Daut Dauti's Britain, the Albanian Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914 traces the relationship between, and mutual perceptions of, the British policy elite and nascent Albanian nationalist movement in the forty odd years leading to Albanian statehood. If for most of this time that relationship was largely muted, for a brief but critical moment during the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1912–13, Britain played a decisive role. Dauti's book provides useful background to these developments, delving further back in time than existing English language studies into the creation of the Albanian state, and utilizing Albanian language sources and former Ottoman archives.
In the book, Dauti largely follows a chronological structure. Despite the book's titular timeframe, the first chapter begins in the late eighteenth century with the first published accounts of Albania in Britain—primarily travel writers, most notably Lord Byron the poet. Another sympathetic writer who traveled to the region was Benjamin Disraeli, who visited in 1830, shortly after the Ottoman's reasserted control by massacring several hundred Albanian leaders who had supported the Greeks in their earlier uprising.
Byron and Disraeli's positive depiction of Albanians was premised on their secular outlook, a perspective that was opposed by William Gladstone's religiously underpinned Christian-centric liberalism. British attitudes toward Albania, the book argues, were largely shaped by the Conservative and Liberal positions that Disraeli and Gladstone represented. This did not guarantee differences in political outcomes for the Albanians however.
Chapter 2 exemplifies this by noting that, despite Disraeli's sympathetic stance during the 1878 Congress of Berlin and after—his foreign secretary Lord Salisbury met with a delegation from the Albanian League, the first (short-lived) organized expression of Albanian political unity—ultimately “he did not answer their call” (37). Conservatives saw the Albanians as a bulwark supporting the Ottoman Empire, while for that same reason, Liberals saw them as Muslims unworthy of the support they gave to the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 3 examines these competing perceptions as they operated within the Balkan Committee, the foreign policy pressure group established in 1903 that advocated autonomy for Ottoman Macedonia but that largely viewed the region “through the prism of religion” and thus tended to overlook the role of the Albanians (56).
Albania was, of course, always integral to the Macedonian question and the broader fate of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Chapters 4–6 chart this, and in so doing also highlight the role of Britain in the Albanian national movement. The British and Foreign Bible Society had played an important role from the middle of the nineteenth century in translating and distributing the New Testament in Albanian, which as Dauti writes was “popular simply because it was a book in Albanian” (88). Britain played a role in the political plans of rising Albanian politicians too. When still a loyal Ottoman, and not yet the founder of modern Albania, Ismail Bey Qemali sent the Sultan an 1892 memorandum calling for a Balkan federation and an entente with Britain, in order to ward off Russia.
In the end, following the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which Dauti does a good job recentering on the important role played by Albania, the Ottoman government would reorientate toward Germany. He notes how language politics quickly unraveled the erstwhile support for the Young Turks from the Albanians, which ultimately led to open hostility and broader repercussions. However, the question of language makes its presence felt in a different way, too. While Dauti's writing is largely clear, there are a number of idiosyncrasies whose resolution might have aided the reader.
While the Albanian 1911 insurrection failed, it managed to induce Britain to support Albanian autonomy, which Dauti writes was “a pivotal step in the British government's abandonment of its friendly policy towards the Porte” (106). The Albanian insurgents had more success in 1912, but the possibility of Albanian autonomy upset the neighboring Balkan states and helped precipitate the Balkan Wars. The birth of Albania during the Conference of Ambassadors in 1912–13 was helped by Sir Edward Grey, who now saw British interest best served by advocating a new state.
Dauti's discussion of this diplomacy is somewhat cursory, however, and is better explored in Nicola Guy's The Birth of Albania (2012) and Ernst Helmreich's classic 1938 study. Likewise, the argument as a whole might have benefitted from a deeper engagement with the broader international context, which sometimes gets lost with the narrow focus on Britain. This said, Dauti's book is not a strict diplomatic history, but an attempt to illustrate the connection between domestic British perceptions and political outcomes.
Chapters 7 and 8, the final two of the book, are reflective of this in that they examine the careers of two prominent British supporters of the Albanian cause, who helped shape public opinion during this time. Edith Durham and Aubrey Herbert had both been disgruntled members of the Balkan Committee who baulked at its dismissal of the Albanian cause. Herbert created the Albanian Committee to counter this but the ultimate impact of its publicity appears hard to judge. The Committee criticized the outcome of the London Conference, but Herbert himself praised Grey.
Durham, it seems, had more success influencing British diplomats on the ground from the Balkans. After she left Albania in 1914, however, she returned only once seven years later—and was disappointed, writing, as Dauti quotes her: “[I] don't feel as if my Albania existed any more” (134). Could the Albania imagined by any of the Britons examined in the book ever really have existed?
Whatever the answer to that question, in its exploration of British domestic perceptions, Dauti provides useful background to the creation of the Albanian state that did ultimately eventuate. In doing so, Dauti also succeeds in bringing the importance of Albania back into the story of the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire.
