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Review
Reviewed Work(s): Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire,
18151914 by Davide Rodogno
Review by: Samuel Moyn
Source: Law and History Review, Vol. 30, No. 4 (November 2012), pp. 1175-1176
Published by: American Society for Legal History, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23489469
Accessed: 29-11-2016 12:13 UTC

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 Book Reviews

Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the

Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011. Pp. 376. $39.50 (ISBN 978-0-691-15133-5).
doi: 10.1017/S0738248012000557

Historians have now decisively shattered the popular misimpression from the
1990s that humanitarian intervention was bom thanks to the Cold War's end
ing. Rather than a newfangled invention in the age of Bosnia, Rwanda, and
Kosovo, the principle that sovereignty isn't absolute when civilians are
dying was revived from the past of international lawespecially the nine
teenth century past. Gary Bass offered the pioneering corrective, in his book
Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York,
2008), but a new collection organized by D.J.B. Trim and Brendan Simms,
Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge, 2011), and now Davide
Rodogno's impressive volume make the case for deep roots unanswerable.
With the preliminary contention that humanitarian intervention long preexisted
the 1990s established, the field can now move on to richer and deeper concerns
about why that correction might matter.
Focused like Bass's book on British and French policy choice and public
sentiment, Rodogno's excellent account goes beyond its predecessor in a num
ber of distinct ways. First, it is a comprehensive treatment of humanitarian
intervention through a century of the so-called "Eastern Question," as obser
vers called the much debated fate of the Ottoman empire in its declining
era, and from which Rodogno shows humanitarian intervention was insepar
able. Thus, Rodogno adds to Bass's original case studies and places them in
a larger matrix. Second, and pleasingly for this journal, Rodogno gives some
what more attention to the specifically legal rationales for the great power poli
tics of the day. Finally, while Bass was already well aware of the
overwhelming role that interest and ideology played in the events he described,
Rodogno is even less enthusiastic about the moral demands for saving civi
lians through which intervention was (and is) justified. Rodogno's prime
goal is not to extract an authentic humanitarianism for our own day from
the jaws of a historical practice that was, he graphically shows, shot through
with imperialist zeal and orientalist stereotype. After reading his book, he
may have realized it would be difficult to do so.

Law and History Review November 2012, Vol. 30, No. 4

the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2012

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1176 Law and History Review, November 2012

If the main virtue of this book is its archivally grounded, exceptionally

detailed, but fluidly presented series of case studiesincluding several in
which intervention failed to occurRodogno also presents two key argu
ments. First, Rodogno's evidence forces him to cabin the sentiments of citi
zens mobilizing for intervention to their fellow-feeling for Christians and
their outrage at atrocity (hence the book's title). While not downplaying the
role of new media like newspapers in making grisly foreign atrocity palpable,
Rodogno shows that by and large humanitarians were not categorically com
mitted to any larger liberal worldview, in which intervention would lead to lib
eral freedom in place of Ottoman despotism. Second, and even more
disturbingly for anyone who views these episodes as avatars of contemporary
liberal internationalism, Rodogno insists on the role of the post-Napoleonic
Concert of Europe in setting the geopolitical frame, especially when interven
tion actually came to pass (16). As late as the atrocities visited on Armenians
in the 1890s, Rodogno shows, if it was "multilateralism" that made interven
tion imaginable sometimes, it was through revival of the geopolitics of that
conservative entente rather than the progress of liberal internationalism
(200). Of course, this wasn't always the case, as liberal William Gladstone's
political self-reinvention in the era of the Bulgarian atrocities shows, but
here Rodogno detects a primacy of domestic politics to which humanitarian
(or more accurately, transnational Christian) sentiment was easily annexed.
Writing as an impartial scholar surveying nineteenth-century practice,
Rodogno reaps great benefits from integrating humanitarian intervention with
political (and especially diplomatic) history. As a result, Rodogno officially
brings no contemporary lessons at all, though his epilogue summarizes develop
ments down to our own day. If nineteenth-century humanitarian intervention
then is relevant now, or to the successor notion of "the responsibility to protect,"
Rodogno is not willing to say exactly how. Yet historians of law will surely find
his survey of legal thought in the erawhich Rodogno shows crystallized on
this question only late in the nineteenth century eerily tracking recent tempes
tuous debates about the impregnability and abrogability of sovereignty (47-62).
Obviously, humanitarian intervention is no longer unquestionably tethered to a
standard of civilization; thanks to that standard, Rodogno shows, the nineteenth
century cross-border uses of force for humanity's sake were unthinkable when it
came to other Europeans or to "savages" who had no sovereignty to override in
an era of formal and informal imperialism. In other ways, however, the gnawing
debate about how to save strangers in the Middle East is alive and well today, as
everyone knows. This fact makes Rodogno's careful and sophisticated though
inconclusive study undoubtedly relevant for considering a persistent dilemma.

Samuel Moyn
Columbia University

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