Peasants and Politics: Re-thinking the British Imaginative Geography of the Balkans at the Time of the First World War

I

As the Ottoman Empire declined and the first autonomous and then independent states emerged in the Balkans over the course of the nineteenth century, British politicians, newspaper correspondents, travellers, diplomats, religious leaders and other public figures engaged in an anxious debate on the region. Reports of ‘atrocities’ became a recurrent feature of Balkan news, most famously the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ of 1876 that inspired Gladstone to return to the political fray. In the early years of the twentieth century, regicide in Serbia in 1903, seemingly endemic political violence and nationalist tension in Ottoman Macedonia, and then the fractious Balkan Wars of 1912–13 provided a steady stream of sensationalist headlines, moral outrage and humanitarian concern. This was what the traveller and anthropologist Edith Durham described as the ‘Burden of the Balkans’. ¹²

Drawing heavily on postcolonial studies, and particularly the concept of ‘imaginative geography’ developed by Edward Said, literary scholars have argued that the Balkans were essentially ‘invented’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the violent, backward and hopelessly complicated ‘East End of Europe’. ¹³ Vesna Goldsworthy writes that ‘the moment when the newly independent Balkan states are supposed to be joining Europe is … also the moment when they are symbolically differentiated from it and a new – “Balkan” – Other is created’. ¹⁴ For Maria Todorova, the Balkan Wars ‘crystallized’ the negative Western image of the region as a barbarous and unstable ‘melting pot’ of rival national and religious groups. ¹⁵ Moreover, just as orientalism was ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’, balkanism was presented as an ‘imaginative colonization’ that subjugated the Balkans to Western European diplomatic, economic and cultural control. ¹⁶

In Europe, but not (totally) of it, the Balkans were marked negatively by both their proximity to ‘the East’ and by the impact of five hundred years of rule by a non-Christian empire. Moral outrage at Ottoman misrule did not necessarily imply a positive representation of the Balkan peoples. More common, most studies argue, was a ‘strategy of marginalization’ through which the Balkan nationalities were orientalized, exoticized, infantilized and denied the right to full self-government and sovereignty. ¹⁷ As Goldsworthy has shown, popular literature set in supposedly imaginary (but clearly ‘Balkan’) lands generally involved British heroes or heroines getting embroiled in a Balkan muddle and being called upon to restore order and leadership through their superior character. British travellers to the region are similarly seen to have created ‘an imaginative and geographical space in which to play out fantasies of personal control’. ¹⁸ In the arena of international politics, this all served to justify the interference or ‘monitoring’ of the Western powers (and their international agents and committees).

It is acknowledged that the dramatic beauty of the Balkan landscape was a source of inspiration to travellers and that the region could be imagined in a more positive vein – as a romantic wilderness in which to escape the constraints of the modern age or find ‘a palliative for contemporary decadence’. ¹⁹ However, even writing that cast the region as a pastoral idyll is nevertheless seen to have kept it separate from the modern world as a picturesque yet implicitly backward and semi-oriental borderland. ²⁰ Balkan peasants appear in British literature as ‘little more than cardboard cut-outs, an element of the scenery which contributes to local colour’. ²¹ As has been noted by Larry Wolff in relation to Eastern Europe more broadly, as well as by historians of other regions on Europe’s periphery (for example in studies of the Italian Mezzogiorno), ‘backwardness and the picturesque are two sides of the same coin’. ²² In this vein, the peasant has been described as ‘the clearest symbol of Balkan under-modernity’. ²³

And yet, as the British embracement of Ivan Meštrović suggests, Balkan nationalism and ‘under-modernity’ was not necessarily always presented in negative or condescending terms. The work on display at the V&A in 1915 was, contended one publicist, ‘inspired by a single fury of national memories and aspirations that is without parallel in modern art’. Far from the conditions of life in the Balkans acting as a barrier or burden, it was instead argued that ‘Meštrović had the fortune to spend his early days in a land throbbing with an unwearied poetry, and touching on every side the primitive realities of suffering and life and death’. ²⁴ A ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ society in this analysis was not the unfortunate if inevitable ‘flip side’ to the picturesque landscape; it was instead a valued antidote to Western cultural degeneration and materialism. Indeed, this seemed to invert the binary of balkanism entirely. If anything, it was the West that had lessons to learn from the Balkans.

Or was this just superficial wartime propaganda? Was it simply a corollary of the lionization of Britain’s small but gallant Serbian ally – part of what Andrew Hammond describes as a ‘shift from nineteenth-century denigration’ and an important but temporary ‘break in the discourse of balkanism’? ²⁵ Whilst accepting the power and potency of balkanist discourse, the present article suggests otherwise. The positive image of the Balkans exposed by the Meštrović exhibition – and, indeed, much of the language employed to rouse support for ‘Heroic Serbia’ – can be understood as part of a tradition of British political engagement with the region that pre-dated the First World War.

