 William Ewart Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, March and April 1880

(Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1880), 95. 219 Ibid., 323–325. 220 Multiple sources note “loud and prolonged cheering” at this point (and others). 221 “Great Speech on Finance and Foreign Opinion by Mr Gladstone at Stow,” Daily

Review, 31 March 1880, col. C, p. 4. 222 Ibid.

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his previous speaking tour had, by his call to stand back from Balkan politics and stop violently intervening in foreign lands, allowed other imperial powers to move in with no fear of British reprisal. Reflecting Gladstone’s own personal views, as well as the popular success the Liberals had had in the previous months attacking the Dual Alliance, he targeted Austria-Hungary as the main bad actor in the Balkans.223 Citing reports in the Tory Edinburgh Courant and the Evening Standard that alleged that Emperor Franz Joseph was hoping for a Conservative victory in the general election, Gladstone was careful to say, at Penicuik on March 25, that he had only “condemned the foreign policy of Austria.”224 This was a neat way to portray his attack on Beaconsfieldism as a cause against selfish and immoral actors no matter where they were, although the Earl of Dalkeith complained, himself speaking at Dalkeith’s Foresters’ Hall the following week, that Gladstone’s marked anti-Austrian views “wounded the susceptibilities” of a British ally.225 Gladstone also distanced himself from the Cobdenite Manchester School, whose anti-war and anti-imperial positions may have overlapped with his but which he dismissed, at the Edinburgh Music Hall on March 17, as a “dream of Paradise upon earth” that would always be “rudely dispelled by the shock of experience.”226 The chief dreamer in that school after Cobden’s death, John Bright, did not complain about the oblique slight, but it foretold his disappointment in and split from Gladstone over the invasion of Egypt in 1882.227 With the general election set to commence on the last day of March, Gladstone was increasingly confident but also careful to not fall into any traps. The night before the election, he wrote a prayer in his diary promising to accept from God whatever happened, “lift us up, or trample

223 Shannon, Gladstone, Volume II , 243. 224 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, March and April 1880, 277–279. 225 “The Earl of Dalkeith in Dalkeith,” Edinburgh Evening News, 2 April 1880, col. F,

p. 2. 226 Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, March and April 1880, 30. 227 The relevant part of Bright’s diaries shows no mention of his taking offense at the

comment, although he must have noticed it—see Bright, 434–438.

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us down.”228 The next day, the first results in, he went to bed in Edinburgh with God’s answer: already “by 11 P.M. the doom of the Govt came in view.”229

Conclusion: The People’s Eastern Question, the People’s Empire Gladstone’s mating of principle and moderation worked, in Midlothian first and then nationally. When the votes were in, the Liberals had gained 352 seats, the Conservatives 237, and the Home Rule League 63. Moreover, the Liberals won the popular vote by a margin of over 12%, making up for their irritation at having won by almost 8% in 1874 while still losing almost 150 seats. Gladstone himself won by 7% over the totally outmatched Lord Dalkeith, who claimed on April 7 that “influences, both misguided and illegitimate” and “peculiar tactics” had been employed by the Liberals to defeat him—the latter likely a sulky reference to the blank book of his achievements the Liberals had printed.230 Dalkeith was also probably upset over “riotous proceedings” that accompanied his opponent’s victory in his hometown two days earlier, which were set off when his father, the Duke of Buccleuch, sent his gardener into town to complain about Gladstonian partying. The gardener took his walking stick and poked at a bonfire a pro-Gladstone crowd had built, demanding that it be put it out because, as The Scotsman reported, “it was giving great offense” to the residents of town’s ducal palace.231 The crowd was already angry because the revelers had endured “taunts of the Conservatives and uncalled for interference of the police.” The paper rather buried the lede, as apparently the police became involved when, after Gladstone’s son Herbert was reported to have lost his election at Middlesex, Dalkeith’s Tories yelled the news out the windows of the hotel at which they were gathered. Although Herbert 228 William Ewart Gladstone, 30 March 1880, The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinet Minutes and Prime-Ministerial Correspondence, Volume IX: January 1875-December 1880, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 496. 229 Ibid., 31 March 1880, 497. 230 “Address from the Earl of Dalkeith,” Glasgow Evening Citizen, 7 April 1880, col.

F, p. 2. 231 “The Mid-Lothian Election—Riotous Proceedings at Dalkeith,” The Scotsman, 7 April 1880, col. C, p. 9.

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had in fact lost, Liberal crowds outside took this as an insulting lie and smashed the hotel’s windows and attacked the responding police with rocks.232 By this point 5,000 strong, the crowd then pulled up locals’ fences and garden stakes and built more fires, continuing to throw “stones, barrel staves, and other missiles” at the police, who after receiving reinforcements brutally attacked the crowd, enlisting local Tories who dealt with their disappointment by beating up their Liberal neighbors and breaking the windows of the local Liberal headquarters. The symbolic and communal violence in Dalkeith was mild compared to that of Fife, across the Firth of Forth from Midlothian, where Disraeli was burned in effigy in multiple towns—at Auchtermuchty, “amidst great laughter” and dancing, at Freuchie amid the ringing of church bells, and at Tillicoultry “amidst much uproar and groans” and a fireworks display.233 At Huntly, farther north, an effigy-burning was overseen by a Liberal mob that ran the local Tories out of town, while at Barrowin-Furness, in northern Lancashire, a Disraeli effigy wearing a replica of Turnerelli’s wreath was “attacked by roughs,” torn apart, and the wreath stolen.234 A crowd of over 10,000 then gathered in the town square and, in the ensuing chaos, ransacked both parties’ local headquarters inside and out.235 To be sure, elections in the era were routinely marked by violence, while effigy-burning is a tradition across the British Isles.236 And much of the destruction was indiscriminate: in Huntly, the Tory-hunting mob also threw crows’ eggs at local Liberal leaders, and at Barrow-in-Furness the North Cheshire Herald determined that the worst offenders were simply

232 In a bit of nepotism, Herbert’s loss at Middlesex was assuaged by his being given the opportunity to stand for a by-election at Leeds, which had a vacancy due to the fact that his father had won it as a backup to Midlothian. 233 “The General Elections—Auchtermuchty,” Dundee Courier, 13 April 1880, col. D, p. 3; “The General Elections—Freuchie,” Dundee Courier, 13 April 1880, col. D, p. 3; “The General Elections—Tillicoultry,” Dundee Courier, 13 April 1880, col. D, p. 3. 234 “Huntly,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, 7 April 1880, col. D, p. 5; “Election Riots,” North Cheshire Herald, 17 April 1880, col. C, p. 6. 235 “Election Riots,” North Cheshire Herald, 17 April 1880, col. C, p. 6. 236 On the local roots of effigy-burning in the nineteenth century, see the chapter

“Acts of Disapproval: Skimmington Riding” on pp. 71–92 of Jacqueline Dillion’s Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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boys taking advantage of the political conflict around them.237 But it was clear that, for many of the communities that had been following the Midlothian contest closely, the campaign had stirred up and confused as much as it had settled and clarified. Yet although the Liberals would face challenges almost immediately on taking over, the key outcome of the period between 1878 Berlin Congress and the 1880 general election was the Conservatives’ failure to anticipate the popular effect of so much attention on foreign and imperial affairs in the previous decade. Gladstone’s performances, Rosebery’s management, and all of those who rode their coattails had produced not just a political revolution in electoral politics, but a societywide emotional phenomenon. This was, then, a victory not just for Gladstone and his party but for Argyll’s “sentiment,” and in many ways it relied on the sidelining of elite politics. The most popular and arguably effective actions on Gladstone’s and Rosebery’s part during the Midlothian campaign were those that encouraged people to insist that politics and power were not remote from them. Gladstone was also successful in accepting Liberals’ more pragmatically negative views of British imperialism and involvement in the East while, at the same time, proposing an internationalist vision for world peace that dishonored the Tory version as an empty gesture. Yes, imperialism was expensive, but its chief problem was that it was done for no other cause than the aggrandizement of already-powerful individuals. Yes, the Eastern Question was frightening, but it could not be withdrawn from just because the Tories had put it at the center of things. The British Empire would lead, as an empire but a more ascetic one than presented by the Conservatives, for whom Turnerelli’s fake gold wreath—funded by the working class and ultimately a burden—acted as an appropriate symbol. The Eastern Question, far from being a distant issue of unfathomable intricacy, was placed in the hands of the populace by its greatest living statesman with a degree of accessibility that proved to be beyond the capacity of his Tory opponents. Some of this populace—a small minority, ultimately—could vote, so focusing only on voting matters would miss the majority, whose animation could be much better secured by painting a simple, optimistic portrait of a great nation and empire temporarily 237 “Huntly,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, 7 April 1880, col. D, p. 5; “Election Riots,” North Cheshire Herald, 17 April 1880, col. C, p. 6.

