Eastern Question Research Articles

Introduction

During the past quarter-century Soviet historians have published a steady flow of monographs, articles, and document collections on the Eastern Question. (1) To a certain extent this flurry of scholarly activity stems logically from a long-term national interest in the Balkans. Russian historians and even Russian public opinion in the nineteenth century placed great importance on the Black Sea basin, the Straits, and south-eastern Europe in general for a variety of strategic, economic, religious, racial, and emotional reasons. However, unlike their prerevolutionary counterparts, who tended to underscore the religious, national, and emotive content of St. Petersburg's relations with the Balkan Christians (2), Soviet Marxist writers not surprisingly place more emphasis on socio-economic determinants in explaining the vicissitudes of the Eastern Question. Still, as the tone of the articles appearing here in translation suggests, recent Soviet works affirm the affinity and friendship between the Russian and Balkan Slavs and to a lesser degree, as in the case of Greece, the significance of Orthodox religious bonds.

Catholic Opinion on the Eastern Question, 1876–1878

In the middle 1870s British society experienced the greatest debate over foreign policy since the early days of the French Revolution: the dispute known as the Eastern question. For two years the British political world was divided by this issue as the country took sides between the Ottoman Empire, the oppressor of the Christian Slavic peoples of the Balkans, and Czarist Russia, the Slavs' protectors. What began as a diplomatic dispute became through its religious dimension a moral, even ideological, issue. Responsibility for this transformation belonged to a strange coalition made up of English radicals, a major portion of the Nonconformist community, and a considerable number of High Church Anglicans. They were joined later by the greatest Victorian exponent of moral force in politics, William Ewart Gladstone. Inexorably the Catholic community in Britain was drawn into this dispute.

Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878. Richard Millman

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBritain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878. Richard Millman Nancy Nichols BarkerNancy Nichols Barker Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 53, Number 1Mar., 1981 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/242256 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1981 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

New Serbia and the Origins of the Eastern Question, 1751-55: A Habsburg Perspective

In 1751 Empress Elizabeth Petrovna established New Serbia as a major defense and settlement initiative in a thinly populated area along the southern Ukrainian frontier. This initiative, which launched Imperial Russia's first centrally planned colonization of its southern steppe,1 prefigured Catherine II's later expansion to the Black Sea. But its immediate effect, in the years 1751 to 1755, was to strain Austro-Russian and Turkish-Russian relations and to cause a major international crisis. The story of this crisis is worth examining primarily because it helped crystallize key features of the explosive Eastern Question. This side of the crisis has, however, generally been ignored, as have its diplomatic aspects, because the Russian government finally drew back from the New Serbian adventure before it could cause a war. Austrian state papers document this incident in detail and illuminate its broader significance as an important harbinger of change in East European relations.

Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878

Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878

Frustrated Great Gamesmanship: Sir Garnet Wolseley's Plans for War against Russia, 1873–1880

Sir Garnet Wolseley, Viscount Wolseley of Tel el-Kebir and the very model of the modern major-general, is remembered for his reform of the army and for his successes in Ashanti and Egypt. Less is known of his views on how to fight a war against Russia and how to defend India from a Russian attack. His ideas on these subjects were first explained in any detail between 1873 an(^ 1880, as the result of the Great Eastern Crisis. This was the most serious and protracted crisis the British had to manage between the Crimean War and the First World War. It compelled them, in a way in which the Penjdeh Crisis, for example, did not, to work out their worldwide military and naval potential in a war against a major European military power. From 1873 onwards, Russia gained undisputed control over the routes to India across Central Asia and Britain gained equally undisputed control over the sea routes by way of the Mediterranean corridor. As a result, the Eastern Question, which had formerly to take account of the diplomacy, trade, and religions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, was increasingly simplified by the British. It turned into a prolonged discussion of the best strategy for defending India and merged into the Great Game in Asia.

Radicalism, Pressure Groups, and Party Politics: from the National Education League to the National Liberal Federation

The National Education League came to prominence in the 1870s as the most militant of the pressure groups that spearheaded the so-called “Nonconformist Revolt” from the Liberal Party. The revolt began in 1870, reached its peak in 1873, and contributed to the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1874. It finally petered out in the wake of that defeat and the emergence of a revitalized liberalism during the Eastern Question agitation in the late 1870s. The National Education League was founded in 1869, and disbanded in 1877, in the midst of the Eastern Question agitation. Because its dates are coincident with the revolt, and because it did play a crucial role in that movement, the league's history has been treated as an integral part of the Nonconformist Revolt. The revolt itself has been generally interpreted as a sectionalist attack on the Liberal Party, launched by Nonconformist grievance organizations for narrow, and largely sectarian, aims. According to this view, the revolt ended when the Nonconformists finally accepted the notion of a comprehensive liberalism that transcended their particularist interests; when they recognized that, politically speaking, they were Liberals before they were Nonconformists.This explanation is misleading because it ignores the generally radical thrust of the Nonconformist Revolt and the agitations of groups such as the United Kingdon Alliance and the Liberation Society. In particular, the rise and fall of the National Education League cannot be understood solely within the context of Nonconformist politics.