As will be discussed, this tradition still drew heavily on various forms of cultural prejudice. British activists generated a highly subjective representation of the Balkans that implicitly excluded significant sections of the region’s population, notably its non-Christian and town-based communities. It will be argued that this offers insights into how questions of citizenship and identity were conceived within British political culture at the time, underlining unease with ‘cosmopolitan’ society at home as much as in the Balkans. Nevertheless, for all their subjectivity and prejudice, British political and humanitarian campaigners imagined the Balkans in a manner that has not been fully addressed in previous work on the imaginative geography of the region.

II

This is partly a question of sources. The concept of balkanism has been developed largely with reference to literary texts. Todorova draws heavily on travel writing; for Goldsworthy, ‘the most indelible images of the Balkans were disseminated through popular literature’; Hammond lists poetry, fiction, drama and travel writing (as well as cartography, book illustration, cartoons and photography) as the primary means through which the West has created denigratory images of the region. ²⁶ Negative tropes about Balkan barbarity and backwardness were undoubtedly deeply engrained within such texts. However, alongside this primarily ‘literary’ interaction with the Balkans, there is another form of British engagement with the region that needs to be considered. This was based around political activism and humanitarian campaigning in support of the ‘oppressed Christian nationalities’ of the Ottoman Empire. It is associated particularly with British Liberal political culture, inspired by the great agitation against Disraeli over the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. ²⁷ As a later literary visitor to the region remarked: ‘The problems of India and Africa never produced anything like the jungle of savage pamphlets that sprang up in the footsteps of the Liberals who visited Turkey-in-Europe under the inspiration of Gladstone’. ²⁸

By the first decade of the twentieth century, British Liberal political debate on the Balkans centred on a campaign to force the reform of Ottoman rule in Macedonia. The Balkan Committee, a pressure group formed in 1903 by the reformist politicians Noel and Charles Buxton, gathered support from journalists, other backbench Liberal MPs and likeminded activists. ²⁹ Whilst remaining extremely ambivalent towards Balkan nationalism, the Balkan Committee and its supporters produced a steady stream of reports, memoranda, pamphlets, public speeches and newspaper articles in support of the Balkan peoples – or, as discussed below, more specifically in support of the Balkan Christian peasant communities. The records of this political engagement with Balkan questions need to be brought more fully into historical analysis of the British imaginative geography of the region. Doing so reveals, as has also been recently argued in other studies, that ‘British people had a real interest in the Balkans that went beyond the horror stories’. ³⁰

Yet this was an interest that related as much to domestic politics as to international affairs, as can be illustrated by the example of the Balkan Committee’s co-founder. Noel Buxton’s first trip to the region seems to have been inspired by a fairly apolitical attachment to the picturesque – the search for ‘valleys undefiled by motor, and mountains unvulgarized by the modern hotel’. ³¹ Before long, however, sympathy for the cause of the Balkan Christians under Ottoman rule had become an integral part of the wider reformist dynamic underpinning his political career. Why did he come to be ‘meddling in such an out of the way affair as the Balkan cockpit’, Buxton mused in October 1914. His answer was that ‘you see some of the realities of life, and become less of a parasite’. Much as he argued that ‘we can’t do much for the poor unless we know what it is like to be poor ourselves’, he justified his activities in the Balkans as ‘another way to get nearer to reality – hunger and cold, danger, wounds, death, rebellion, sacrifice’. ³²

There was a clear link in Buxton’s mind between the problems of the East End of London and those of the ‘East End of Europe’. Whilst his ‘natural interest’ in social reform perhaps came to take second place to his desire to remove the ‘evil’ of Turkish misrule in the Balkans, this did not imply a change of political outlook or commitment. As he explained:

There might be those who would feel that it was a pity to go in for a foreign thing rather than home reform, but all those who had been concerned with Macedonia were the very people who had been prominent in social reform at the first. ³³

Progressive ‘new liberal’ intellectuals such as L. T. Hobhouse and Graham Wallas voiced considerable unease at the perceived effects of urbanization and mass culture on patriotism and citizenship. ³⁶ Arguing that classical liberalism was unable to address the problem of urban poverty, such critics combined ‘utilitarian radicalism’ and ‘progressive elitism’, to borrow Peter Clarke’s terms. ³⁷ New liberals called for greater state intervention in the economy through gradual social reform and new, albeit limited, forms of welfare. Yet they also assumed that it was only if guided ‘from above’ – through disinterested leadership by a progressive elite – that the inherent virtues of ‘the People’ would triumph over jingoism, ignorance and crass materialism.