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contaminated by various toxins. Devolving the Eastern Question, transporting it from the battlefields and conference rooms of foreign lands to the platforms and galleries of the meeting halls dotting the homeland, demonstrated a confidence that foreign and imperial policy was just as much the possession of the average person as it was of the most eminent diplomats. This was the essence of the popularity—the cult—of the People’s William. It was not party artifice, but a genuine expression of gratitude for the democratization of political debate, the making common of the rarified. Evoking the old nickname for Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder, the Liberal press took to calling Gladstone “the great Commoner” in late April 1880, as a way to express anger that Queen Victoria waited to ask him to form a Government in her false hope that either Hartington or Lord Granville could, as leaders in the Commons and Lords respectively, could be persuaded to take charge.238 Her attempts failed and she relented, finally meeting with Gladstone on April 24. A few days later Disraeli wrote to Lady Chesterfield that he might not write to her much anymore, for “I am no longer responsible in any sense.”239 Two weeks later, another letter: “I am alone; I see nobody; I hear nothing.”240 Disraeli’s old rival, already (indeed, perhaps perpetually) hard at work, had the opposite view of his significance, writing on May 20 that “the Almighty has employed me for His purposes in a manner larger or more special than before.”241 The issue was whether the empire could be set on a different path than it already was on, or whether yet another version of the Eastern Question would arise to obstruct his plans.

238 See, for example, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 24 April 1880, col. D, p. 2; “Mr. Gladstone First Minister,” Belfast Morning News, 24 April 1880, col. H, p. 2; “The Political Crisis,” Sheffield Independent, 24 April 1880, col. D, p. 6. 239 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 29 April 1880, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 356. Emphasis original. 240 Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield, 10 May 1880, Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, Vol. II , 357. 241 Gladstone, 20 May 1880, The Gladstone Diaries: Volume IX: January 1875December 1880, 526.

CHAPTER 8

“The Eastern Question Will Never Be Solved”: The Perseverance of History

A Dog of the Regiment Readers will recall, several chapters ago, an opening vignette that referenced the South London Palace’s quickly composed ballet to honor the 1878 Cyprus Convention, featuring a “damsel” dressed in a soldier’s uniform as Sir Garnet Wolseley, performing a salvifying, imperial act to free Cyprus from a Muslim regime depicted as a gorgeous, dissolute wreck. Four years later, another fast-tracked popular production came to Southwark in the form of Stanley and Morgan’s Egypt for the Egyptians, a long-running show that capitalized on the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 by staging what appears to have been an elaborate, frenetic, dog-centered review at the Elephant and Castle Theatre, advertised as the “coolest and best ventilated theatre in London” and only a five-minute walk from the South.1 In Stanley and Morgan’s act, which was also shown nightly at various times by the same troupe throughout London at often rather distantly

1 “New Elephant and Castle Theatre,” South London Press, 9 June 1883, col. E, p. 8.

“The Eastern Question Will Never Be Solved”: “Jottings—By an Eclectic,” National Independent and People’s Advocate, 28 June 1878, col. F, p. 2. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0_8

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separated music halls, the authors showcased their “comic vocal” duetting and “scientific swordsmen” credentials alongside the charms of “their famous Newfoundland Dog Lion” to, as the London and Provincial Entr’acte had it, a “hurricane of applause and recalls in the greatest and most attractive Military Sketch ever produced on a Music-Hall Stage.”2 With the longer title of Egypt for the Egyptians, or the Dog of the Regiment, Stanley, Morgan, and Lion regaled London’s pleasure-seekers throughout 1882 and beyond with topical content, promising: “Sensational incidents—the flag of truce—Arabi Pasha’s Spy—the charge on Kassassin. Wonderful new acts by the beautiful dog Lion. Stirring national music. Real Egyptian and English Soldiers, Uniforms, and Accoutrements.”3 Given the exceedingly tight, crosstown schedules detailed in their advertisements, an image is conjured: a solidly packed hansom hurtles through dim London streets toward eagerly waiting crowds, Lion’s head out the window and bits and pieces of his masters’ costumery fluttering from the edges of a hastily shut chest lashed atop the cab. Their scientific swords glinting in the moonlight, Stanley and Morgan give each other notes, strategizing on how to make their show bigger, better, fresher.

Egypt for the Britons, or Sir Garnet to the Rescue Like Cyprus before it, Egypt for the Egyptians could not have been produced without the experience of the 1870s. The backdrop, conduct, and aftermath of the Eastern Crisis, with its almost constant vicissitudes and catastrophes, had changed British society. Just as future British culture contained the stamp of this tumultuous period, Britain’s future external policy was by necessity shaped by the various tactics its policymakers adopted in their attempts to respond to the Crisis in a way that fit with domestic British social and political values. The Franco-Prussian War and the Khiva campaign provided the stimuli for, respectively, the European and global consequences of threats to the status quo enjoyed since 1856. What is more, in the pivotal period between the 1878 Congress of Berlin and the 1880 general election, the issue of whether the Tories had been 2 “I must dot that down!—Stanley and Morgan,” London and Provincial Entr’acte, 17 September 1883, col. C, p. 11. 3 “I must dot that down!—Stanley and Morgan,” London and Provincial Entr’acte, 25 November 1882, col. C, p. 13.

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right in their method of addressing the Eastern Question continued to be unresolved, meaning that in a sense the Eastern Crisis never really ended as neatly as the “peace with honour” fanatics would have had it. As for Egypt, a much less subtle exertion of Britain’s imperial might than the acquisition of Cyprus came in the form of Britain’s invasion of the country and its quashing of a nationalist revolt, whose leaders main goal was regaining financial and political independence after Egypt’s debt crisis had allowed foreign powers to take over the reins of much of Egypt’s government. This decision in 1882 to instigate this conflict and, more importantly, the occupation that followed it confounded those who had assumed that a Gladstone ministry would halt the progress of “imperial adventuring” that had been so effectively attacked by the Liberal Party and its various affiliates in the preceding half decade. In an era of growing literacy and political involvement, this rapid sequence of events led to the realignment of Britain’s political forces around the public’s new beliefs and interests, producing significant shifts in the way politicians arranged themselves around future foreign, imperial, and domestic issues. Though imperialism, broadly written, became the solution when all was said and done, it was never inevitable and never uncontested. In other words, all of this progress toward acquiring putatively Eastern places as fantasy vassal states of the British Empire was, in any given moment, ongoing and in-flux, simultaneously never final and never oblivious of what came before. Citing Britain’s arch-Turcophobe and arch-antisemite E. A. Freeman, the National Independent and People’s Advocate (a pro-temperance—and thus anti-Tory—organ4 ), declared at the end of June 1878, with the Berlin Congress still in session: It was the laudable intention of the Russian people—not its diplomatists— to cure the Turk of his pranks, and wipe him from the map. The great blunder on the part of our Government was allowing Russia to do this work single-handed. The Turk crippled, the diplomatists of Russia and England put their heads together with the object of patching things up and leaving the difficulty unsolved. ‘The Turkish power,’ says Freeman—and we agree with him, ‘is not a nation, not a government but a band of robbers. All the mischief has come of treating these robbers as something other than the mere robbers which they are. Till diplomatists open their eyes, and all

4 See Volume II of Hubbard’s Newspaper and Bank Directory of the World, ed. H. P. Hubbard (New Haven: International Newspaper Agency, 1882), 1617.

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the robbers to be dealt with as robbers, the difficulties and complications will never be over, the Eastern Question will never be solved.’5

This is a remarkably illuminating insight into the ideal global imaginary of those Britons so-minded to this viewpoint, professing a unitarily anti-Ottoman, anti-Muslim, and antisemitic world order, in which Britain would band with any and all who would commit, apparently in some kind of Western blood pact, to the obliteration of the chief Muslim power in the world. At the same time, as we have seen in a variety of places in this study, an ample portion of British society was unconvinced that the Ottoman Empire (and Muslims more broadly) posed an existential threat to Christendom, while some Britons went as far as to defend Ottoman conduct by citing those cases where British-authored massacres and other abuses of power had been papered over. Still, treating 1870s Britain as a site of increasing Eastern anxieties cannot be avoided as the outcome of populist reactions to perceptions of global disorder and Britain’s responsibility in addressing the same. The period before the Eastern Crisis laid the groundwork for a referendum on the British Empire’s role in addressing the popularized depictions of Eastern confusion and decay of existing systems. The Eastern Crisis was thus a “crisis” only in the sense of the manifest realization of these worries. The phase immediately following the Crisis provided a series of physical consequences of Britain taking charge in “solving” the Eastern Question. Indeed, not so surprisingly some of the effects of the Eastern Crisis were felt almost immediately. As I have detailed, just as Britain’s eyes were moving away from the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, they were diverted even farther eastward to Afghanistan. The Second AngloAfghan War saw the carrying out of a working geopolitical theory set forth by the Government, namely that Russia’s gains during the RussoTurkish War posited a direct threat to the safety of the Britain’s Eastern territories.6 Based on the belief that Russia intended to influence the foreign policy of Afghanistan with malicious intent toward India, Britain’s

5 “Jottings—By an Eclectic,” National Independent and People’s Advocate, 28 June 1878, col. F, p. 2. 6 For a summary of these conditions, see Meyer and Brysac, 184–186.

