Armenia, Australia & the Great War

By Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley

Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide massacres. April 24, 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli; and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians. For the first time, this book tells the powerful, and until now neglected, story of how Australian humanitarians helped people they had barely heard of and never met, amid one of the twentieth century's most terrible human calamities. With 50 000 Armenian-Australians sharing direct family links with the Genocide, this has become truly an Australian story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jun 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781742242286

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ARMENIA, AUSTRALIA

& THE

GREAT WAR

VICKEN BABKENIAN is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. Vicken has written several articles on Australian international humanitarianism for peer-reviewed history journals. His research has been cited in radio and television documentaries on the First World War and its aftermath.

PROFESSOR PETER STANLEY is one of Australia’s most active military-social historians. Formerly the Principal Historian of the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980 to 2007, he has been a research professor at UNSW Canberra since 2013. He has published twenty-nine books, including Lost Boys of Anzac (2014) and his Bad Characters was jointly awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011. Peter is president of Honest History and appears frequently in the media.

ARMENIA, AUSTRALIA

& THE

GREAT WAR

Vicken Babkenian & Peter Stanley

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley 2016

First published 2016

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Babkenian, Vicken, author.

Title: Armenia, Australia & the Great War / Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley.

ISBN: 9781742233994 (paperback)

9781742242286 (ebook)

9781742247656 (ePDF)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Armenian massacres, 1915–1923.

World War, 1914–1918—Atrocities—Turkey.

Armenian massacres survivors—Australia.

Humanitarian assistance, Australian.

Armenians—Australia—History.

World War, 1914–1918—Participation, Australian.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Stanley, Peter, 1956– author.

Dewey Number: 956.620154

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Nada Backovic

Cover images TOP LEFT A deported Armenian woman and child. Armin T Wegner © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. TOP RIGHT The Rev. James Cresswell, Miss Gordon, Hilda King and John Knudsen and some of the 1700 Armenian orphans at the Australasian Orphanage, c. 1923. Courtesy of Missak Kelechian. BOTTOM Two Australian Light Horsemen watch Armenian women sew at the Port Said refugee camp, c. 1918. James A. Cannavino Library, Archives & Special Collections, Marist College, USA.

Illustrations Maps on pages viii–ix and x–xi by Gavin James, mapuccino

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The authors welcome information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

To all those humanitarians who risk their lives to save others during war and genocide

CONTENTS

Maps

Authors’ note

Prologue Saturday, 24 April 1915

Chapter 1 From Ararat to Ballarat

Chapter 2 The ‘Armenian question’

Chapter 3 The first massacres, 1894–96

Chapter 4 Murder of a nation

Chapter 5 Deportation and death

Chapter 6 Anzacs and Armenians

Chapter 7 Anzac prisoner of war witnesses

Chapter 8 Australians and the Armenian massacres of 1915

Chapter 9 Friends of Armenia

Chapter 10 Victory brings relief

Chapter 11 From the armistice to Versailles

Chapter 12 Relief

Chapter 13 Smyrna and Chanak

Chapter 14 Loyal Wirt’s mission

Chapter 15 James Cresswell’s journey

Chapter 16 Edith Glanville and Armenian relief

Chapter 17 Australian women and the League of Nations

Chapter 18 Armenia and the new Turkey

Chapter 19 Orphans and emigrants

Epilogue Friends tell the truth

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Index

AUTHORS’ NOTE

We have chosen to use place names and spellings that would have been familiar to Australians reading about the progress of the Great War in the early twentieth century, rather than their modern equivalents – Trebizond rather than Trabzon, for example, and Moosh rather than Muş.

For Turkish personal names, and the names of organisations, we have tried to use those the Turks themselves would have used, retaining their distinctive accents. Among the Turks, bey was an honorific title meaning ‘sir’. Paşa, which we have rendered ‘pasha’, following the practice of most English-speakers at the time, was a title given to generals and high-ranking statesmen.