This reflected deep-seated pessimism about the material, social and cultural environment created by the urbanization of British society. The Boer War had generated alarming statistics about the physical condition of working-class recruits, placing the impact of city life on the ‘Condition of England’ under fresh scrutiny. ³⁸ Indeed, Liberal and Radical critics of the war had expressed admiration for the Boers as ‘citizen-farmers’ prepared to fight to defend their rural communities and way of life from the encroachments of a cosmopolitan, profit-driven empire. ³⁹ By contrast, the typical English city-dweller appeared to the writer and politician Charles Masterman to be ‘stunted, narrow-chested, easily-wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina or endurance’. ⁴⁰ For Masterman and other critics of city life, peasant proprietorship and access to the land had value as a source of physical and cultural vitality, promoting both moral ‘character’ and economic independence. ⁴¹

Concern with the complexities of the Balkan question did not follow automatically or directly from commitment to land reform at home (or vice versa). Yet this was the background against which the Balkan Committee and its supporters engaged with the region, and it needs to be borne in mind when considering the imaginative geography that was produced as a result.

III

Most notably, the political and intellectual context outlined above stimulated British interest in the Balkan ‘village community’. For instance, the centrepiece of the Balkan States’ Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1907, held with the support of the Balkan Committee, was a supposedly typical ‘Balkan village’, complete with ‘quaint houses’, ‘genuine’ local peasants, and gypsy dancers. ⁴² Scenes of country life, including footage of folk-dancing peasants in traditional dress, also featured in the collection of bioscope films shot in the Balkans in 1904 by the English filmmaker Charles Rider Noble (titles in the catalogues of the company he worked for include ‘Bulgarian Village Dance’ and ‘Peasant Beauties’). ⁴³ It was arguably misleading to focus on this pastoral image of the region at a time when mass emigration, increased reliance on a money economy, growing literacy, increased contact between towns and villages, and acute land-hunger were all helping to undermine the assumptions and attitudes of traditional peasant life. ⁴⁴ The Earl’s Court exhibition’s Serbian and Bulgarian collaborators would have apparently preferred to emphasize the technological and economic progress being made in their countries. ⁴⁵

It would be easy to dismiss the exhibition’s take on Balkan society as a romantic cliché. Yet the display was very much in line with the prevailing tendencies of British Liberal interaction with the Balkan lands and peoples. The Balkan village community was not valued merely as an ethnological museum. Indeed, British Balkan experts who had taken upon themselves the ‘serious purpose of awakening interest and enlightening sympathy’ for the region were quick to distance themselves from artists or travellers ‘who went to Turkey in search of the picturesque’. ⁴⁶ British Liberals in particular – from Gladstone’s day if not earlier – had long displayed an explicitly political concern with the region’s rural traditions and social structure. At the time of the Bulgarian agitation, commentators such as the historian E. A. Freeman had praised the historic traditions in Balkan society of a ‘primitive democracy’ that was held to be comparable to the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon folkmoot. ⁴⁷ Independence from the ‘Unspeakable Turk’ would allow these democratic traditions to flourish. Writing from Bulgaria in the 1880s and 1890s, the Times correspondent James Bourchier was struck by the local population’s ‘aptitude for self-government’. ⁴⁸ This he attributed to the absence of feudal structures and the widespread existence of peasant proprietorship, and to the survival of the village commune and other ‘primitive institutions of a pre-historic age’ such as the patriarchal house-community. ⁴⁹

Similar expressions of (albeit somewhat paternalistic) sympathy for the Balkan Christian peasantry were a common trope in British political discourse at this time, particularly amongst those who featured in the Bulgarian agitation. George Campbell, one of Gladstone’s most prominent supporters in 1876, pointed to the ‘conservative peasant-proprietor sort of democracy’ believed to exist in Serbia as ‘a remarkable instance of successful free government’. ⁵⁰ Twentieth-century Liberal or Radical commentators such as the journalist H. N. Brailsford continued to celebrate the Balkan village community and its traditions of local self-government and peasant proprietorship. ⁵¹ The virtue of ‘democracy’ was commonly placed on the local peasantry in the sympathetic writings of the Balkan Committee and its supporters, as was that of ‘industry’. ⁵²

There was therefore an established British Liberal perspective on the Balkans that linked peasant proprietorship with the qualities of independence and citizenship required for self-government and democracy. Such attitudes certainly never completely subsumed the more balkanist rhetoric that stressed the need for continued international or imperial control over ‘immature’ or ‘backward’ nationalities. There were always these two positive and negative sides to the British vision of the region as it emerged from Ottoman rule. Most scholarship, however, has focused squarely – and thus somewhat misleadingly – on the denigratory aspects of British representations of the Balkans. ⁵³ Shifting the focus of study to include greater consideration of the domestic political context suggests that British interaction with the region produced a more complex and multifaceted imaginative geography than the concept of balkanism implies.

