Reconsidering Perceptions of the Balkan Wars (1912-3) in British War Correspondence

Abstract

Historiography about external representations of southeastern Europe places significance on the Balkan Wars (1912-3) in cementing negative stereotypes of the region. Despite this, there have been few studies dealing specifically with British representations of these conflicts. This article scrutinises British journalistic correspondence from the wars, sources neglected by previous scholarship in favour of overtly literary depictions of the region and tangible forms of Anglo-Balkan political contact. Foregrounding domestic political culture which shaped representations, notably the publicity of the liberal Balkan Committee, and the practicalities of war correspondence, this article argues British perceptions of the wars were more sympathetic than typically assumed. Representations of the conflicts were based around patterns of perception originating in orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire. Reporters welcomed allied victories as the triumph of Western ‘progress’ over Eastern ‘stagnation’ and instrumentalised violent stereotypes about the Ottomans to highlight the just cause of the allied offensive via atrocity propaganda. While recognising growing dissent in Britain over pro-Balkan reporting from organisations such as the Ottoman Association, this article concludes by emphasising how the ‘fratricidal’ Second Balkan War had less of an impact on patterns of perception due to its short duration.

Keywords:

• Balkan Wars
• war correspondence
• journalism
• balkanism
• Britain

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Dr Mirna Šolić and Professor Churnjeet Mahn for their continued support and to the participants at the 2022 Borders and Crossings Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing at the University of Tartu for their encouraging comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Andrew Hammond, ‘Imagined Colonialism: Victorian Travellers in South-East Europe’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 28:2 (2006), 87-8. For a discussion of Western media commentary from the 1990s see, Cynthia Simmons, ‘Baedeker Barbarism: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts’, Human Rights Review, 1:1 (2000), 109-24.

2 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 121-2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). The extent to which balkanism and orientalism are consanguineous remains an issue of historiographical debate. See, Katherine Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’, The American Historical Review, 105:4 (2000), 1218-33; Andrew Hammond, ‘Typologies of the East: On Distinguishing Balkanism and Orientalism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29:2-3 (2007), 201-18; Otto Dix, ‘On Balkanism and Orientalism: undifferentiated patterns of perception in literary and critical representations of Eastern Europe’, Textual Practice, 29:5 (2015), 973-91; Catherine Baker, ‘Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies’, Interventions, 20:6 (2018), 759-84.

3 Mika Suonpää, ‘Balkan Conflicts and Evolving Conceptions of Militarism, 1875-1913’, History, 99:4 (2014), 646.

4 Mark Mazower, The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 4; Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (London: Penguin, 2001), 5.

5 Thomas Emmert, ‘A Crisis of Identity: Serbia at the End of the Century’, in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case (eds), Yugoslavia and its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 165.

6 Maria Todorova, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review, 53:2 (1994), 464. For a recent exception see, Florian Keisinger, ‘The Irish Question and the Balkan Wars’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutger (eds), The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory, The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 161-78.

7 Samuel Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 67.

8 Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 66.

9 Patrick Finney, ‘Raising Frankenstein: Great Britain, ‘Balkanism’ and the Search for a Balkan Locarno in the 1920s’, European History Quarterly, 33:3 (2003), 318.

10 For an overview of the course of the Balkan Wars see, Richard Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000).

11 Iakovos Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline: War Correspondents in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913)’, Media History, 26:2 (2020), 128.

12 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 4.

13 Eugene Michail, Britain and the Balkans: Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900-1950 (London: Continuum, 2011); James Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe: The Balkans and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Political Culture’, The Historical Journal, 58:2 (2015), 565-87.

14 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 11; Peter Kardjilov, The Cinematographic Activities of Charles Rider Noble and John Mackenzie in the Balkans (Volume 1) (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 28

15 Said, Orientalism, 1-2.

16 Vesna Drapač, Constructing Yugoslavia: A Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 26.

17 Eugene Michail, ‘Western attitudes to war in the Balkans and the shifting meanings of violence, 1912-91’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:2 (2012), 221.

18 Mark Biondich, ‘The Balkan Wars: Violence and Nation Building in the Balkans, 1912-13’, Journal of Genocide Research, 18:4 (2016), 394.