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object in invading Afghanistan was to concede that it would follow British foreign policy and not that of any other power, least of all Russia’s.7 The Afghan war also offered Britain, after over three years of indecision and anxiety, the opportunity to be involved directly in a fight over some aspect of the Eastern Question. The fact that the war went far better than the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War was heartening as a symbol that strong, decisive responses to imperial boundary disputes worked. For the first time, Anglo-Afghan relations were, in the words of Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “routinized” under a new, British-supported Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, who reigned for the next generation.8 At the same time, the Second Anglo-Afghan War entered the British consciousness in a way that was troubling in its scenes reminiscent of the First Anglo-Afghan War and the Indian Rebellion, given that nearly 10,000 men died in the war and Britain’s performance in key battles had been uneven.9 As Shafquat Towheed notes, it is “more than merely a trivial anecdote” that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed his Doctor Watson as having received his army career-ending wound in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, as it represents the concern that people in the 1880s felt over Britain’s “unresolved Imperial policy” in Indian and Afghanistan (shown in stories like The Sign of Four and “The Adventure of the Crooked Man”).10 In other words, it was all fine and good to speak of glorious, honorable fighting in the abstract, but the reality of imperialism was much dirtier and uncertain.

7 See Thomas J. Barfield, “Problems in Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan,” Persian Studies 37, no. 2 (2004): 277–279. The official result of the conflict was the Treaty of Gandamak, signed on May 26, 1879, in which Afghanistan ceded authority of foreign affairs to Britain and allowed a permanent British residency in Kabul. However, the conflict continued on a lesser level for two more years—see Hopkirk, 387–401. 8 Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “Impoverishing a Colonial Frontier: Cash, Credit, and Debt in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 2 (2004): 201. 9 Although there is no completely accurate count of British casualties, Martin Ewans cites around 10,000 dead and 30,000 wounded or sick, concluding that the war “achieved little” in strategic terms and there was criticism from the Viceroy’s Council at the time regarding the long-term effects of the war—see Conflict in Afghanistan: Studies in Asymmetric Warfare (London: Routledge, 2005), 69–70. 10 See pp. 186–187 of “Appendix C: Colonial Contexts: The First and Second AngloAfghan Wars,” in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, ed. Shafquat Towheed (London: Broadview, 2010).

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Accordingly, the new, more imperial shape of Britain’s Eastern policy inspired a greater interest of the public in imperial matters. The public’s oscillation between euphoria and anxiety over the vagaries of imperial activity had long been an aspect of the British milieu, but in the 1880s this dynamic reached new heights.11 Papers like the Daily Telegraph, which as we have seen made a dramatic turn from Liberal to Conservative during the 1870s, came to define a new kind of sensationalist, war-obsessed, and pro-imperial reportage. Moreover, as the Pall Mall Gazette was sold in 1880 and turned into a Liberal paper (with arch-Gladstonian John Morley at the helm), the Daily Telegraph took its place alongside the Evening Standard as the voice of the Conservative Party.12 But whereas the Pall Mall Gazette had taken something of an elite-focused line and had a small, mostly London-based circulation, the Daily Telegraph was a large-run, national paper. Moreover, the previous provincial vs. London split that was much made of by the Liberals in disputing the broadness of support for the Government during the Eastern Crisis began to break down. For example, W. T. Stead left the Northern Echo in 1880 to serve as Morley’s assistant, and took over for the latter in 1883. So too did the Manchester Guardian begin to expand from its base to take more responsibility for “serious” national commentary on the Liberal side, which was a space that to that point had been occupied by the Daily News.13 For its part, The Times continued to pace the center, but as other papers grew in influence nationally it began to lose the hold on the political narrative it had so long enjoyed in British society.14

11 Though he would dispute Britons’ pre-1880 concern for empire, Bernard Porter concedes that there was shift in the 1880s toward a more imperial culture—see pp. 138 and 164–169 of The Absent-Minded Imperialists. 12 Ibid., 139–140. 13 Onetime Chief Reporter for the Guardian, William Haslam Mills, wrote that the

paper began to make a name for itself nationally during Gladstone’s Second Ministry to the Home Rule Crisis, taking a Whiggish, Unionist line throughout the conflict, increasing its influence over Liberal opinion and among Liberal Unionist leaders like Hartington and George Goschen—see The Manchester Guardian: A Century of History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922), 113–118. 14 As Mark Hampton shows, The Times responded to the rise of cheap dailies by “[imitating] their methods” of covering (and staging) political controversy, in so doing it removed itself and its readers from the position of controlling the direction of political discourse in London and nationally—see p. 85 of “Liberalism, the Press, and

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In such ways, newspapermen allied with the Liberals attempted to subvert the supposed Tory iniquity of the imperial center. The simultaneous nationalization of the Tory position and centralization of the Liberal one meant that both parties had to base their policies more squarely on widely-held values rather than ones associated with either’s regional strongholds. As a result, this altered the texture of political discourse by allowing greater involvement of the public in British policymaking, something that amplified the democratization of British society. Democracy did not, however, necessarily produce less imperialist policies, as we cannot assume that just because imperialism is fundamentally an undemocratic policy that it would not be supported by a more democratic British society. Even in the case of the 1880 Midlothian campaign, in which we saw Gladstone rise again to power by deploying his remarkable oratorical abilities to indict Disraeli over his foreign policy decisions, the Liberals’ overall win was arguably less tied to Disraeli’s foreign policy than one might think. As Richard Shannon put it, Disraeli’s defeat in 1880 is “accounted for less by the iniquities of [his] foreign policy than by [his] helplessness in face of the distresses of the depression of trade.”15 Indeed, though the Liberals won big in terms of taking constituencies, their majority was much less resounding in terms of the actual percentage of the vote.16 Compared to the previous general election in 1874, the Liberals gained 2.7% more votes, the Tories lost 1.8%, and—perhaps most tellingly—the Home Rulers lost nearly 1% while at the same time gaining three seats. Further, the Midlothian campaign, long viewed as the quashing of Disraeli’s imperial moment, makes no sense when viewed in relation to the fact that the 1880s and 1890s saw Britain take a progressively more imperial line on its external policies in virtually every part of the still-available globe.17

the Construction of the Public Sphere: Theories of the Press in Britain, 1830–1914,” Victorian Periodicals Review 37, no. 1 (2004): 72–92. 15 Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister: 1865–1898, 245. 16 Ibid. 17 From Morley to Bass, the Midlothian campaign has often been portrayed by Gladstone enthusiasts as the end of his-called “Beaconsfieldism,” and thus as the affirmation of moderation and even divestment in imperial responsibilities under Liberal leaders. For this interpretation see, under its original author, Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. II (1872–1898), 202–203; under Morley’s present-day acolyte, see Bass, 310–312.

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Although Gladstone wrote of his win that “the downfall of Beaconsfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance,” what strikes one about the subsequent period is that the castle was simply enveloped in a convenient, comforting mist and then emerged from it each time it suited the public spirit.18 Ironically, it had been Gladstone who was convinced that the “real opinion of the people,” as Lord Derby had put it,19 was concealed by shady Tory interests, and if ever this “real” people were allowed to speak, they would see the vindication of his policies. The reality was much more complicated, as there is little evidence that British society was any less susceptible to the romance of imperialism after Gladstone returned. Even R. W. Seton-Watson, no friend of the Tories, had to agree that there was some truth to the claim that Gladstone’s Second Ministry was “one of the least successful examples of Liberal foreign policy,” and that there is a difference between “exalted theory and meagre fulfillment.”20 What Seton-Watson missed, though, is that after the fall of the Conservatives in 1880 the Liberals and their press affiliates almost immediately turned imperial tastes among the public to their own ends. The difference was that if an imperial act was done by the Liberals it could merely be portrayed as undertaken with more reluctance than the Tories, and thus it was “less” imperialistic given that the Conservatives were considered the party of empire. As J. A. Hobson noted in 1902, the Liberals “[dallied] with an Imperialism which they have foolishly and futilely striven to distinguish from the firmer brand of their political opponents.”21 Hobson’s doubts came from a generation’s experience of anti-imperialists’ disappointment with the Liberals. At the time, it was easy to cast the Midlothian campaign as a groundswell of public opposition to imperial adventurism—as if, in the symbol of the popular vote and the change of ruling party, Disraeli’s whole platform had been rejected in favor of Gladstone’s. In fact, though, it is not clear that the public rejected Disraeli’s vision of a more imperial Britain because, within a year, Britons were rallying for 18 Gladstone to the Duke of Argyll, 12 April 1880, qtd. in Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. II (1872–1898), 223. 19 Derby Diaries, 17 February 1877, 377. 20 Seton-Watson, 550. He makes sure, though, to note that it is “unfair” to lay the

“entire blame upon the shoulders of Mr. Gladstone himself.” 21 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902), 151.