Admittedly, as mentioned above with reference to the Boers, this idealization of peasant culture did not only apply to the Balkans. Victorians had particularly venerated the Swiss Landesgemeinden as a modern equivalent to the Teutonic Mark communities of the past. ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, although idealization of peasant culture was a general trope in British political discourse in this period, its impact on representations of the Balkans was particularly pronounced.

Vesna Goldsworthy does note the preference of British travellers and novelists for rural over urban locations in the Balkans. This is attributed to ‘the Romantic-inspired idea that the village, rather than the city, offers genuine insight into the “real” culture of an area’. ⁵⁵ Yet this overlooks the deeply rooted political belief in British Radical-Liberal circles at this time in the inherent virtues of peasant proprietorship and access to the land. Idealization of the Balkan village community was more than just a Romantic residue, not least for those activists who were also involved in contemporaneous campaigns against ‘Tory landlords’ at home. ⁵⁶

Indeed it is clear that for several reformist British commentators the ‘liberation’ of Macedonia from Ottoman rule would contribute not only to progress in the Balkans but equally to Western civilization as a whole. Amid widespread fears of ‘racial degeneration’ and serious concerns about the ‘artificial city civilisation’ of the West, the villagers of the Balkans showed many of the physical, moral and cultural qualities that were seen to be so lacking at home. ⁵⁷ The journalist, literary critic and one-time Balkan Committee secretary Rolfe Scott-James thought the Macedonians were ‘a people full of vital force which Europe can ill afford to lose’. He asked ‘whether our almost sterile western civilization should be content to lose the new stock of vital force which the Balkans can offer’. ⁵⁸ Writing shortly after the Balkan Wars, the diplomat George Young confirmed that ‘a Bulgarian peasant is of more value than the proletarian soldier of a developed country such as ours, the latter being often a social surplus product’. ⁵⁹ Elsewhere, Noel and Charles Buxton paid tribute to the fact that the majority of the population in Bulgaria were peasant proprietors rather than ‘mere wage earners’, something that was held to account for the absence of poverty ‘in the sense in which that term is used in the West’. Nor was such praise just the patronizing regard of the materially privileged for a ‘primitive’ and ‘picturesque’ backwater. It rested instead, so the Buxtons maintained, in a genuine hope that Bulgaria ‘as a young nation’ would escape the ‘evils – economic, moral and aesthetic – which are caused by luxury and the over-elaboration of life’. ⁶⁰

Such comments suggest that political and humanitarian activism in support of the Balkan peoples created a discursive space for the expression of concern at the impact of industrialization and urbanization on British society. Debating the virtues of Balkan peasant life had a very real political and cultural significance to activists such as the Buxtons. Their idealization of the Balkan village community was part of a transnational process through which reform-minded British activists addressed a key domestic policy concern. Understanding this domestic context is surely critical to understanding the British imaginative geography of the Balkans.

Despite acknowledgement of the ‘primitive’ appeal of Balkan peasant cultures in this period, this has been largely overlooked in analysis of attitudes towards the region. Indeed, conversely, it has been argued that ‘the vilification of the Balkans reached its peak during the nationalist uprisings of the early twentieth century’. ⁶¹ There were indeed negative reactions to the bloody events in the region in 1903, when, in addition to the Macedonian uprising against the Turks, the Serbian King and Queen were assassinated in a coup to install a regime that would be less easily controlled by Austria-Hungary. By the time of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, humanitarian fundraisers certainly faced a challenge in overcoming popular prejudice against the ‘Barbarous Balkans’. As one such activist complained: ‘It’s very difficult to rouse people’s imaginations when they think the countries more or less barbarous. Surely barbarians always live on nothing, they think’. ⁶² Yet, throughout this period more supportive views continued to be expressed. In 1904, reporting on screenings in London of bioscope films showing footage of refugees and other victims of the unrest in Macedonia, one journalist found it ‘impossible not to sympathize with the efforts of the insurgent bands who have taken up arms to throw off the yoke of Turkish tyranny’. ⁶³