PROLOGUE

SATURDAY, 24 APRIL 1915

On the afternoon of 24 April 1915 one of the most significant events in the military history of Australia – and New Zealand – began in the harbour of Mudros, just off the Greek island of Lemnos. The island had become the base for the great Anglo-French assault force assembling for the planned invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula that would occur the next day.

The broad harbour was full of ships of all kinds – merchant ships, white-painted hospital ships and warships, from the smallest fishing trawler pressed into service to HMS Queen Elizabeth, the world’s newest and most powerful battleship. The transports carried some 75,000 troops, a polyglot force of men from Australia, Britain, France, India and New Zealand. Their task, beginning before the next dawn, would be to land upon the hostile coast of the Gallipoli peninsula and seize the forts defending the Dardanelles strait, the waterway leading to the Ottoman empire’s capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul). After what most expected would be relatively light fighting – the Ottoman army was believed to be poorly equipped and trained, and restive under its German commanders – the force was expected to move northwards and swiftly occupy the capital, which would soon come under the guns of the British and French battleships.

One by one that afternoon the transports and warships weighed anchor and steamed out of the harbour, some turning east to make directly for the peninsula, 130-odd kilometres across the Aegean Sea, and others turning west to round the island before heading eastwards for a rendezvous with destiny. The Australians, New Zealanders and Indians would land north of Gaba Tepe around a little bay later named Anzac Cove. A few hours later the British and French would land on either side of the mouth of the Dardanelles, soon becoming bogged down in the fight for Cape Helles. As is well known in the countries of at least three of the protagonists, the Gallipoli campaign, whether it was won or lost, became a part of the founding myths of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey, still described in epic, almost mythological terms a century on.

Just hours before the Anzac landing, the Ottoman authorities arrested about 230 Armenian political, religious, educational and intellectual leaders in Constantinople. Removed from their homes, the prisoners were taken to the police headquarters – now Istanbul’s Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, on the Hippodrome, in what has become the centre of the city’s heritage and tourist district. The arrests were a result of a directive sent by Mehmed Talaat, Ottoman minister of the interior, earlier that day. Among those arrested was German-educated Armenian Apostolic bishop Grigoris Balakian, whose brother, Haroutiun Balakian, lived in Melbourne. Within hours, as the Anzacs came ashore, Grigoris and his fellow prisoners were deported east by train from Haidar Pasha railway station on the Asiatic shore, arriving at Angora, now the Turkish capital of Ankara, about 500 kilometres away. One group of sixty-two were taken to Ayash, north-west of Angora, while the rest including Balakian were taken further to the north-east, to Chankiri. Only eight of the 230 survived: the rest disappeared without trace. Grigoris was one of the lucky few who were not murdered, and in April 1916 he escaped. With boldness and ingenuity, he disguised himself as a German railway worker, a German Jew, a German engineer, a railway administrator, a German soldier and a Greek vineyard worker. His memoirs, published in 1922, provide detailed testimony of the Armenian persecutions.¹ The arrests carried out on 24 April would become a blueprint for the rounding up of the Armenian elite throughout the Ottoman empire.

For the Anzacs and their comrades, 25 April was the beginning of an eight-month ordeal, a campaign that would see the deaths of 40,000 invaders and more than twice as many defenders. It would end in a defeat extolled as the making of the Anzac nations and an Ottoman victory that gave Turkey a leader who created the Turkish nation. The train rattling eastwards that day, carrying the fearful leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community, was the beginning of another ordeal – the attempt to exterminate the Ottoman empire’s Armenian subjects. An oppressed people who had not been a nation for centuries and whose survivors would wait decades to belong to a nation again were to be bound up with the new Antipodean nation whose volunteer citizen soldiers were at that very moment fighting for their lives on the hillsides of Gallipoli.

One of the ways we tell this story is by highlighting Australians who became part of the epic of the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘Plevna’ Ryan, Charles Bean, Thomas White, Stanley Savige, Isobel Hutton, Cecilia John, James Cresswell, Edith Glanville and many others. This book tells the story of how Australians and Armenians came together, during the Great War and in the decades that followed. That story is now a part of Australia’s history.