Political and Socio-Economic Repercussions of the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War

AbstractThe war waged by Russia against the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78, was one of the most important events in the history of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its significance for Southeastern Europe may be compared to such events of first-rate importance as Germany's and Italy's national unifications in the sixties and the early seventies of the past century. Without any exaggeration it may be stated that diplomatic activities of the large European countries on the eve and in the course of the war were unprecedented in scale. The Great Powers were well aware of the fact that the Eastern Question had reached its decisive phase, that the war inevitably would lead to profound political and economic changes on the Balkan Peninsula, and these changes would affect their age-old interests in the Near East. It is for these reasons that they committed themselves directly to the dramatic duel which began on Bulgarian land after the Russian troops crossed the Danube toward the end of June, 1877. The major political result of the war was Bulgaria's liberation from a five-century long Ottoman rule and the restoration of its national independence. But the war dealt a crushing blow to the decadent Ottoman military-feudal system in all of Southeastern Europe and opened up wide prospects for the progressive development not only of the Bulgarians but also of the other Balkan peoples. An important step was taken along the road for the liquidation of national oppression and for the achievement of a transition from feudalism to capitalism in one of the most beautiful parts of the European continent, whose development had been delayed for ages.

The First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813) and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Eastern Question

Throughout the nineteenth century a major international issue facing the Great Powers of Europe was the volatile “Eastern Question.” As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, the question of the future disposition of its extensive territories (some 238,000 square miles in Europe alone in 1800) provoked an intense and prolonged rivalry among those European states with vested political and economic interests in the Near East. With its military power in decline and its frontiers menaced by powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the nineteenth century despite its imposing imperial edifice.

Recent Soviet Publications on the Eastern Question

Recent Soviet Publications on the Eastern Question

An 1853 Formula for Ottoman Victory

Eighteen hundred and fifty-three was a fateful year in European diplomacy. The irritating and danger-laden Eastern Question once more moved out of the control of Europe's statesmen; and when the Ottoman and Russian empires locked in combat French and British leaders moved rapidly to form an alliance with the Turks. While objecting to implications by Tsar Nicholas that the government in Constantinople was “sick” and “dying,” the western nations testified to the validity of his remarks by their actions. Turkish moribundity was taken for granted in the next two years, and Turkey's allies were to treat her virtually as a satellite.

‘That Horrid Electorate’ or ‘Ma Patrie germanique’? George III, Hanover, and the Fürstenbund of 1785

The League of Princes (Fürstenbund) was founded on 23 July 1785, when the representatives of Prussia, Hanover and Saxony signed at Berlin a main treaty and several secret articles relating to the domestic affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. During the following months a number of other German princes joined the League, notably the elector of Mainz, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, the margrave of Baden and the dukes of Brunswick, Saxony-Gotha and Saxony-Weimar.s Its general objective was the preservation of the imperial status quo. More specifically, it was aimed at the Emperor Joseph II and the innumerable schemes of expansion popularly attributed to him, not always without justification. More specifically still, the League was designed to prevent any renewal of Joseph's most cherished ambition - the exchange of the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands (which embraced the larger part of present-day Belgium) for the Electorate of Bavaria. From the European perspective, the League was soon overshadowed by the reopening of the Eastern Question in 1787, eclipsed by the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1788 and finally extinguished by the Austro-Prussian rapprochement in 1792, but during 1785–6 it assumed great importance. Not the least affected was Great Britain, whose king - albeit in his capacity as elector of Hanover - was a founder-member of the League and one of its most enthusiastic protagonists. Despite the official British view - repeated ad nauseam to sceptical foreign diplomats - that Georg Kurfürst von Hannover and George III King of England were two entirely separate beings and that consequently the actions of the former could have not the least effect on the latter's domains, British policy could not help but be influenced.