Once the plurality of British images of the Balkans is appreciated, apparently surprising shifts in public perception can be better understood. The transformation of Serbia in British eyes from the ‘nation of regicides’ of 1903 to the gallant ally of 1914 can be seen as more than just a matter of wartime propaganda, for example. No doubt the unexpected resistance of the Serbian armies provided good copy for patriotic newspaper editors. Yet it is striking that British wartime images of Serbia stressed not just her martial qualities but also the democratic traditions of her society, her peasant folk-culture, and the pastoral beauty of her landscape. It was the peasant, rather than the semi-educated, semi-Westernized town-dweller, who was seen by the historian R. W. Seton-Watson to represent the true ‘Spirit of the Serb’. ⁶⁴ The Serbs were ‘a healthy, virile people’. ⁶⁵ Their society, whilst lacking the façade of Western political culture, was ‘built on that most solid of foundations, a democratic peasant people owning its own land and irrevocably rooted in the soil’. ⁶⁶ Arnold Toynbee urged his readers to look beyond ‘the intrigues of a handful of politicians at Belgrade’ and focus instead on the ‘industry of the peasants, who have been purging from the Morava-basin the traces of Turkish misrule’. ⁶⁷ G. M. Trevelyan likewise contrasted the weakness of Serbia’s political class with the ‘independent manliness of the free yeomen’ of the countryside. ⁶⁸

The same tropes, in other words, that had characterized the positive aspects of the British image of the Balkans in the pre-war period, which had focused primarily on Bulgaria and Macedonia, were now employed to bolster British propaganda regarding Serbia. As with the Meštrović exhibition, for certain commentators and publicists this also extended to the South Slav peoples as a whole. ⁶⁹ This may have still been the ‘Barbarous Balkans’, but British cynics were urged ‘to remember the essential distinction between the primitive and the savage’. ⁷⁰ Even the Buxtons – associated more with sympathy for the Bulgarians than for the Serbs – stressed the virtues of Serbia’s ‘peasant life, founded upon the soil and on a wide distribution of property’. ⁷¹ These positive images were not created from scratch. Pro-Serb and pro-Yugoslav publicists and propagandists drew on a reservoir of British support for the Balkan peoples that had been built up through the longer history of political engagement with the region.

To fully understand the British imaginative geography of the Balkans, it is therefore necessary to consider the writing and the media through which the political aspects of the British-Balkan relationship were framed. This calls for attention to be given to political journalism, parliamentary debate, lobbying, and other records of political engagement and activism, in addition to the travel writing and popular literature on which analysis of the British imaginative geography of the Balkans has tended to be based. As is explored below, there were still many negative or ‘balkanist’ tropes within British political discourse on the region. Positive images of the Balkan village community always co-existed with deeply condescending and paternalistic assessments of the region’s ‘political immaturity’ and ‘backwardness’. But it is clear from the records of political activism around Balkan questions that a positive appraisal of Balkan society was expressed alongside the more widely cited accounts of the region’s barbarity, instability and ‘otherness’. Todorova acknowledges that ‘there was always a plurality of British sympathies in the East’. ⁷² This plurality, and its relationship to the political culture in which British ‘sympathies’ for the region were developed and expressed, merits closer examination.

IV

It should be stressed that the Balkans constructed through British political and humanitarian discourse in this period was just as ‘imagined’ or ‘invented’ as that portrayed in literary texts. The Balkan village community of the British imagination was invariably a Christian one. Yet this was a region with significant Muslim and Jewish populations. In Macedonia – the primary focus of British political engagement in Liberal circles before the First World War – Muslims constituted one-third of the population. Jews formed the biggest single minority in the main urban centre of Salonika. ⁷³ In Albania, the population was approximately 70 per cent Muslim (either Sunnis or followers of the Bektashi sect). ⁷⁴

The political future of non-Christian communities tended to be overlooked, however, with the focus of most writers falling squarely on the sufferings of the supposedly ‘numerous and progressive Christian element’. ⁷⁵ In a campaign backed publically by representatives of church and chapel, the Balkan Committee typically sought to inspire humanitarian sympathy for the Macedonian population with a reminder that they inhabited ‘ground made sacred by the footsteps of St Paul’. ⁷⁶ Despite protestations to the contrary, there was undeniably indifference towards the fate of Balkan Muslims amongst many of the Committee’s supporters, as critics such as the pro-Albanian Edith Durham pointed out. ⁷⁷ In 1912, the Committee stood accused by the London Muslim League accused of trying ‘to strangle Islam in Europe’. ⁷⁸

Representations of the Balkans by Liberal and Radical activists reveal an implicit hierarchy of sympathy which certainly privileged the sufferings of Christians over Muslims. Yet this was a more complex form of cultural prejudice than contemporary accusations of ‘Cross versus Crescent’ bias implied. Support for Macedonian peasants also contrasts with negative portrayals of the predominantly urban Jewish and Greek inhabitants of the region. In defending the inherent virtues of Balkan peasant proprietorship and village life, British activists were prone to denigrate the town-dwelling ‘Levantine’ Greek and the ‘Jewish tax farmer’. ⁷⁹ In the Macedonian context, there was thus an anti-Semitic undercurrent to the juxtaposition of ‘progressive’ countryside and corrupt town. Whilst Christian villagers could be portrayed as passive victims of Turkish misrule, the urban Jewish population was more likely to be seen as an active part of the problem. One account described the Jews of Macedonia as members of a ‘ruling caste’ that was content to ‘live on the labour of a subject population of Christian serfs’. ⁸⁰