The twentieth century was a century of mass killing: in the Belgian Congo, throughout eastern Europe, in the Ukraine and Siberia, in China and Cambodia, in Rwanda. The deliberate, state-directed attempt to exterminate the Armenians of the Ottoman empire was second only to the Holocaust endured by the Jews of Europe. Between 1915 and 1920 at least a million Armenians were either immediately massacred or died after being deported from their homes to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Among the deported, those who were not shot, stabbed or beaten to death on the roadside died of starvation and disease. Thousands of women and girls suffered rape and forced concubinage and thousands of children were forcibly converted, brought up as Muslims and denied their heritage. Many more Armenians were displaced, becoming refugees in Turkey and in neighbouring states. Within a few years more than half of Turkey’s two-million-strong Armenian community had been destroyed – killed, died of disease or exiled.

A century on, the Armenian people’s homeland is a small, impoverished former Soviet state, whose people remain at loggerheads with their neighbours. From their capital, Yerevan, they can see across the border with Turkey the mountain, Ararat, sacred to the Armenian people, but which they are not able to visit. It remains a tragic metaphor for the longstanding effects for Armenia, and all of those affected by one of the greatest atrocities of the century. The Ottoman empire’s successor state, Turkey, still denies that the episode was genocide – though western historians and jurists now almost universally acknowledge it.

What has this crime against humanity to do with Australia? It was a tragedy, certainly, and made the hope of peace in the Middle East even more unlikely. But surely this was a tragedy remote from Australia? What has Australia to do with Armenia and its history? The perhaps surprising answer is that Australia has a great deal to do with this episode of the Great War and its aftermath. Australians witnessed the attempted extermination of the Ottoman empire’s Armenian population and fought to liberate its people. They took part in a massive humanitarian effort – the first such sustained effort in Australia’s history – and later welcomed descendants of both victims and survivors, so that Australia itself can now be said to have an Armenian past.

This book has been written by two Australians. Vicken Babkenian, the grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide, did the great bulk of the research and writing, drawing largely upon his personal collection of historical documents, photographs and published material relating to the genocide, arguably the greatest such concentration in the southern hemisphere. The other, historian Peter Stanley, helped to write, edit and shape the manuscript, and wrote the prologue and epilogue.

We have written this book not for scholars in the complicated and contentious fields of genocide and Ottoman studies, but for Australian readers curious about this little-known aspect of their country’s part in the Great War. As a result, while our bibliography suggests the breadth of our research, our end notes usually give only the sources of direct quotes. We will not be drawn into the unnecessary argument over whether the Armenian genocide happened. That debate is over: there is no question that at least a million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman regime. The question for us is: what was Australia’s part in this atrocity, both during and after the Great War?

By any measure, the Armenians’ near-annihilation at the hands of the Ottoman state and its agents was an event of global significance. It introduced the world to the idea of genocide; sadly a concept that has been needed to describe other outbreaks of mass murder since 1915. But this is not just Armenia’s story. The descendants of both many of the victims and some of the perpetrators of the massacres and deportations are now Australians. This story is now Australia’s too: in fact, it begins far from Mount Ararat, in colonial Victoria, a place goldminers at first called (coincidentally) Ballaarat.

CHAPTER 1

FROM ARARAT TO BALLARAT

‘DAMN YOU AND YOUR PRIEST’: EUREKA

Colonial Australia was an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic community, with over ninety per cent of its people coming from the British Isles or with parents or grandparents from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales. During the gold rushes of the 1850s, however, gold-seekers from all parts of Europe and beyond journeyed to Victoria and New South Wales to seek their fortunes. Men (and a few women) came from France, the states of Germany, from the still-divided Italy, from North America and Hungary, and from a remote and obscure province of the Ottoman empire: Armenia.