"Let the People Settle the Eastern Question This Time and It Will Be Settled"

"Let the People Settle the Eastern Question This Time and It Will Be Settled"

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Series IA, Vol. VII: German, Austrian and Middle Eastern Questions 1929–1930

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Series IA, Vol. VII: German, Austrian and Middle Eastern Questions 1929–1930

The London Newsletters of Stephen and Cora Crane: A Collaboration

THE LONDON NEWSLETTERS OF STEPHEN AND CORA CRANE: A COLLABORATION Lillian Barnard Gilkes* In October of 1897 Stephen Crane wrote to Paul Revere Reynolds from England proposing a series of articles for New York papers which had paid him well in the past: the Herald, the World, and the Journal. Then, as an alternative to "fooling with the big newspapers," he suggested in the same letter another scheme: Reynolds should go to Curtis Brown, Sunday editor of the New York Press, and say to him"in the strictest confidence, that a lady named Imogene Carter whosework he had been using from time to time is also named Stephen Crane, and that I did 'em in about twenty minutes on each Sunday just dictating to a friend." Those pieces were "rotten bad," but the new series would be much better in style. "Then if he says aU right you might turn up a little syndicate for every Sunday." Crane counted on about £10 per week from sixty-five per cent of the take, thirty-five going to Reynolds.1 But nothing came of either of these schemes. After completing the Westminster Gazette articles on Turkey and the Eastern Question, followed by "London Impressions" and the "Irish Notes," Crane abandoned journafism to write short stories for "quick money." The great stories poured from him at top speed: "Death and the Child,""The Monster," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," "The Blue Hotel." It was an astonishing output at the height of his creative powers. Meanwhile, the "rotten bad" pieces were already undergoing some sort of syndication, presumably through Curtis Brown. Whose idea the Newsletter series was is not known. Hard up for cash as the Cranes were on arrival in England, it might have been Cora who saw rescue in exploiting for popular consumption her considerable knowledge of women's fashions. As Mrs. Donald Stewart ("Lady Stewart" to some) she had come by much of her wardrobe in the Paris shops, the great couturier establishments. She knew the difference between "dress" and "clothes." Her shrewd sense of what the average American housewife, more and more a reader of newspapers at the turn of the century, liked to hearabout must also havepersuadedherthat the •Lillian Gilkes has long been an authority on Stephen and Cora Crane. Among her numerous publications are Cora Crane and Stephen Crane: Letters, edited with R. W. Stallman. She is currently working on a book on Park Benjamin. 174Lillian Barnard Gilkes doings of the aristocracy and visiting royalty was surefire stuff for the gossip columns. Crane withheld his name, disassociating himself from these potboiler pieces for which he had felt it necessary to apologize to Reynolds. Cora's preserved manuscripts are signed with her byhne "Imogene Carter," but the articles appeared in the New York Press, the prime distributor, with only a general identification: "From a Special Correspondent of the Press." Though not great literature, these London Newsletters are of considerable interest in the Crane story, biographically as weU as bibliographically, for they shed important Ught on Crane's mental and emotional states during what was probably the most troubled period of his conflict-ridden Ufe, the Oxted residence. Despite the constant burden of debts, and contrary to much that has been written, tensions relaxed when they got to Brede Place. There in the companionship of his horses and his dogs, of Cora and a selective group of literary friends and neighbors, Crane spent one of the happiest years of his adult life. But the Oxted period, from which these letters come, is a different story. The articles also mark the beginning of what was actuaUy a collaboration between Crane and the woman he took to live with him as his wife. Generally thought to have begun no earlier than Brede Place, their working association commencing with the Newsletters later saw Cora taking over more and more of the secretarial duties of typing and business correspondence, and ended only with Stephen's death and her publication of the manuscripts he left. In this respect, the Newsletters fill in and round out the picture given of the Cora relationship to date, thus adding another chapter to the Crane story. The discovery...

Stratford, the Cabinet and the Outbreak of the Crimean War

The Eastern Question is a hardy perennial in historical research and writing. Years, indeed generations, of study seem to leave basic issues unresolved. One of the most persistent of those issues is the role of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at Constantinople, in the outbreak of the Crimean War. Temperley may have been exaggerating when he said it had long been a popular belief that Stratford ‘was the human agency which caused the Crimean War’ – a belief he spent some time in efforts to dispel – but that Stratford was less than helpful in the pursuit of a peaceful solution to the 1853 crisis was certainly a widely held belief at the time and has proved an enduring one. As late as 1966, M. S. Anderson, dealing with the question of Stratford's ‘guilt’, once more could only conclude: ‘Whether Stratford de Redcliffe, as has often been alleged, privately urged the Turkish ministers to reject the [Vienna] Note while publicly advising them to accept it, is uncertain.’ The Vienna Note was the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict proposed jointly by the Governments of England, France, Austria and Prussia and accepted in toto by the Tsar. There was, however, no lack of certainty in the minds of the British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Clarendon, and the first lord of the admiralty, Sir James Graham, that Stratford had been an agent provocateur. On 3 September Greville wrote: ‘Clarendon thinks that Stratford has encouraged the resistance of the Divan to the proposals [at Vienna] and that he might have persuaded the Turks to accept the terms if he had chosen to do so…’