Interestingly, in a case of fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Balkans sharing common references, the ‘shadowy Jewish financier’ was also a regular anti-Semitic caricature in British popular literature with a Balkan theme at this time. Vesna Goldsworthy sees the presence of such characters as expressing British ‘anxieties about the loss of control’ over the region as it asserted its independence from Ottoman rule. ⁸¹ Perhaps this literary trope also expressed equally strong anxieties in the domestic sphere, at a time when prejudice against the Jewish ‘alien’ in British society was particularly intense and politically sensitive. ⁸²

The anti-Semitic thrust to negative representations of urban Balkan society, however, is arguably best understood as part of a wider critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’, urban culture and commerce in British political culture. In contrast to the picturesque countryside, the urban Balkans was invariably seen as a squalid environment. According to Henry Brailsford for instance, Salonika was united only by ‘a lingua franca of materialism, a patois for nasty pleasures and petty commerce’. ⁸³ In Macedonia, this distaste for urban society carried an anti-Semitic inference. In other parts of the Ottoman region, however, anti-urban sentiment coloured the portrayal of Christian groups as well. This is made clear by briefly comparing the imaginative geography of Macedonia with that of Armenia – two parts of the Ottoman world whose sufferings were in British eyes often linked.

Massacres of Armenian communities in the 1890s had led to an outpouring of British humanitarian sympathy, political activism and anti-Ottoman moral outrage. Yet, as Jo Laycock has shown, interest in – and notions of British responsibility for – the Armenians could dissipate rapidly. Despite the massacres of the 1890s being even more horrific than those in Bulgaria twenty years earlier, even at the height of the crisis, in 1895–96, public support was ‘not on the scale of the Bulgarian agitation’. ⁸⁴ The Armenian question had slipped from the international agenda by 1897, although it would of course re-emerge during and after the First World War. ⁸⁵

There was considerable British ambivalence towards the plight of the Armenian people in the 1890s. As a diasporic nationality, comparisons were in fact just as readily drawn between Armenians and Jews as between Armenians and their fellow Christians in the Balkans. One commentator asserted that ‘the word Armenian no more connotes a nation than does the word Jew, and it would be a good deal less absurd to demand Judea for the Jews than it is to claim Armenia for the Armenians’. ⁸⁶ With writers referring to the ‘distinctive facial peculiarities’ of the Armenian people, analogies to popular anti-Semitic caricature are not hard to find. ⁸⁷ Their success within the Ottoman Empire as merchants, tradesmen and bankers meant that the Armenians were also subject to similar kinds of racial prejudice and negative stereotyping as Jews, with one extreme account describing them as ‘rich, tyrannical, ignorant and grasping tradesmen who have money in narrow, sordid business in towns’. The more circumspect Lord Rosebery complained to Gladstone: ‘I do not see why we should bear the whole burden of this astute if pious race’. ⁸⁸ Even committed supporters of their cause, more likely to stress their piety than their astuteness, acknowledged that the Armenians were ‘a frugal, money-making race’, that they ‘resembled the Jews in their aptitude for commerce’, and that they were ‘the bankers, usurers, the moneyed men of the East’. ⁸⁹

In an attempt to counter such prejudice, the pro-Armenian Liberal James Bryce claimed that, contrary to popular belief, the Armenians were a largely peasant population rather than a commercial, town-dwelling class. ⁹⁰ This is contradicted by population statistics, which suggest that there were more Armenians living in Constantinople at this time than in ‘Armenia’ itself. The Armenian merchants, shopkeepers, bankers and civil servants of the capital would have outnumbered the Armenian shepherds and peasants of Eastern Anatolia. ⁹¹ Yet the fact that Bryce was so keen to depict the Armenians as a peasant population is surely telling. It illustrates both the hold that the village community had over the British political and cultural imagination at this time, and the related ambivalence towards urban society. In contrast to the ‘Levantine’ Greek, the ‘cosmopolitan’ Armenian or the ‘unscrupulous’ Jew, the Balkan peasant could be presented as an honest and industrious ‘son of the soil’, an ideal-type naturally suited to local self-government and democracy. As discussed, however, by focusing so squarely on Balkan peasant society, British activists constructed a picture of the region in which the sufferings of other communities were ignored.