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an intervention in Egypt over a new perceived threat to Britain’s Eastern interests, and, a year after that, Britain had folded Egypt into its empire as another “material guarantee.” Would the public have been more subdued under a Disraelian Egyptian adventure? This is a sticky counterfactual, but it is clear the return of the Liberals did not quench Britain’s developing imperialist culture, no matter how much the victor of Midlothian wanted it to. Gladstone himself appears to have been subject to the imperialist whims of the public—perhaps much more than he would have been in his first ministry from 1868 to 1874. In this sense, we see what might be the clearest influence of the spirit of the Eastern Crisis on later events. Although Gladstone liked to believe that it was only external exigencies and not domestic foment that led to his taking military action, Tony Hopkins has argued that it was a passion for intervention whipped up in the public in 1881–1882 that led to one of Britain’s most patently imperialistic actions, namely the bombardment of Alexandria, the subsequent invasion of Egypt, and the permanent occupation of the country as a British protectorate.22 Since 1879 Egypt had been in a state of unrest over economic and social issues, and in 1881 an army colonel named Ahmed ‘Urabi—the selfsame “Arabi Pasha” in Stanley’s and Morgan’s rendering—took control of the Egyptian government.23 France and Britain sought to restore the authority of the Khedive, but the situation continued to devolve toward a wholesale change of power and all the chaos that was thought to have promised. In such circumstances, Britain’s ability to bring “good government” to the East in the shape of Cyprus appears to have proved that Egypt was an apt candidate as the next place in need of Britain’s reforming influence. That it was General Sir Garnet Wolseley in charge of Britain’s role in both places is, honestly, almost too neatly on the nose. Histrionics aside, though, the fact that Britain’s efforts for direct control in Egypt began under Disraeli is another instance of how there was a residual effect of

22 See A. G. Hopkins, “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882.” 23 For a larger discussion of the political and social background to the revolt, see Juan R. I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999).

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his policy on Gladstone’s.24 What is more, the notion that his actions in Egypt were somehow less imperial than Disraeli’s in Cyprus is at best dissimulation and at worst dishonest: the fact was that Britain’s political establishment had decided that an area outside the borders of the empire would do better within it. The 1882 occupation of Egypt almost completely embodies the “new imperialism,” especially when considering the shape of policy immediately instituted there and as later formulated by a chief imperial figure, Lord Cromer.25 For what else, at the end of the day, does the “new imperialism” even mean if we dismiss its label based on traditional assumptions of Tory imperialists vs. Liberal anti-imperialists? We should not solely heed the qualified protestations against territorial expansion by all but the most fanatically anti-empire Britons. We should not affirm the scrupulosity of hesitant imperial authors like Gladstone and Granville and decry only the acts of confirmed empire-lovers like Disraeli and Chamberlain. We should not also dismiss, by grace of mere contemporary tut-tutting, the previous acquisition of Cyprus and the 1878–1880 Anglo-Afghan War (and, more distantly, the wars for British mastery over South Africa), as they formed a precedent for the notion that such boldly imperial moves like that in Egypt in 1882 were workable from an operational and diplomatic perspective.26 Indeed, the expected objections to Britain’s professed and concealed motives in the East from the other major shareholder in the Suez Canal Company, France, were under the circumstances easily managed, while Egypt’s transition to British control in 1882 was more or less smooth.27 24 Here, one must dismiss the idea that Gladstone’s hands were tied by international agreements that Disraeli had made to which Britain was bound. Britain was under no specific international obligation to intervene in Egypt militarily, much less on its own. In any case, the question of whether the new government would honor commitments made by the Khedive was never really given a chance to be considered, as its discussion was largely precluded, conveniently, by the British invasion. 25 See Chapter 12, “Asserting British Control, 1887–1891,” on pp. 236–260 of Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul; also, see Said, Orientalism, 35–41. 26 Later, especially after Egypt took the place of Cyprus as Britain’s primary strategic position in the Near East, the integration of Cyprus into the British Empire progressively came to be seen as unwise. But this was a slow process and not fully realized until decades after 1878—see Varnava, 12–15. 27 That is, in terms of dissent from Egyptian society; the matter of stabilizing Egypt’s finances and keeping other countries’ influence, especially France’s, at bay took almost a

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If Disraeli had promoted the idea that imperial tactics could be used to resolve international instability, Gladstone appears to have been fully willing to leverage this same belief when it served his purposes. Perhaps he was not so averse to “Beaconsfieldism” after all—whether, and this is critically important, he himself knew it or not. The effect of Egypt on the Liberals’ imperialist credentials was more than abstract: British anti-imperialists, both the old Cobdenites and the new international socialist types, were highly displeased with Gladstone’s performance on the matter of empire. John Bright resigned from the Cabinet over Egypt,28 while others chafed at the fact that Gladstone’s bold words against Disraeli’s reckless and vain posturing were not borne out by his policy of continuing British encroachment in South Africa and his avoidance of weighing in on French imperialism in Tunisia and Madagascar.29 Britain’s more radical Liberals began to feel that Gladstone had betrayed them, notably on the issue of Ireland, and the most ardent Home Rulers became suspicious that Gladstone was not their man after all.30 In this, we might allow that Gladstone wanted to do more on these issues, and he certainly hoped that the 1884 Representation of the People Act (which extended the vote to rural men) would allow his vision to become reality by distancing politics from vested party interests—the power of the “great mass” over the venal few.31 This was a quest to reshape British society driven by, as Biagini puts it, “humanitarian causes ‘above’ party politics” that Gladstone commenced in 1876 during the Bulgarian Agitation.32 He had thought that such a move would help him with Ireland, because as ever he believed that once the British people could finally speak they would line up behind the “People’s William” once and for all. decade to solve—see Chapter 11, “Surviving the Drummond Wolff Mission and the ‘Race Against Bankruptcy’, 1885–1887,” on pp. 215–235 of Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul. 28 Bright was also unhappy with Gladstone’s handling of Irish affairs, but it was the bombardment of Alexandria that was the final straw—see Taylor, “Bright, John (1811– 1889),” in ODNB. 29 Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906, 57. 30 Ibid. 31 Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister: 1865–1898, 322. 32 Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906, 353.

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Gladstone’s unswerving confidence in a Britain that, on the balance, was worldly, humanitarian, and unselfish certainly does the British people credit, but he rivaled his old enemy Disraeli in closing off his mind to any information that spoke to the contrary. In fact, his post-Bulgarian turn not only did not convince any on the other side of the aisle (or the more vocal anti-imperialists), but it made him unpalatable to all sorts of Whigs, Unionists, High Churchers—anyone who believed that such humanitarian policies went against the nebulous value of protecting the “national interest.”33 Thus, when the Home Rule debate began in open earnest in 1885, we see some of the political dynamics and factions that had begun to separate during the Eastern Crisis become more brittle and finally break, with influential Liberals ranging from Whigs like Hartington to radicals like Joseph Chamberlain splitting off to form the Liberal Unionists. Biagini convincingly argues that it was Gladstone’s miscalculation on the strength of the connection Britons felt existed between foreign issues and the issue of Ireland that spelled the destruction of the Liberals, as even if Irish nationalists—who certainly felt they were at least partly in the “foreign” camp—went for it the British public as a whole saw Home Rule as danger to national integrity.34 The rift over Home Rule portended a major shift in the politics of imperialism, as the Liberal Unionists were, at least in part, defined by their support of a “national integrity” that discursively bled over into “imperial integrity,” with Ireland embodying this liminal space. This placed them in line with a region of public opinion long associated with the Conservatives. Yet the 1870s had shown there was compatibility between certain liberal and imperial ideals, most notably the belief that Britain had a unique capacity to bring its admirable institutions of governance and its spirit of progress to new lands either devoid of such beliefs culturally or under the yoke of illiberal, backward powers.35 This logic had been applied in India, Cyprus, Egypt, and South Africa, and the Liberal Unionists believed it had relevance to the Irish Question. The significant

33 Ibid., 353–354. 34 Ibid., 163–168, 355. 35 Of course, the irony in the Indian case was that the illiberal, backward yoke Britain

had removed had been, in some senses, British itself, namely in the shape of the East India Company—a fact that uncomfortably colored discussions of the basis for the Raj.

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difference was that in the case of Ireland, those who felt that Britain’s civilizing power rested upon keeping Ireland firmly in the British fold were placed on the side of those who wished to uphold the union mainly as an element of the political status quo. Although seemingly uncomfortable, the fact that this alliance worked was not necessarily due to chance. It may have had something to do with how many Liberals had come to see the role of the British state in providing a certain kind of society—one that looked out for the welfare of its peoples in a more direct and comprehensive manner. Here, I would offer a subtle reframing of Biagini’s emphasis on humanitarianism in late Victorian politics by questioning, as Bernard Porter has, how imperialism was “grafted” onto liberal values in the era of the “new imperialism.”36 To be sure, that such a hugely popular37 advocate of imperialism as Chamberlain could support plebian democracy on the one hand and imperialism on the other stands as hugely important innovation in British politics—a powerful, new political ideology made available to Britons in the last generation of the Victorian period.38 The fact that British imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s was based on territorial expansion and direct control does not mean that it was justified at the time by a basic greed for power and wealth. On the contrary, Chamberlain’s brand of imperialism was not merely about power politics; it was a vision of Britain bringing order, progress, and prosperity to new lands as an affirmation of Britain’s innate national virtues.39 The popularization of this rendition of imperialism had a deep impact on the political makeup of Britain. That pro-imperial Chamberlain went from reluctant ally with his old Tory foes to willing participant is particularly notable here: in the early 1880s Chamberlain had been one of Salisbury’s most vociferous Parliamentary opponents; in 1895, he sat in

36 See Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 226. 37 Chamberlain had long been noted for his devoted following before The Times

dubbed him in 1902 as “the most popular and trusted man in England”—see Marsh, “Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914),” ODNB. 38 Peter T. Marsh notes that J. R. Seeley’s 1883 book, The Expansion of England, which spoke to this mating of democracy at home and an imperialist policy abroad, had a great effect on Chamberlain—see Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 176–178. 39 Travis L. Crosby, Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 43–44.