On 10 October 1854, in the bustling Victorian mining town of Ballarat (then known as Ballaarat), Johannes Gregorius, the Armenian servant of the Roman Catholic Father Patrick Smyth, had his visit to a sick neighbour interrupted by shouts from James Lord, a trooper. Lord was hunting for diggers without licences. He demanded that the ‘damned wretches’ leave their tent and produce a licence, his anger fuelled by a contempt well known to the many ‘foreign’ diggers on the Ballarat fields.¹ Trooper Lord evidently had forgotten – if he had ever known – that the law requiring miners to obtain licences exempted ministers of religion and their servants. Gregorius, who spoke little English and suffered a physical deformity – a hunchback – replied that he worked for Father Smyth, at which point Lord remarked, ‘Damn you and your priest.’ According to a group of eyewitnesses, the constable treated Gregorius in an ‘unwarrantable, cruel manner’. The servant was ‘trampled upon’ and arrested.² It was an inauspicious beginning to the documentary record of Armenians in Australia; their later history in this country was to be more positive.

Many miners expected the assistant commissioner, James Johnston, to drop the charges against Gregorius and charge Lord with assault. To their disappointment, Johnston maintained the original charge and accepted £5 in bail money from Father Smyth when his servant appeared at the police office the following morning.

Next day, Johnston fined Gregorius £5 for nonpossession of a licence, then recalled him and withdrew the charge: someone had realised that Gregorius was lawfully exempt from carrying a licence. Then, in a move that would infuriate the miners, officers charged Gregorius with assaulting Lord. The presiding magistrate found Gregorius guilty of the assault charge. Historian John Molony summed up the fiasco as follows: ‘So the £5 which had begun as the property of Smyth first became bail money, then a fine for nonpossession of a licence, and finished as a fine for assault upon Lord.’³

Gregorius’s unjust treatment became one of the final triggers for a rebellion against colonial authority by Ballarat miners – known of course as the Eureka rebellion. At dawn on 3 December 1854 British troops and Victorian police attacked the stockade. The ensuing battle left twenty-seven people dead, mostly insurgents. Although the government quickly quashed the rebellion, the Eureka battle gave impetus for democratic reforms and better conditions for the miners.

Thus, the story of one of the earliest known Armenian settlers in Australia is intertwined with a landmark event in Australian history. Johannes Gregorius’s birthplace is unknown, but it is likely he hailed from one of the scattered Armenian colonies of India or South-East Asia. Gregorius was part of the trickle of Armenian settlers who came to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Armenian periodicals Azgaser Araratian of Calcutta and Scholar in Singapore both urged Armenians to migrate to Australia. They portrayed the Australian colonies as places of potential wealth and prosperity – exactly as hundreds of thousands of migrants saw Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴ The ‘Armenian Gully’ and ‘Armenian Reef ’, named by an Armenian prospector in 1855, can still be found today in the former goldmining town of St Arnaud in Victoria.

Individual Armenians began to filter through to Australia from all over the world, though they remained very few. The first historian of Armenians in Australia and New Zealand, Aramais Mirzaian, identified as Armenian ‘a certain Mr Malcolm’, an unlikely sounding name for a man from New Julfa, Iran. Mr Malcolm was not alone. In the absence of a clergyman, he held Sunday services for Armenian worshippers at Port Phillip. Like many migrants from small communities, Malcolm and his coreligionists gradually assimilated into colonial Australia, lost to history among the more numerous Scottish Malcolms.

Migrants like Johannes Gregorius and Mr Malcolm were unusual, though, even in cosmopolitan Victoria. Armenia and the Armenians were virtually unknown to the majority of the colonies’ people. That ignorance would end as the century closed.

‘A THOUSAND AND ONE CHURCHES’: THE ARMENIANS

Johannes Gregorius and Mr Malcolm were descendants of an ancient people who had inhabited the highlands surrounding the mountainous region of Ararat – where Noah’s ark supposedly came to rest – since prehistoric times. The Urartians (also known as Araratians) lived there between the tenth and seventh centuries BC, founding a kingdom around the lake of Van. Their ruined castles and palaces still exist today and figure in the tragic story this book tells. Urartu for a time rivalled Assyria for supremacy in the region, but in the turbulent ‘Fertile Crescent’ no power lasted long. Urartu fell to the Medes in the early sixth century BC and soon after to the Persians.