British interaction with the cause of the ‘oppressed nationalities’ of the Ottoman Empire was therefore driven by prejudice as well as by humanitarian sympathy and solidarity. The imaginative geography that was produced as a result was marked by a variety of essentially invented caricatures, both positive and negative. British political and humanitarian engagement with Balkan peasant society is significant as an illustration of both what was idealized and what was demonized through cross-cultural encounters in this period. Campaigners may not have always viewed the region through the prism of balkanism, but activism in support of the victims of Ottoman rule relied on the persistent misrepresentation of Balkan society and the negative characterization of certain sections of the region’s population. Humanitarian sympathy, however heartfelt, was thus inexorably intertwined with the expression of deep-seated prejudice and ignorance. This underlines the importance of imaginative geography to political activism and humanitarianism – and vice versa: it reinforces the need to consider the records of political engagement when analysing representations of foreign lands and peoples.

V

Whilst the positive aspects of the British imaginative geography of the Balkans certainly merit closer consideration, the continued and widespread presence of denigratory assumptions and stereotypes must still be acknowledged. There was always a delicate balance to be struck in British minds between advancing the cause of ‘freedom’ and ensuring the careful management of the region’s complex national questions. It was assumed that the Great Powers had the right to interfere in the internal policies of both the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan successor states, ostensibly to monitor the treatment of minorities and investigate reports of atrocities. ⁹² When such interference failed to achieve the anticipated results, or when the Balkan states seemed intent on acting independently of the Powers – when, as with the Balkan Wars, the ‘tail ended up wagging the dog’, as Mark Mazower puts it – established stereotypes about Balkan ‘barbarity’, violence and obfuscation quickly came to the fore, even in otherwise sympathetic political circles. ⁹³

Hence, in July 1914, there was initially rather limited British sympathy for Serbia. The Daily News, which eventually supported the war, insisted that ‘we must not have our western civilization drowned in a sea of blood to wash out a Serbian conspiracy’. ⁹⁴ British Radicals were already particularly ill disposed towards Serb nationalism in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, perhaps reflecting the generally more pro-Bulgarian stance of the Balkan Committee. ⁹⁵ If there was a specifically anti-Serb thrust to the Radical outrage, however, the Sarajevo murder was nevertheless depicted as being symptomatic of a broader problem – what Arnold Toynbee would later call ‘the curse of the Balkans’. ⁹⁶ In a defence of the record of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the New Age argued that ‘the half-savage denizens of the Balkans have still a long hill to climb before they reach the cultural level of the Habsburg dominions’. ⁹⁷

As noted, this was only one side of what was a complex and fluctuating imaginative geography. The hostility towards Serbia in July 1914 and low estimations of its relative ‘cultural level’ did not prevent the enthusiastic response to the Meštrović exhibition a year later. Nevertheless, even for sympathetic British politicians and activists, greater interaction with Balkan representatives and agents during the war consolidated the general impression that the region needed to be managed ‘from above’ in order for its value and potential to be realized. What were ultimately largely hypothetical and academic debates about the envisaged post-war settlement in the region rested on the paternalistic assumption that the interests of the Balkan states were best served by British ‘experts’. In a letter to Seton-Watson, Sir Edward Boyle expressed the conviction that ‘we [that is to say those “disinterested friends” of the Balkan peoples] should impose a serious recognition of Bulgarian claims in Macedonia’. ⁹⁸ Henry Brailsford, too, urged Seton-Watson to use his ‘great influence’ to moderate Serbian claims to Macedonia, at a time when Seton-Watson himself was more concerned with patching up the strained relations between the Serbian government-in-exile and pro-Yugoslav bodies, and with trying to reconcile the aspirations of both groups with Italian claims to Istria and Dalmatia. ⁹⁹ Such an enthusiastic embrace of amateur diplomacy surely overestimated the influence of even as well-connected a figure as Seton-Watson over the Foreign Office and War Cabinet.

There was little concern that the aspirations of the peoples affected by the proposed territorial changes ought to be taken into consideration. Noel Buxton actually went further and called for the territorial settlement to be followed by an exchange of populations. This would be overseen by an international commission with the aim of transferring as many of the Balkan peoples as possible to ‘the States to which they rightly belong’ and thus achieve a ‘sorting out of Nationalities’. ¹⁰⁰ Although Buxton’s commitment to the policy of the population exchange was never absolute, this does suggest that sympathy for Balkan peasant communities was compatible with ‘ethnic cleansing’. For all the British Liberal praise for the ‘rootedness’ of Balkan society, there was a readiness to resort to widespread population displacement if it was felt to best serve the long-term interests of ‘progress’ in the region. Whether or not the unfortunate ‘sons of the soil’ in Macedonia and elsewhere actually wanted to have their lives and livelihoods uprooted in this way was not a question to which Buxton, and other commentators of a similar mind, appear to have paid much attention.