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Salisbury’s Cabinet as colonial secretary.40 The 1870s had seen various and often otherwise oppositional constituencies promote a belief that a strong, decisive British Empire should intervene in the East to bring order and peace there. The reformulation of British politics in the 1880s and 1890s did more to reinforce this ideology than tear it down. As a result, we can observe the generation after the 1870s see the framing of imperial concerns more and more closely tied to those of national concern so that, as in the case of Ireland, where one stood on the matter of Britain’s imperial program served as a reliable guide on where one fell on the political spectrum. This study has sought to shine light on the relationship between the British public’s direct and indirect involvement in debates over the Eastern Question, the role of the press in creating and sustaining those debates, and the public and clandestine doings of the powers-that-be directed at “solving” the Eastern Question. In the 1870s, which in my mind was the Eastern Question’s most crucial decade in Britain’s rendering of it, this relationship saw a rapid shift from a question defined by elite agents of the state around specific matters of international affairs to a question that seemingly tracked with a whole host of worries, hopes, loves, and hatreds circulating throughout major British constituencies. This shift had the effect of turning the Eastern Question into a powerful and highly adaptable piece of popular culture. We often hear that in matters of international relations it is the letters and conversations, the summit meetings, and the signing of treaties that act as paramount mooring points in the progress toward resolving some shared problem. But the quest to “end” the Eastern Question, borrowing E. A. Freeman’s words, was far from being solely the province of “diplomatists.” In the both the traditional and the modern view, we imagine these men reclining in a fug of cigar smoke in some grand hall, passing lit matches from wingback to wingback and murmuring intrigues through heavy beards while snipping maps into bits on behalf of a compliant body politic. In fact, much more disturbingly, they simply read the papers and decided where their own views might have traction. They did, then, what the people wanted. The people wanted their voice heard, and it was.

40 For a discussion of Chamberlain’s animosity to Salisbury in the early 1880s, see Crosby, 30–34.

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June 27th, 2016: A Sunny Day in London At the southeast corner of Hyde Park Corner stands a statue of the Duke of Wellington on horseback, looking north across Piccadilly at his beloved Apsley House. Sculpted by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm in the mid1880s, the duke is protected on four corners by bronze soldiers, each representing one of the four nations of the British Isles.41 Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, so often in dispute at home, have come together against the latest outsider to challenge the islands’ safety and security. To exit this zone of packed monuments to the hero of Waterloo, you may head southeast along Apsley Way, pass through the Wellington Arch, cross Duke of Wellington Place, and thereafter—now free for a moment from the Iron Duke’s iron grip—onto Constitution Hill. As you proceed east underneath the street’s buoyant canopy, Buckingham Palace’s gardens will be on your right and Green Park on your left. You will pass the place where in 1850, at the old wicket gate entering into the park, Sir Robert Peel was thrown from his horse and died, after the former prime minister’s mount was frightened by Lady Dover’s daughter.42 Pass in front of the palace, keeping on your left the massive Victoria Memorial, its golden-winged Victory flanked by imperial eagles gazing west and east. You are halfway there. A sharp left will take you eastward again along Birdcage Walk. You will pass between St. James Park and its many-ducked lake on your left and the Wellington Barracks on your right, reaching the grand government offices building, faced in bright Portland stone, that sits at the corner of Horse Guards Road and Great George Street.43 The statues of Parliament Square will soon hove into view across the street and, if you turn right and enter the square, you will be welcomed by Prime Ministers Palmerston and Derby, tall on their pedestals at the northwest corner of the 41 The Victoria and Albert Museum states that the plasters were completed by 1885 or thereabouts, with the official unveiling of the bronzes, on their shared plinth, occurring on December 21t , 1888—see “Equestrian Statue for the Wellington Monument at Hyde Park Corner,” Victoria and Albert Museum, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O176072/ equestrian-statue-for-the-wellington-model-boehm-joseph-edgar/. 42 “The Death of a Remarkable Prime Minister,” The Guardian, 6 July 1850. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/1850/jul/06/leadersandreply.mainsection. 43 “History—1 Horse Guards Road,” Gov.uk, https://www.gov.uk/government/his tory/1-horse-guards-road.

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green. Continuing south, you can turn and face west to look up at an unreasonably flattering Disraeli, clothed in sumptuous lordly robes and incongruously rendered with a stern, almost chiseled face like that of a Plantagenet. Disraeli stares at the ground in front of his feet, where stand recently installed bronzes of Mahatma Gandhi and Millicent Fawcett—tributes to revolutionary causes never championed by their mutual onlooker. They rest on much lower plinths, though, and thus seem miniature in contrast to the man floating permanently above them. Past this cluster is a statue of Peel, Disraeli’s frequent opponent in life and now, unhappily, his neighbor in perpetuum. As with Gandhi and Fawcett, near Peel is a modest statue of Nelson Mandela on a small cube of stone built into the stairway leading down to street level at the southwest corner of the square. Amid the heady fog hanging round London following the Brexit vote four days prior, the modern world’s avatar of reason reaches out to you in a gesture of exhortation. You leave him behind. Westminster Abbey sits before you. A right onto Broad Sanctuary will allow you to walk westward along the length of the church, its extensively renovated stonework a pixelated array of colors ranging from dark brown to near white. In the small plaza in front of the Great West Door rises the Westminster Scholars War Memorial (aka the “Crimea and Indian Mutiny Memorial”): a tall column with lions guarding the base and St. George triumphant atop, inscribed “to the memory of those educated at Westminster School who died in the Russian and Indian Wars A.D. 1854–1859.” Now, turn to face the church, enter via its massive arched portal, and march eastward down the nave to the crossing. Once there, turn left a last time and walk forward into the north transept. At the very end is a congregation of three marble statues dedicated to the Canning family. George Canning is on the left: prime minister and a harsh critic of the Concert of Europe’s impact on the British Empire’s interests.44 His son, Charles, is in the middle: Governor-General of India from 1856 to 1858 (before and during the Indian Rebellion) and then the first Viceroy of India until 1862. On the right is his cousin, Viscount Stratford de 44 It is worth noting that, though this view of Canning’s policy is more or less standard among British and European historians, Norihito Yamada has extensively critiqued it in his PhD thesis—see “George Canning and the Concert of Europe, September 1822–July 1824,” PhD diss. (London: School of Economics, 2004).

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Redcliffe, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and Greece for a combined total of 25 years, his last posting at Istanbul from 1841 to 1858. The statue, like the Wellington at the start of your journey, was carved by Joseph Boehm after Stratford’s death in 1880 at the age of 94.45 Its epitaph is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then in his 30th year as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom: Thou third great Canning, stand among our best And noblest, now thy long day’s work hath ceased, Here silent in our Minster of the West Who wert the voice of England in the East

This is just one short journey of nation, empire, language, and memory centered on an Orientalist and imperialist rendering of Britain’s place in the world. This little stroll signifies the enduring presence of the Eastern Question, both in the exceedingly long Victorian era itself and in the oft-glazed eyes of today’s hardworking passersby. And perhaps most poignantly, that light of the past glimmers brightly in the visages of pilgrims recently ashore—eager to learn and, not long thereafter at the tour guides’ instigation, recite the virtues and sins of Britain’s past as the greatest of great empires in human history. Of course, even excluding those monuments built outside of the Victorian period, the places and items listed above exist today in dense layers of signification, representing an aggregation of over half a century of relentless memory-making. But it would be a mistake to separate them in a gratuitous attempt at subtlety—a tyranny of nuance insinuating that infinite, internecine perspectives trump any scholars’ good faith attempts at summary conclusions. It is not the scholar who combined the deaths of Westminster students in two putatively Eastern places that lay 3000 miles apart. It is not the scholar who stood all these prime ministers—in a sort of succession of national patriots—in a square intimately tied to democracy and state power. It is not the scholar who placed statues of Britain’s lords in the East in one of the realm’s holiest places—not to mention less than 100 feet from the exact spot where all English and British royals have been crowned since 1066. 45 See “George, Charles & Stratford Canning,” Westminster Abbey, https://www.wes tminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/george-charles-stratfordcanning.

