The Bulgarian Horrors: Culture and the International History of the Great Eastern Crisis, 1876-1878
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THE BULGARIAN HORRORS: CULTURE AND THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT EASTERN CRISIS, 1876-1878 by Cameron Ean Alfred Whitehead M.A., University of Victoria, 2007 B.A., University of Victoria, 2006 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2014 © Cameron Ean Alfred Whitehead, 2014 Abstract In the wake of alleged Ottoman atrocities in Bulgaria, the new geopolitical order created at the 1878 Congress of Berlin was demarcated largely along Western cultural prejudices. Using a cultural approach that appreciates both “macro” material structures and “micro” cultural processes in Bulgaria, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, this study offers an alternative framework for understanding this period. It employs community-level evidence (petitions, public meetings, provincial journalism) alongside the diplomatic record; moreover, it uses the diaries, writings, and the marginalia within the personal readings of important policy-makers as pivotal intermediaries between cultural discourses, material structures, and individual agency. Diverging from previous narratives, which hold that the Great Powers altruistically responded to barbaric atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against their European Christian subjects, I argue that solidifying conceptions of racially-based national self-determination and nonconformist evangelicalism were crucial within humanitarian protest, the diplomatic decision-making process, military objectives during the Russo-Turkish War, and the resolution of the Great Eastern Crisis. Western cultural preconceptions, propagated, negotiated, and reified throughout this process, were thus transformative in the construction of the new, unstable Balkan geopolitical order that contributed to the outbreak of the First World War and the remaking of the modern world. ii Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, C. Whitehead. iii Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ...................................................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures ....................................................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ............................................................................................................................................................... xi 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology and Historiography: Renovating the Practice of International History ........... 7 Analytical Frameworks: Constructivism, Culture, and Structuration ....................................... 18 Scope and Focus: Britain, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1878 ............................. 29 Section Summaries ........................................................................................................................................ 37 2. The Bulgarian Revolution: Reconceptualizing the April Uprising ............................................. 42 The Ottoman Historical Context and the Spread of Nationalism ................................................ 45 Origins of Revolutionary Bulgarian Nationalism .......................................................................... 56 Revolutionary Nationalism and the Origins of the April Uprising ............................................. 61 The Ottoman Default (1875) ................................................................................................................ 65 The April Uprising and the Bulgarian Horrors ................................................................................... 68 Revolutionary Bulgarian Sources ....................................................................................................... 80 Robert College and Initial Reports of the April Uprising ........................................................... 84 Revolutionary Bulgarian Delegates in Britain ............................................................................... 87 Codification of the Bulgarian National Narrative .............................................................................. 91 The 2007 Batak Massacre Controversy .......................................................................................... 100 Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................... 109 3. “What a Glorious Opportunity for Attacking the Devil”: Cultural Preconceptions, New Journalism, and the Origins of the Bulgarian Agitation .................................................................... 114 British Historiography of the Great Eastern Crisis and the Bulgarian Agitation ................ 119 Antecedents to Agitation: Patterns of Perception in British Newspapers, 1870 to June 1876 .................................................................................................................................................................. 124 Attacking the Devil: W.T. Stead and the Northern Echo ............................................................... 130 iv Competing Conservative Views of the Eastern Question, January to June 1876 ................ 135 Between the Outbreak of Rebellion and its Fallout: June 1876 ................................................. 139 “Moslem Atrocities in Bulgaria”: 23 June 1876 ........................................................................... 144 Racialized Discourses of the Agitation ............................................................................................ 155 Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................... 163 4. A Politics of Righteous Passion: Community Level Political Action during the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876-1877 ...................................................................................................................................... 166 Petitions Campaigns in British Historiography ............................................................................... 169 Horror and Indignation: The Bulgarian Agitation Petition Campaign, July to October 1876 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 178 British Investigations into the Bulgarian Horrors .......................................................................... 186 Eugene Schuyler and Januarius MacGahan’s Reports ............................................................... 187 Culturally Imagined Narratives into Perceived Material Facts ............................................. 194 Explosion of the Agitation: Public Meetings and the Petition Campaign, August-October 1876 .................................................................................................................................................................. 199 The Impact of Eugene Schuyler’s Report ....................................................................................... 206 Public Meetings and Petitions ............................................................................................................ 207 The Baring Report, September 1876 ................................................................................................... 216 “Gladstone to the Front!” Stead, Gladstone, and the Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, September 1876 ........................................................................................................................ 218 Gauging the Importance of the Bulgarian Agitation ...................................................................... 230 Conclusions .................................................................................................................................................... 237 5. Reading Beside the Lines: Marginalia, W. E. Gladstone, and the Bulgarian Horrors......... 240 Adopting Methods for Marginalia ......................................................................................................... 243 Before the Horrors: Gladstone’s Background Reading ................................................................. 250 The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East ..................................................................... 261 Beyond the Lion and the Unicorn: The Agitation and International History ....................... 266 Gladstone’s Later Readings (1877-1878) ...................................................................................... 280 Conclusions ...................................................................................................................................................