Networking against Genocide during the First World War: the international network behind the British Parliamentary report on the Armenian Genocide

Abstract

In 1916, Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee produced a report to the British Parliament which became the first large-scale collection of evidence of the Armenian Genocide. The book was the product of a remarkable international collaborative network involving British, US, Swiss, German, Armenian and other contributors. This article provides a deep analysis of the network and its motivations, arguing that the collaborators mutually stimulated each other’s actions to go further than was possible through the resources of one part of the network alone, and assesses the book’s effectiveness as a tool of fundraising. Further, it argues that the transatlantic and transnational collaboration occurred at a point of wider transition, brought about by the First World War, in which presumed international leadership of opinion shifted from Britain to the United States.