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As I write this, one more of among Britain’s apparently unending line of kings and queens has just been coronated—on that small, subtle square of Cosmati Pavement—on a rainy day in May 2023 not that much different than the dark one in May 1878 that opened this study: Charles III, after the death of his mother in September 2022. That Elizabeth II and Victoria are endlessly compared just shows how near the recent past really is to the recent present.46 Modern historians too often forget that ancient ones speak in centuries. Instead, just as these contexts are today intermixed and crowded against one another, the persons, places, and ideas referenced and involved were intertwined at the time in question—probably even more so due to their direct relevance to the moment and its inhabitants. In teasing apart, then, the genesis of the Eastern Question’s place in British politics and society in the 1870s, I have attempted to remove that question from the strictures of historians writing between 1923 and 1991, who, following a generally imperial Weltanschauung, regarded the matter as closed despite the fact that they did not have even a tenth of the access to historical records as present-day scholars do. Nor did they fully anticipate the explosion of long-due redress of racist, classist, sexist, and every other worthy -ist grievances toward Western historicity. It is an oversight both calming and chilling in its respectability. I mean that equally on both counts. The perception of the Eastern Question as solely a piece of international relations lore still remains strong, but things are thankfully beginning to change. A little more than a decade ago, I talked with a giant in the field of European history and asked him whether he thought there was any relationship between the Eastern Question and other soidealized nineteenth-century questions, like the Jewish Question and the Polish Question. He waved his hand and said “Oh, that’s different: the Eastern Question was just a diplomatic question.” Now, of course we have groundbreaking works like those of Holly Case, Michelle Tusan, and Stéphanie Prévost proving just the opposite, while Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky’s work in complicating the traditional, top-down narrative is a much-needed antidote to repacing the same old dusty paths.

46 See, as a representative example among at least many hundreds, John Harrison, “Queen Elizabeth II: Elizabeth and Victoria in Numbers,” BBC News, 6 September 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34112486.

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At the same time, to dismiss something as “just diplomatic” totally misses the point of how diplomacy cannot but reflect some collection of popular (and even seemingly frivolous) essences, as the outcomes of such conferences always satisfied at least some major aspect of what those elite grandees knew of the opinions of the middle and working-class sorts. They also understood the fickle favors of the lumpenproletariat —the drunks, the rowdies, the cat-throwers. To say otherwise is to assume that foreign things always stay “out there.” Diplomacy was not the alpha and omega of activity on the Eastern Question and, just as importantly, diplomats are capable of seeing, hearing, and most importantly reading about what goes on outside their wood-and-leather habitats. I hope, too, that this book has added to the progress of this revision of traditional forms in the study of the Eastern Question, while still honoring the labor of those who worked under models that were fruitful in their times. I wish to my younger readers, especially, the cultivation of an attitude characterized by a balance between reverence and skepticism of their forebears in this field. It is only fitting given that the Eastern Question’s old guard revealed much, but not nearly enough.

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Index

A Abanazer (Aladdin pantomime villain), 110 Abdülaziz, Sultan, 67, 69, 72, 93, 94, 97, 98 Abdülhamid II, Sultan, 70, 145, 150, 298 Aberdeen, Earl of, 14, 308 Abyssinia, 17, 125, 297 Ethiopia. See Abyssinia Adair, Cornelia, 57, 59 Aegean Sea, 252 Afghanistan, 75, 224–227, 231, 288, 294–296, 300–304, 306, 307, 310–312, 320, 321, 324–326, 340, 341, 343, 346, 358, 359 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 330 Alabama claims, 80 Alexander II, Emperor, 66, 72, 124, 161, 172, 178, 263 Alexander III, Emperor, 66 Alexandretta, 214–216, 218, 223 Iskanderun. See Alexandretta

Alexandria, 91, 211, 218, 300, 363, 365 Ali, Hyder, 108 Ali Masjid, Battle of (1878), 321 Ali Pasha, 70 Âli, Mehmed Emin. See Ali Pasha Alison, Archibald, 229 Amaserah, 221 Amasra. See Amaserah American Civil War, 17, 166 Anatolia, 62, 93, 160, 206, 221, 358 Asia Minor. See Anatolia Anderson, George, 109 Andrássy, Count Gyula, 85, 90, 262, 330 Anglo-Afghan War (1838–1842), 225 Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), 19, 364 Anglo-Egyptian War (1882), 34, 204, 229, 355 Anglo-Mysore War (1780–1784), 108 Anglo-Russian Agreement (1878), 1, 254, 255, 256, 258 Anglo-Zulu War (1879), 311

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. R. Schumacher, The Eastern Question in 1870s Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36514-0

411

412

INDEX

Anti-imperialism, 238 Antisemitism, 317, 331, 334 Jewishness. See Antisemitism Judaism. See Antisemitism Armit, R.H., 190, 193, 196 Arnold, Edwin, 176 Ashanti Empire, 80 Aussenpolitik, 39 Primat der Aussenpolitik. See Aussenpolitik Austin, Alfred, 130 B Balkans, 3, 29–31, 34, 53, 57, 61, 83, 93, 95, 96, 103, 116, 136, 137, 139, 144, 156, 159, 160, 166, 172, 179, 183, 186, 192, 206–209, 251, 253, 295, 311, 342, 349, 358 Bartlett, Ellis, 192, 193 bashi-bazouks , 101–103, 107, 108, 110, 112, 165 Batak, Massacre at, 107, 109 Battle of Navarino (1827), 12 Batumi, 3, 208, 211, 212, 254, 258, 259 Beaconsfieldism, 314, 336, 349, 361, 362, 365 Belize, 231 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 18, 308 Benthamism, 300 Berg, Louis, 301 Berlin, Congress of (1878), 6, 19, 35, 66, 76, 204, 206, 216, 225, 245, 246, 264, 291, 302, 352, 356, 357 Berlin, Congress of (1884–1885), 6, 246, 264 Berlin Memorandum (1876), 95, 97, 98, 238 Berlin, Treaty of (1878), 66, 160, 225 Be¸sik Bay, 90, 98, 212

Bessarabia, 254 Biddulph, Robert, 228 Bismarck, Otto von, 63 Blowitz, Henry de, 296 Boehm, Edgar, 369 Bolan, 309 Bosnia, 68, 136, 141, 262, 263 Bosphorus, 9, 64, 79, 208, 212, 236, 258, 259 Bowyer, George, 336 Brackenbury, Henry, 228 Bradford, Countess of, 25 Bradlaugh, Charles, 188–190, 193–195 Bright, John, 46, 91, 113, 163, 235, 281, 283, 293, 306, 314, 330, 339, 344, 349, 365 Brophy, Charles, 83, 184 Browne, Samuel, 267, 309 Buccleuch, (5th ) Duke of, 350 Bulgaria, 3, 18, 31, 60, 67–70, 95, 101, 102, 105, 107–109, 112, 113, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 136, 141, 142, 146, 159, 160, 162, 163, 206, 209, 251, 252 Bulgarian Agitation, 41, 43, 48, 60, 87, 90, 133, 139, 146, 151, 158, 163, 185, 186, 192, 217, 236, 323, 325, 338, 365 Bulgarian Atrocities, 19, 45, 47, 54, 60, 76, 83, 93, 99, 101–103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 120, 122, 123, 134, 152, 182, 184, 185, 229, 271, 280, 299, 300 Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East , 19, 45, 54, 115, 116, 343 Bulgarian Orthodox Church, 67, 184 Burke, Edmund, 53, 108 Burleigh, Bennet, 177 Burmese Empire, 311

INDEX

Burma. See Burmese Empire Butt, Isaac, 269 Byzantine Empire, 65 C Cambridge, Duke of, 204, 212, 227, 232, 235 Cambridge, Prince George of. See Cambridge, Duke of Cameron, Charles, 197 Campbell, Baron, 183 Campbell, George (Liberal MP for Kirkaldy Burghs), 236, 340 Canning, Charles, 370 Canning, George, 370 Cape of Good Hope, 289 Carlingford, Baron, 307 Carnarvon, Earl of, 147, 151, 152, 158, 188, 189 Carol I, Prince, 160 Cartwright, William, 50, 51 Caucasus, 3, 62, 159, 160, 183, 206, 220, 251, 252, 358 Cavagnari, Louis, 326, 327 Cawnpore, Massacre at, 107–110, 112, 113, 117 Cecil, Lady Gwendolen, 25, 244, 262 Central Asia, 16, 18, 36, 61, 67, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79, 95, 161, 184, 224, 225, 305, 324, 341 Chamberlain, Joseph, 51, 92, 278, 285, 292, 306, 330, 339, 364, 366–368 Chapman, John, 300 Charles III, King, 372 Chartists, 43, 103, 281, 324 Chechens, 221 Chesterfield, Countess of, 25, 97, 304, 353 Childers, Hugh, 112 China, 43, 73, 298, 299 Churchill, Horace, 56