Greek and Persian sources mention ‘Armina’ and ‘Armenians’ from about 500 BC. The Armenian language, a branch of the Indo-European tree of languages, is considered to be one of the oldest recorded members of the group. Armenia grew in military strength and political influence during the reign of emperor Tigranes II (95 to 55 BC). Under his rule, Armenia extended from the Caspian Sea right across the Middle East to Syria and the Mediterranean Sea, until his empire fell to the Romans. Armenia’s fate until living memory has been to fall repeatedly under foreign rule.⁵ It has the misfortune to lie at the intersection of competing empires.

During a brief period of independence in the first decades of the fourth century AD, Armenia adopted Christianity, arguably the first country to become Christian by decree. This, perhaps the defining moment in Armenian history, became a source of its ordeal for centuries at the hands of believers of other faiths. A century later, the Armenian alphabet was devised by the scholar priest Mesrop Mashtots and within a short time the Bible was translated into Armenian. This event ushered in a ‘golden age’ of Armenian literature, a flowering of religion and culture that Armenians would be forced to defend against persecution and oppression, another persistent theme in their history.

Invasions continued. In the seventh century, Muslim Arabs conquered the country. Another brief interlude of independence saw Armenians build hundreds of churches, many of them innovative in their structure and artistically sophisticated, with decorative stone carvings and inscriptions. Ani, the capital, was said to have a ‘thousand and one churches’. In 1045, another conqueror, the Byzantine Greeks, arrived, and within a decade the nomadic Seljuk Turks swept in from Central Asia and Iran. The final blow came in 1071 at Manzikert near Lake Van, where the Seljuks defeated the remnants of Armenian and Byzantine forces.⁶

Although many Armenians remained in their heartland around Lake Van and the mountains of Ararat (the region known as ‘Greater Armenia’), the Seljuk invasion forced others to move south, towards the Taurus Mountains by the Mediterranean Sea. There in the late eleventh century they founded the kingdom of Cilicia (‘Lesser Armenia’). Christian Cilicia became a base for the European quest to recover the ‘Holy Land’ during the crusades, and by the late twelfth century an Armenian–Frankish alliance linked Armenia and Europe. The Armenian King Levon II befriended Richard the Lion-Heart and helped him in the third crusade. While in the thirteenth century the Armenians prospered in Cilicia, those living in the historic heartland to the north witnessed the invasion of the Mongols. Cilicia would be the final Armenian kingdom before it ended with the invasion of the Egyptian Mamluks in 1375.⁷

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 most of Armenia gradually became incorporated into the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans were originally a small Turkic tribe who emerged in Anatolia (the western portion of today’s Turkey) during the breakdown of the empire of the Seljuk Turks in the thirteenth century. They became the arbiters of the Middle East for 400 years, conquering an empire stretching from Arabia and Egypt to the Caucasus, invading Europe far as Austria and holding Greece and the Balkans.

From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Armenia again saw conflict, this time between the Ottoman and Persian empires. The Armenians suffered heavy losses in a bloody conflict that lasted off and on for more than two centuries. The territory of Greater Armenia was split into two, an event with repercussions for Armenians today, and one central to our tragic story. The western part fell to the Ottomans and the eastern part to the Persians.

The rise of yet another aggressive empire in Central Asia – the Romanovs of Russia – introduced a final change. By 1830 most of Persian Armenia had been annexed by the Russians during their southward advance into the Caucasus. By the end of the nineteenth century, Armenians had become dispersed across the borders of the Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires, with outlying communities in Britain’s eastern empire. In the western world, the region of Greater Armenia was frequently portrayed as the boundary between civilisation and barbarism or between Europe and Asia. It was also perceived as a religious borderland, the meeting place of Christianity and Islam. For a thousand years and more, the Armenian people had suffered defeat and conquest, becoming the subjects of half-a-dozen empires as they rose and fell. Throughout – remarkably – they retained their language, religion, literature, culture and identity. They had suffered greatly, though never as much as they were to suffer as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began.

