Search results
The history of relief work is in its infancy. This book draws on new archival research to reveal the priorities of nineteenth-century relief workers, and the legacies of their preoccupations for relief work today. It first explores the inauguration of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (NAS) at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 under the figurehead of Loyd Lindsay. Then, the book sees the revival of the NAS for work in the Balkans during a period of nationalist violence and Ottoman counter-insurgency which culminated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. It also follows the staff of relief committees as they dispensed aid in British colonial wars. The book examines the critiques of British policy in the Boer War (1899-1902) emanating from intersecting circles of Quakers, New Liberals and ethicists, and considers these groups' offer of aid to Boer civilians. Further, the book concentrates on the methodologies of relief for Boer inmates of British concentration camps in South Africa and on the implications of this relief for its intended recipients during and after the war. It concentrates on aid to British soldiers. The book closes by tracing continuities in vocational practices and dispositions to emerging areas of concern in the post-war period, in particular child welfare, and briefly considers their implication for relief work today.
campaign to denounce what came to be known as the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’ not long before Layard’s appointment. 2 Starting in late summer 1876 the public read reports in the press of the mass slaughter of Bulgarian Christian minorities by Ottoman soldiers on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78). Advocates of the Bulgarian cause at home believed that Britain ought to take responsibility for the
’s ‘really close association with the flag’ began in 1877 with the threat to Constantinople from the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War. 2 Gladstone’s Liberals were anti-Turkish but Disraeli’s Conservatives were pro-Turkish, viewing Turkey as a bulwark against Russian expansion and favouring war if necessary to protect Constantinople. This was the stance embodied in G.W. Hunt
tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech.’ 5 Such perpetuation is evident from the way in which the Crimean War propagated the Russo-Turkish war, which ended with the unsatisfactory Berlin Treaty and helped trigger the global conflict of 1914 to 1918, leading to the Second World War. As Michel Foucault sees it, ‘a battlefront runs through the whole of society
never a unified command: the British and French generals consulted, but the two armies always acted independently. As well as the Danubian campaign, the Sultan was also fighting the Russians in the Caucasus, the traditional second front in all the Russo-Turkish wars – the Russians had been fighting the mountaineers almost continuously since the time of Peter the Great. A skillful leader of the Caucasian Muslim tribes, an imam named Shamil, emerged in the 1820s and would cause the Russians considerable trouble in 1853 and 1854. Both the
in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, and ultimately becoming the basis for the Russian Red Cross. Pirogov and Nightingale, the two outstanding directors of nursing in the war, make an interesting contrast. They shared many characteristics and positions. First, they could never have accomplished all that they did if they had not both had powerful political and financial support. It was the Grand Duchess who first had the daring idea of using women at the front, who financed the Sisters of the Exaltation of the Cross, and who secured the
In addition, the quarantine facilities in the adjacent Danubian principalities (the Ottoman vassal states Moldavia and Wallachia, which were occupied by Russia from 1828) relieved the Habsburg sanitary cordon. 71 The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) concluded the Russo–Turkish War of 1828–1829 and governed the declaration of quarantine in the region. In 1830 quarantines were established in Wallachia at thirteen stations and at one, namely Galat¸i, in Moldavia. 72 In his paper ‘Between Polizeistaat and cordon sanitaire: epidemics and police reform during the Russian
), p. 68. 11 Roddy, Strange and Taithe, ‘Humanitarian Accountability’, 191, record £106,221 having been collected for 1877–78 Russo-Turkish war victims. In Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870 –1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 75, p. 95, Rebecca Gill estimates that about £250,000 were collected ‘for those affected by war in the Balkans’ over the period 1876–78. Neither campaign targeted a single ethnic group. 12 Prévost, ‘L’opinion publique britannique’, 66. The article discusses earlier insights by D. W
question of Muslims in the Balkans, which – apart from those in the Caucasus – were and still are the only autochthonous Muslim population in Europe, it is surprising that no relevant study has yet been conducted on their hajjis. As late as the Congress of Berlin of 1878 that put an end to the Russo-Turkish War, estimates pointed to more than 4 million Muslims living in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which meant circa 35% of the total Balkan population. After the war, ‘Turkey-in-Europe’, i.e. the Ottoman possessions in the Balkans, would be reduced to
-Zakomel’skii, a school friend of Skobelev’s bestial in his “cruelty and depravity”.32 Still, Skobelev had permitted himself to fall under these influences, and more besides. It was not this Skobelev whom he admired, but the later Skobelev of the Russo-Turkish War and Transcaspian campaign, who had “improved morally” and grown into a commander skilled in tactics and logistics alike.33 Thus moderated, his gifts could shine through. But Kuropatkin tells the story this way not only to emphasise his association with a military celebrity, or to indicate positive models for his