413

Circassian Genocide, 16 Clarendon, Earl of, 14 Clarke, F.C.H., 224 Cobden, Richard, 14, 46, 163, 281 Collins, Wilkie, 320 Coningsby, 272, 276, 317 Constantinople Conference (1876–1877), 130, 141, 143–145, 148, 151, 153, 157, 158, 209, 213, 249, 259 Corn Laws, 276 Corry, Montagu, 176, 214 Corti, Luigi, 259, 263 Cossacks, 62, 168, 169, 177 Crealock, Hope, 56, 184, 185 Cretan Revolt (1866–1869), 17, 60, 61, 101 Crete, 81, 210, 214, 218, 236, 298 Crimean system, 15, 16, 85, 86, 114, 142, 158, 214, 245, 260, 263, 270 Crimean War (1853–1856), 4, 6, 13–16, 18, 32, 56, 86, 90, 108, 117, 119, 142, 144, 154, 156, 167, 168, 181, 199, 206, 208, 209, 221–223, 266, 296, 297 Cromer, Earl of, 228, 229, 364 Baring, Evelyn. See Cromer, Earl of Cross, R.A., 256, 259, 330 Crystal Palace speech, 89 Cultural imperialism, 219, 282 Cyprus, 4, 19, 21, 24, 26, 35, 45, 202–207, 210, 211, 213–219, 223–234, 236, 237, 239–241, 245, 256–259, 263–268, 277, 278, 282, 283, 304, 305, 319, 336, 341, 346, 355, 357, 363, 364, 366 Cyprus Convention (1878), 216, 239–241, 248, 254, 256, 257, 259, 277, 282, 346, 355

414

INDEX

D Dalkeith, Earl of, 338, 341, 343, 346, 349–351 Buccleuch, (6th ) Duke of. See Dalkeith, Earl of Dardanelles Straits, 9, 98, 207, 210, 258 Derby, (14th ) Earl of, 362, 369 Derby, (15th ) Earl of, 86–88, 98, 101, 105, 106, 113, 116, 123, 128–133, 146, 157, 158, 159, 188, 206, 212, 215, 216, 241, 248 Stanley, Edward Henry. See Derby, (15th) Earl of Dilke, Charles, 249, 271, 339 Disraeli, Benjamin, 5, 18–20, 25, 46, 47, 48, 51, 76, 88, 89, 97, 105, 113, 129, 131, 180, 212, 215, 217, 219, 225, 230, 233, 238, 239, 243, 245–247, 255, 256, 258, 263, 265, 266, 268, 272, 276, 285, 288, 289, 304–306, 314, 316, 317, 319, 320, 323, 324, 327, 331, 332, 334, 335, 340, 347, 351, 353, 361, 363, 365, 366, 370 Beaconsfield, Earl of. See Beaconsfield, Earl of Dohsé, Frederick de, 124, 125 Dorchester, Baron, 182, 183 Dreikeiserbund, 95, 97 Drummond-Wolff, Henry, 20, 128, 276 Dual Alliance, 290, 328, 330, 349 Dunraven, Earl of, 183 E East, Cecil J., 225, 226 Eastern Crisis (1875–1878), 4, 6, 16, 19, 21, 22, 37, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 54, 60, 75, 80, 85, 91, 93,

104, 126, 130, 132, 151, 152, 173, 181, 197, 198, 202, 205, 215, 219, 220, 223, 226, 229, 231, 233, 236, 238, 245, 248, 249, 264, 271, 280, 283, 285, 291, 293, 294, 296, 302, 305, 314, 315, 323, 335, 338, 340, 356, 357, 358, 360, 363, 366 Eastern Roumelia, 307 Edward VII, King, 235 Egypt, 4, 8, 10, 35, 56, 81, 86, 204, 205, 210, 213, 214, 227, 229–231, 236, 237, 260, 285, 289, 291, 296, 300, 311, 338, 341, 349, 357, 363–366 Khedivate of Egypt. See Egypt Egyptian bankruptcy (1876), 57 Elgin, Earl of, 230 Elizabeth II, Queen, 372 Elliot, Henry, 21, 71, 98, 101, 106, 109, 114, 118, 146, 148, 149, 152, 207 Erekli, 221 Karadeniz Ere˘gli. See Erekli

F Factory Acts, 298 Farley, J. Lewis, 69 Fawcett, Millicent, 370 Fenianism, 134, 184 Fenians. See Fenians Fenton, Roger, 14 Fiji, 282–284 First Boer War (1880–1881), 311 First Home Rule Bill (1886), 319 First World War, 28, 33, 66, 135, 137, 205, 297 Forbes, Archibald, 165, 169, 186, 187 Forster, E.W., 103 Forward policy, 295

INDEX

Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 18, 62, 76, 80, 167, 328, 356 Franz Joseph I, Emperor, 349 Fraser, Thomas, 207, 208 Freeman, E.A., 21, 84, 85, 110, 187, 195, 236, 272, 276, 314, 316, 357, 368

G Gallenga, Antonio, 24, 82, 83, 97, 104 Gallipoli, 28, 177, 179, 207, 210, 212, 214, 219, 224, 232, 233, 235, 236 Gambetta, Léon, 63, 268 Gandamak, Treaty of (1879), 310, 311, 323, 326, 359 Gandhi, Mahatma, 370 Garibaldi, Guiseppe, 47 Gavazzi, Modesto, 76 Gentlemanly capitalism, 37 Gibraltar, 186, 231 Gladstone, Catherine, 342 Gladstone, William Ewart, 19, 20, 23, 25, 28, 41, 42, 45, 48–52, 54, 79, 80, 87, 89–92, 98, 102, 104, 106, 112, 114–119, 122, 127, 130, 133, 159, 173, 175, 177, 187, 194, 228, 235, 240, 245, 247, 268, 272, 276, 277, 279, 282–285, 290–292, 298, 301, 305–309, 314, 318, 319, 323, 328, 334–350, 352, 353, 357, 360–366 Globe scandal. See Marvin, Charles Gorchakov, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich, 63, 64, 153, 154, 247, 255, 263 Gordon, Charles George, 207 Granville, Earl of, 25, 63, 89, 90, 98, 114, 115, 248, 267, 353, 364

415

Great Game, 36, 75, 161, 177, 226, 229, 290, 295 Greece, 11, 31, 107, 230, 262, 371 Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), 11, 14, 42, 84 Greenwood, Frederick, 319, 337 H Hamley, Edward, 229, 230 Hansard, 20, 23, 50, 85, 86, 89, 90, 103, 106, 109, 125, 128, 183, 267–271, 277, 278, 283, 289, 325, 340 Harcourt, William, 91, 92 Hardy, Gathorne, 125, 131, 206, 207, 210, 212, 213, 216, 224, 304 Hare, William, 223 Hartington, Marquess of, 86, 87, 89–92, 114, 115, 269, 270, 293, 328, 330, 335, 339, 344, 353, 360, 366 Herbert, Auberon, 21, 189, 236 Herbert, William von, 162 Herzegovina, 18, 62, 80, 81, 95, 98, 141, 262, 263 Hicks-Beach, Michael, 278 Higgin, W.H., 287 Hitchman, Francis, 332 Hobson, J.A., 198, 362 Home, Robert, 148, 150, 207–214, 216–219, 221–226, 229, 230, 234, 240, 241, 248, 255, 282, 304 Home Rule (Ireland), 48, 49, 91, 92, 177, 279, 320, 339, 347, 350, 360, 361, 365, 366 Home Rule League, 80, 127, 269, 326, 350 Hozier, Henry, 24 humanitarianism, 5, 49, 239, 280, 339, 367 Hunt, Thornton Leigh, 176, 313

416

INDEX

Hyde Park Association, 189, 190, 194, 195, 302 Hyde Park riots (1866), 187

I Ignatyev, Count Nicolay Pavlovich, 70, 71, 94, 144 India, 18, 36, 37, 56, 59, 67, 72, 79, 108, 112, 151, 161, 177, 178, 185, 186, 204, 208, 211, 216, 218, 224, 226, 228, 230, 231, 264, 277–279, 289, 292, 294–296, 298, 301–304, 310, 312, 327, 336, 358, 366, 370 The Raj. See India Indian Rebellion (1857–1858), 16, 56, 107, 119, 185, 310, 359, 370 Innenpolitik, 40, 303, 339 Intelligence Branch, 208, 209, 224–226, 228–231, 248, 304 internationalism, 187 Ionian Islands, 10, 231 Irish Land Act (1870), 92 Irish Question, 127, 276, 366 Irish University Bill (1873), 92 Isma’il Pasha, Khedive, 81, 86, 211, 363, 364 Izzeddin, Sehzade ¸ Yusuf, 72

J Jewish Question, 5, 372 Jingoism, 181, 187, 194, 196–199, 318, 327, 330, 348 “By Jingo!”. See Jingoism Hunt, G.W.. See Jingoism “The Great MacDermott”. See Jingoism