The fact was that neat and tidy solutions to the national questions presented by the Balkans were not available. Yet this was generally blamed on the region itself, reinforcing the stereotype of Balkan ‘backwardness’ and barbarity. In a report on the subject for the Labour Party, Brailsford dismissed the prospect of a post-war Balkan federation. This was not because it was necessarily felt to be an ill-conceived objective, but because it was assumed to have been rendered impossible by the ‘emotional chauvinism and intellectual immaturity’ of the Balkan peoples. ¹⁰¹

By the end of the war, writers who had once written optimistically of the contribution to be made to western civilization by the Balkan lands seemed to see only the debilitating products of a ‘backward’ Balkan nationalism being exported to the more ‘advanced’ section of Europe. For Charles and Dorothy Buxton,

all the destruction and confusion which had made the Balkans a synonym for political unrest and danger had been reproduced, with tragic exactness, over a far greater area, and had begun to affect the life of peoples more advanced in civilization and more accustomed to order and culture. ¹⁰²

Images of the Balkans in British political discourse were thus unstable, malleable and subject to revision or counter-argument. Elements of balkanism were certainly prevalent, but the Balkans of the British political imagination was marked by a variety of essentially invented caricatures. These included the ‘pious’ Balkan Christian, the ‘sturdy’ peasant proprietor, the ‘decadent’ Turk, the ‘unscrupulous’ Jewish tax-farmer, the corrupt ‘Levantine’ Greek, and the ‘rapacious’ Albanian brigand. Positive and negative tropes were intertwined. Different aspects of this complex and at times contradictory imaginative geography might be stressed by the same commentators at different times, depending on the context. It was arguably this interplay between forces of attraction and repulsion that gave the region its intriguing hold over the British cultural and political imagination.

VI

Edward Said argued influentially in Orientalism that ‘imaginative geography and history can help the mind to identify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away’. ¹⁰⁴ On the evidence of the political discourse addressed by this article, however, we should not rely too heavily on assumptions that the foreign ‘other’ was always and inevitably cast in negative terms, or that it was invariably the subject of an ‘imperialism of the imagination’. Historical analysis of British engagement with international questions and of British interaction with foreign cultures has to account for both positive and negative patterns of perception. In the case of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Balkans, British responses could stress the region’s similarity and ‘sameness’ rather than its ‘backwardness’ or inferiority. A genuine if at times misguided humanitarian sympathy can still be discerned amidst the underlying currents of cultural prejudice. Genuine solidarity with victims of oppression and misrule undoubtedly existed despite the fact that it tended to go hand in hand with a paternalistic drive to control.

Ultimately, the imaginative geography of any region must depend to a great extent on who is doing the ‘imagining’, and why. However, as Patrick Finney has noted of studies of British representations of the Balkans, ‘on the whole, the extant work … has been more concerned with outlining the lineaments of the discourse and exploring its crystallization than with tracing what precise political significance it may have had at specific times and places’. ¹⁰⁵ In outlining the positive appeal of the idealized Balkan village community, this article has thus tried to indicate its significance to British political culture. It has suggested that the appeal of the self-sufficient and ‘virile’ Balkan peasant freeholder should be understood in the context of widely held concerns about the moral character and physical condition of many of the inhabitants of Britain’s industrial towns and cities. It has argued that the contrast that was drawn between the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘artificial’ society of Salonika and the ‘real’ Balkans of the interior mountains and countryside offers insight into the ongoing preoccupation of British reformist politics at this time with the land, and with the relationship between land ownership, urbanization and citizenship. Ambivalent representations of the Ottoman Armenians can also be better understood in this context.

This underlines the extent to which concerns about the impact of urbanization permeated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British political discourse. Moreover, it shows that these essentially domestic debates and anxieties were articulated in the context of foreign affairs and international humanitarianism. Engagement with events in the Balkans was part of what Kevin Grant describes as ‘a multifaceted, radical campaign for reform in the Edwardian era’. ¹⁰⁶ Re-thinking the complex imaginative geography that this engagement helped to construct can therefore contribute to a broader challenge – that of unpicking the complex intersection between the domestic and international spheres of British political history.

More generally, this article has sought to make the case for ‘putting the politics back in’ as far as historical analysis of Britain’s cultural encounters with the rest of the world is concerned. Travel writing and popular literature were an important means by which ‘the other’ was presented to British audiences. Literary and cultural scholars have influentially mined such texts to expose the subjectivities of the British worldview and the impact of this on geopolitical relationships – the work on ‘balkanism’ is an important example of this. Yet it remains necessary to integrate analysis of literary sources with more conventionally and explicitly ‘political’ records and correspondence. Bringing ‘literary’ and ‘political’ analysis into closer dialogue means bringing different historical voices into one comprehensive analysis, and thereby subjecting British imaginative geographies to closer scrutiny. This will serve equally to enhance understanding of the intriguing relationship between the ‘political’ and the ‘cultural’ components of British political culture.