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Lord Salisbury and the Ottoman Massacres

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Peter Marsh
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Extract

In 1876, and again from 1894 to 1896, thousands of Christians in Bulgaria and Armenia, then provinces of the Ottoman Empire, were massacred by Turkish troops, local irregulars known with romantic barbarity as bashi-bazouks, and Moslem tribesmen. The victims were raped or mutilated, many were burned alive. Weeks later streets were littered with corpses. The Armenians, even in the best of times, were subjected to an almost systematic starvation: Moslem tribesmen were permitted to take the crops of Armenian farms when times were peaceful, and to burn them in periods of violence. Naturally such treatment provoked insurrections, which renewed the cycle of repression.

These massacres drove a section of the English public to peaks of moral indignation. Nonconformist ministers and liberal academics, and their followers, were imbued with a reverence for the independent individual. High church clergy had rediscovered a religious affinity with the ancient Churches of the Near East. Humanitarian concern for the sufferings of one's fellow men – prison inmates and child laborers at home, for example, or slaves abroad – had been a steady force in the nineteenth century, and fortified these sectarian sensitivities. These Englishmen would have been distressed by the Ottoman massacres even if the British Government had been in no way involved. Since they believed the Government to be in fact gravely responsible, they conducted extensive political agitations.

Britain was the foremost defender of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , May 1972 , pp. 63 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1972

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References

1. The Bulgarian agitation and Gladstone's response to it are most ably analyzed in Shannon's, R. T.Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

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46. Salisbury modified it only by trying to sharpen its teeth. He paid close attention to the points he considered essential to the effectiveness of any scheme of reform: selection of a Turkish administrator for Armenia whom Europe could trust, with full powers and security of tenure so that the Sultan could not undercut or dismiss him; alternatively, the creation of a supervisory commission including representatives of the Powers. Christ Church, Oxford, Salisbury's telegrams to Currie, 29 June and 1 July 1895, and his letters to Currie, 1 July and 12 Aug. 1895, copies, Salisbury papers; and Public Record Office, Salisbury's letter to Currie, 10 July 1895, draft, F. O. 78/4606, Salisbury's telegram to Currie, 16 Aug. 1895, and Sanderson's telegram to Currie from a minute by Salisbury, 29 Aug. 1895, F. O. 78/4627.

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52. The Armenians were not, however, Orthodox, and Russia treated its non-Orthodox minorities harshly.

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63. Christ Church, Oxford, Salisbury to Goschen, 18 and 23 Dec. 1895, Salisbury Papers.

64. This was the speech quoted supra, p. 75.

65. Hansard, 4th series, XXXVII, 54-8 (11 Feb. 1896).

66. Hansard, 4th series, XXXIX, 449 (30 Mar. 1896).

67. Christ Church, Oxford, note by Salisbury to S. K. McDonnell, 2 Mar. 1896, copy, Salisbury Papers.

68. To the Primrose League, 29 Apr. 1896, reported in The Times, 30 Apr. 1896; and in Parliament, Hansard, 4th series, XLIII, 113 (20 July 1896).

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70. Parliamentary Papers, Turkey No. 2 (1897), no. 2.

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76. Lady Gwendolen Cecil recalled this in the uncompleted draft of a fifth volume (p. 86) to her biography of her father, now at Christ Church, Oxford.