CHAPTER 2

THE ‘ARMENIAN QUESTION’

‘THE LOYAL MILLET’: ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Armenians became part of a multinational, multilingual and multi-religious realm: the Ottoman empire. Because the ruling dynasty was ethnically Turkish, the empire was also commonly referred to as Turkish. While the Ottomans’ Islamic political system required the protection and toleration of the ‘People of the Book’ – meaning Jews and Christians – non-Muslims faced discrimination, including extra taxes, judicial inequality and a prohibition on bearing arms.¹ The Ottoman state imposed upon Armenian (and other) communities the devshirme or child levy, which forcibly removed mostly Christian boys from their families. The boys were brought up as Muslims and the ablest were trained for the service of the empire. Despite official discrimination against non-Muslims, peaceful relations among Ottoman subjects largely persisted from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century and the Ottoman system worked relatively well for much of its history.

By the early nineteenth century, along with various other non-Muslim subjects, the Armenians were organised into religious communities known as millets. Each millet was to a large extent self-governing. By this time, the Armenian population had become heavily intermingled with Kurds and Turks (who were the large majority of Anatolian Muslims in the Ottoman empire). There are no reliable population statistics, but an Ottoman government publication suggested that in 1844 the empire included about 2.4 million Armenians.² Most belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church, an independent national church theologically non-aligned with Roman Catholicism or Canonical Orthodoxy. Armenians earned themselves the title of ‘loyal millet’ because of their allegiance to official authority and their accomplishments in trade, commerce and craft.³ Survival, even prosperity, seemed secure under relatively benign Ottoman rule.

Armenians in the empire comprised several broad groups. First, the rich and influential men, Amiras, worked in government service and as bankers, architects and administrators. For instance, the Balyan family designed and constructed many major buildings, including palaces, mosques, churches and public buildings, mostly in Constantinople. The Dadians were ‘gunpowder chiefs’ and ran the state arsenal, the Duzians were in charge of the imperial mint and the Demirjibashians ran the shipyards.⁴ Next came the mercantile and trading class of Constantinople and the cities of Anatolia. Its members played a dominant role in the empire’s modernisation. Third, and most numerous, was the peasantry, the class least encountered by foreigners. Lastly, there were the Armenian priesthood and higher clergy, who ministered to their adherents both within and beyond the empire.⁵

Though the empire was a polyglot, multi-ethnic state, Armenians were highly visible, very different from their more numerous Muslim neighbours. At times they were required to wear special garb and to step aside for Muslims on the street. Armenians also placed great emphasis on education as a means of advancement and filled the learned professions out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, making them conspicuous. They were open to new scientific, political and social ideas from Europe and America, and some became affluent through trade and economic innovation.⁶ These differences were to become a point of great vulnerability in the late nineteenth century.

The Ottoman empire, once so dominant, began to decline through the nineteenth century. Communal relations within the empire deteriorated as it faced external threats – a series of wars with Russia – and rebellions by its European subjects in Greece and the Balkans. These nationalist movements provided a pretext for foreign intervention. During the 1820s a wave of ‘philhellenism’ swept Europe as the Greeks fought for independence. The war saw horrific atrocities on both sides – for example, the massacre of thousands of Greeks on the island of Chios in 1822. This captured the European imagination, conjuring visions of Turkish savagery that coloured western images of the Ottoman empire for a century. European observers idealised the Greeks as the originators of ‘western civilisation’ and their struggle for freedom attracted particular support in Britain.⁷

By the time Britain had established colonies in distant Australia, its government had settled on a common attitude to the Ottoman empire. As the political and economic superpower of the day, Britain had a strong hold over the Ottomans and did not hesitate to wield its influence. Continued Ottoman rule was in Britain’s interest, helping to contain Russian expansion and supporting Britain’s supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman economy also created another market for British manufacturers. British opinion held that in order to secure the Ottoman empire’s territorial integrity against nationalist movements and aggressive powers, the empire would have to reform. This ushered in the period of ‘Tanzimât’ or ‘reorganisation’, promulgated by the sultan and beginning in 1839 – an attempt to integrate non-Muslims more thoroughly into Ottoman society by enhancing their civil liberties and granting them equality. These reforms were at best a qualified success: Turkey came to be regarded, in one of the great clichés of the century, as ‘the sick