The Porte and Ismail Pasha's Quest for Autonomy

Historians in the past have tended to examine the reign of the Khedive Ismail in Egypt (18631879) by using one of two approaches. In the first approach Ismail's actions were examined within the framework of Egypt, and purely in a local context, as in Abd al-Rahman al-Rafii's work, Asr Ismail (1932). In the second approach Ismail's reign is studied in the context of the Eastern Question, that is, as a by-product of European history and Anglo-French rivalry, such as in M. Sabry's L} Empire Egyptien Sous Ismail et L'IngSrence Anglo-Frangaise (1933). The latter approach consequently tended to show Ismail in either one of two lights: as a dissolute, profligate ruler who deserved to be deposed by the Powers, which was Lord Cromer's opinion in Modern Egypt (1908) ; or, in refutation, as a maligned ruler who was deposed unjustly because of European interests, such as Pierre Crabites', Ismail) the Maligned Khedive (1933) tried to prove. While both these approaches are perfectly valid and have yielded much important information, few historians, save for exceptions like G. Douin, Histoire du Regne du Khedive Ismail (1933), have viewed Ismail from a third angle, that of his relationship with the Porte, and its consequences to himself and to Egypt. Modern historians are thus faced with the task of unravelling these various themes and attempting to re-assess Ismail's reign in its totality. They have to weigh alternate presentations of Ismail as reformer, modernizer, tyrant, or despote ambigu1 as Jacques Berque in his monumental work, UEgypte: Imperialisme et Revolution (1967), calls him. In this work Professor Berque goes on to write that the time is not yet ripe for us to decide between the various accounts about Ismail, whether in works written by his detractors, or in those panegyrics commissioned by his son King Fuad, because there are so many pieces.2 One of those missing pieces is without doubt Ismail's relationship with the Porte. Because Egypt in 1841 became a hereditary government in the hands of Muhammad Ali and his family, historians assumed that Egyptian-Ottoman relations from then on were of relatively slight importance when compared to Egyptian-European relations. Perhaps that arose from a certain builtin feeling of superiority om their part, or perhaps from a more pragmatic awareness that relationships with the more powerful of the world are of more consequence than relationships with the weak. Be that as it may, there has been a tendency to dismiss the relationship of the Porte with Egypt as a purely symbolic one, and one that did not carry with it any real political issues. Quite to the contrary I believe that Ottoman-Egyptian relations were of crucial importance to the future history of Egypt and determined the course it was to take. Ismail himself regarded his relations with his sovereign as of paramount importance, and spent time and treasure trying to manipulate them to his own satisfaction. Every move that Ismail made towards the Porte, and every concession he gained from it, was in fact a new constitutional development which etched the boundaries of his independence as a ruler, and also as a subject of the Ottoman Sultan. Ismail's relations with the Porte therefore involved real political issues, and are significant in showing that a genuine,

The Eastern Question in British Strategic Policy During the Franco‑Prussian War

The Eastern Question in British Strategic Policy During the Franco‑Prussian War. Un article de la revue Historical Papers / Communications historiques (Montréal 1972) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The History of Austria in United States and Canadian Dissertations

Warren F. Kuehl's list of United States and Canadian doctoral dissertations in history is an important American bibliographical reference work which no historian can afford to neglect. Yet, scholars of the history of the Habsburg monarchy find it difficult to make effective use of this valuable bibliography, for the bulk of the entries which are of potential interest to specialists in the field are listed under numerous subdivisions and are not consolidated under appropriate headings in the topical index. For instance, numerous dissertations dealing with nineteenth-century alliances, with multilateral negotiations involving the Austrian empire, such as the Congresses of Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, or with the diplomatic relations of the Habsburg monarchy and the Austrian Republic with neighboring states are listed under such diverse headings as “Eastern Question,” “Europe, Diplomacy,” “Alliance System and Concert of Europe,” or “Near East.” While most scholars use library catalogs largely for finding works written by particular authors, those who peruse dissertation lists are more often interested in ascertaining what has been written on specific topics.

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939. Series 1A, Vol. II. The Termination of Military Control in Germany. Middle Eastern and American Questions. 1926–7.

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939. Series 1A, Vol. II. The Termination of Military Control in Germany. Middle Eastern and American Questions. 1926–7.