K Kabul, 225, 226, 294, 302, 304, 305, 326, 327, 359 Kars, 3, 160, 214, 254, 258, 260 Khiva, Khanate of, 18, 73, 75, 77, 181 Khiva, Russian conquest of (1873). See Khiva, Khanate of Kimberley, Earl of, 307 Kipling, Rudyard, 282 Kohat, 310 Kosovo, 262 Kurds, 221 Kushi, 226 Khoshi. See Kushi Kyber Pass, 307

L Lansdowne, Marquess of, 230 Larnaca, 267 Latey, John, 328, 330, 331, 334 Layard, Austen Henry, 21, 211, 215, 247, 248, 251, 254, 257 Lemnos, 216 Lennox, W.O., 150 Lerch, Petr Ivanovich, 75 Levant, 61, 205, 210, 219, 225, 295 Levy-Lawson, Edward, 21, 112, 173, 175, 176, 189, 319 Liberal Unionism, 48, 92, 360, 366 Lister, T.V., 131, 132 Loftus, Lord Augustus, 251 London Protocol (1877), 153, 155, 157, 158, 161 London Straits Convention (1841), 12, 15, 98 London, Treaty of (1871), 18, 64, 65 Louis, A.H., 313 Lowe, Robert, 89, 281–283 Lytton, Earl of, 294, 295, 302–305, 327

INDEX

Meredith, Owen. See Meredith, Owen

M MacColl, Malcolm, 23, 186, 187 MacGahan, Januarius Aloysius, 76, 77, 79 Madagascar, 365 Mahmud (Nedim) Pasha, 71 Malta, 216, 231, 238, 302 Manchester School, 349 Mandela, Nelson, 370 Maories, 311, 324 Marvin, Charles, 1–4, 7, 254 Masterly inactivity, 295 Mauley, Baron de, 289 Maurice, John, 221, 228, 230 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 47 Mediterranean Sea, 59, 61, 161 Merchant Shipping Acts, 276 Meredith, Owen, 327 Mesopotamia, 72, 252, 260 Michel, John, 56 Michel, Lady, 55–57, 59, 223 Midhat Pasha, 69–72, 94 Midhat, Ahmed Sefik. ¸ See Midhat Pasha Midlothian campaign (1879–1880), 19, 245, 290 Minto, William, 109 Montenegro, 68, 160, 262 Morley, John, 1, 23, 51, 84, 92, 282, 284, 315, 316, 319, 360, 361 Mount Lebanon Civil War (1860), 16 Munro-Butler-Johnstone, Henry, 147, 276 Muntz, Philip Henry, 306, 330 Murad V, Sultan, 94, 98, 99 Musurus Pasha, 63, 156, 157

417

N Natal, 203 National Liberal Federation, 293, 306 New diplomatic history, 39–41 New Guinea Colonising Association, 193 New imperialism, 34–36, 52, 153, 173, 177, 199, 205, 226, 237, 246, 247, 264, 283, 285, 306, 334, 364, 367 Nightingale, Florence, 14, 167 Nonconformism, 68, 91, 131, 276 Northbrook, Earl of, 295, 304 Northcote, H.S., 148 Northcote, Stafford, 113, 148, 256, 305, 306, 324 Novi Pazar, 262 O Omar Pasha, 206 Opium War (1839–1842), 42 Orangemen, 126, 127, 276 Orange Order. See Orangemen Oranmore and Browne, Baron, 267 Orientalism, 32, 52, 272 exoticism. See Orientalism racism. See Antisemitism; Orientalism, Antisemitism; Turcophobia Osman (Nuri) Pasha, 164, 178, 179, 181, 199 Othello, 266 Ottoman bankruptcy (1875), 86 Ottoman Constitution (1876), 141–143, 146, 157 Ouseley, Frederick, 299 P Palmerston, Viscount, 1, 15, 16, 86, 369 Panslavism, 65–67, 70

418

INDEX

Paris, Treaty of (1856), 15, 18, 63, 64, 98, 142, 156, 206, 251, 263, 270, 296 Partridge, J. Arthur, 300, 301 Pears, Edwin, 102, 104, 108 Pease, Henry Fell, 109, 110, 113, 118, 276 Peel, Robert, 369, 370 People’s Will, 66 Narodnaya Volya. See People’s Will Persia, 62, 73, 224, 300 Iran. See Persia Persian Gulf, 8, 70, 72, 211 Phantasmagoria, 308, 309 philhellenism, 11 Pim, Bedford, 184, 196 Plevna, Siege of (1877), 139, 162–165, 168–170, 199 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 66 Polish Question, 5, 62, 372 Polish Uprising (1863), 61 Q Qatari-Bahraini War (1867–1868), 17 R Rahman Khan, Abdur, 359 Ranke, Leopold von, 39 Redcliffe, Viscount Stratford de, 57, 114, 144, 370–371 Red Sea, 59, 132, 161, 299 Reform Act (1867), 42 Representation of the People Act (1884), 365 Rhodes, 210, 213, 214 Rhodope Mountains, 325 Richmond, Duke of, 87, 130 Ridley, Matthew, 85, 86 Roberts, Frederick, 309, 326, 327 Rosebery, Earl of, 51, 308, 309, 332, 338, 339, 342, 346, 352

Rothschild, Hannah de, 112, 332 Rosebery, Countess of. See Rothschild, Hannah de Royal Engineers, 206, 207, 220 Russell, Lord Odo, 217, 247, 248, 268 Russell, William Howard, 14 Russophobia, 14, 30, 61, 62, 79, 81, 95, 114, 124, 126, 128, 144, 173, 176, 178, 181, 184, 185, 187, 188, 192, 197, 237, 262, 289, 290, 295, 302 Russophobes. See Russophobia Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), 9, 19, 24, 26, 66, 135–199, 205, 232, 234, 245, 251, 295, 302, 323, 348, 358 Rylands, Peter, 288–291, 293, 307, 315 S Saffet Pasha, 257 Salisbury, Marquess of, 15, 25, 143, 146–153, 155, 158, 213, 215–217, 224, 230, 243–245, 247, 249, 251, 254–256, 258–260, 264–266, 268, 289, 290, 292, 293, 298, 304, 305, 328, 330, 331, 340, 367, 368 Salonica, 90, 93, 95, 96 Thessaloniki. See Salonica San Stefano, Treaty of (1878), 251, 252, 254, 256, 263 Sayyid Muhammad, Khan, 73 Schuyler, Eugene, 103 Scientific frontier, 295, 320 Serbia, 31, 136, 160, 262 Sher Ali Khan, Amir, 294, 340 Shipka Pass, 137, 163, 168, 169 Shuvalov, Count Pyotr Andreyevich, 153, 155, 216, 256 Sidebottom, Tom, 268

INDEX

Simmons, Lintorn, 148, 150, 206–215, 217, 219–226, 230, 233, 234, 236, 248, 282, 295 Smith, Goldwin, 21, 315, 316 Sobieski, King Jan III, 62 Social Darwinism, 295, 315 South Africa, 226, 231, 311, 312, 324, 336, 364–366 Stamp Act, Repeal of (1855), 62 Stampalia, 214, 218 Astypalaia. See Stampalia Stanley, Frederick, 216 Stanley, Robert (Reschid), 128 St. Clair, S.G.B., 83, 184 Stead, W.T., 5, 21, 43, 96, 108, 116, 122, 130, 272, 301, 303, 314, 316, 319, 360 Stewart, Donald, 309 Suavi, Ali, 75 Suez Canal, 18, 56, 59, 67, 72, 81, 86–89, 132, 161, 175, 237, 300, 308, 364 Sybil , 317 Syria, 62, 101, 102, 146, 219, 260, 289, 298 T Tancred, 76, 215, 272, 277, 317–319 Tanzimat, 142 Teck, Duchess of, 194 Cambridge, Princess Mary Adelaide of. See Teck, Duchess of Teck, Duke of, 194 Tel El Kebir, Battle of, 229 Temperance movement, 357 Tennyson, Baron, 371 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. See Tennyson, Baron Tenterden, Baron, 248–254 Treddle, J., 307 Trollope, Anthony, 320 Tunisia, 260, 365

419

Turcophilia, 81, 128, 183 Turcophiles. See Turcophilia Turcophobia, 83 Turcophobes. See Turcophobia Turnerelli, Tracy, 331, 332, 351, 352

U ‘Urabi Revolt (1879–1882), 311 Urquhart, David, 124, 183

V Vambéry, Arminius, 73, 75, 76 Vereshchagin, Vasily, 77 Victoria, Queen, 4, 68, 87, 88, 95, 105, 161, 177, 215, 312, 353 Vienna, Siege of (1683), 62 Vivian Grey, 289, 327

W Waddington, William Henry, 260, 262 Weil, Maurice-Henry, 75, 79 Wellington, Duke of, 12, 369 West Africa, 80, 231 Wight, William, 183, 184 Wilde, Oscar, 59 Wilhelm I, King, 63 Wolseley, Garnet, 21, 203, 204, 226–228, 355, 363 Wolseley ring, 227

Y Yaqub Khan, Mohammad, 310 Young England trilogy, 276, 317 Young Ottomans, 69, 94

Z Zulus, 311, 324, 326, 336, 342