19 Michael Bailey, Narrating Media History (London: Routledge, 2004), xxi.

20 For literary approaches to Balkan imagology see, Hammond, The Debated Lands; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Omer Hadžiselimović, At the Gates of the East: British Travel Writers on Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London: Saqi Books, 2004). For revisionist scholarship that places less emphasis on literary approaches see, Mika Suonpää, ‘British Perceptions of the Balkan Slavs: Professional and Popular Categorisations before 1914’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hull, 2008); Michail, Britain and the Balkans; Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’; Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination.

21 Kevin Williams, ‘War Correspondents as Sources for History: Problems and Possibilities in Journalism Historiography’, Media History, 18:3-4 (2012), 341-60.

22 Hans Fredrik Dahl, ‘The Pursuit of Media History’, Media, Culture & Society, 16:4 (1994), 552.

23 Tom O’Malley, ‘Media History and Media Studies: Aspects of the Development of the Study of Media History in the UK, 1945-2000’, Media History, 8:2 (2002), 155-73.

24 Williams, ‘War Correspondents’, 344.

25 Mitchel Roth (ed), The Encyclopaedia of War Journalism, 1807-2010 (Amenia: Grey House Publishing, 2010), ix.

26 Joseph J. Matthews, ‘The Genesis of Newspaper War Correspondence’, Journalism Quarterly, 29:1 (1952), 4.

27 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from Crimea to Kosovo (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4-5.

28 Rupert Furneaux, The First War Correspondent: William Howard Russell of The Times (London: Cassell and Company, 1944), 7.

29 Catherine Waters, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850-1886 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 92-4.

30 W.H. Russell, The British Expedition to Crimea (London: G. Routledge, 1858).

31 David Welch, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds: The Changing Context of Reportage and Propaganda, 1900-2003’, in Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds), War and Media: Reportage and Propaganda (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), xiv.

32 Angela Smith and Michael Higgins, ‘Introduction: Reporting War – History, Professionalism, and Technology’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 5:2 (2012), 132.

33 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 122; Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 2-11.

34 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media (1899-1902)’, Twentieth Century British History, 13:1 (2002), 1-16.

35 Smith and Higgins, ‘Introduction’, 133.

36 Although this present discussion is limited to British correspondence, the caravan of war correspondents following the Balkan armies included French, German, Czech, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Scandinavian, and Russian reporters. See, Nicolas Pitsos, ‘Marianne Staring at the Balkans on Fire: French Views and Perceptions of the 1912-13 Conflicts’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutger (eds), The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 145.

37 Philip Gibbs and Bernard Grant, The Balkan War: Adventures of War with Cross and Crescent (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1913), 18. Gibbs gained fame for being one of the few accredited British war correspondents on the Western Front during the First World War. His output between 1914 and 1918 was prolific and included: The Soul of the War (London: William Heinemann, 1915); The Battles of the Somme (London: William Heinemann, 1917); From Bapaume to Passchendaele (Toronto: William Briggs, 1918).

38 Hall, The Balkan Wars, 22.

39 Lionel James, With the Conquered Turk: The Story of a Latter-Day Adventurer (London: Small, Maynard and Company, 1913), 29.

40 Reginald Rankin, The Inner History of the Balkan War (London: Constable and Company, 1914), 44-5.

41 Leon Trotsky (eds. George Weissman and Duncan Williams), The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 (New York: Pathfinder, 1981), 261.

42 For British reporting on these earlier conflicts see, Jacqueline Beaumont, ‘The British Press and Censorship during the South African War, 1899-1902’, South African Historical Journal, 41:1 (1999), 267-89; Alexander M. Nordlund, ‘A War of Others: British War Correspondence, Orientalist Discourse and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905’, War in History, 22:1 (2015), 28-46; Craig Carey, ‘Breaking the News: Telegraphy and Yellow Journalism in the Spanish-American War’, American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism, 26:2 (2016), 130-48.

43 For Bartlett’s previous accounts of his wartime experiences see, Port Arthur: The Siege and Capitulation (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1906); The Passing of the Shereefian Empire (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1911).

44 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, The Battlefields of Thessaly: with personal experiences in Turkey and Greece (London: John Murray, 1897).

45 Maurice Baring, With the Russians in Manchuria (London: Methuen and Co., 1905); O [Lionel James], The Yellow War (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905); H.W. Nevinson, Scenes in the Thirty Days War Between Greece and Turkey, 1897 (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1898); H.W. Nevinson, Ladysmith: The Diary of a Siege (London: Methuen and Co., 1900); H.W. Nevinson, The Dawn in Russia (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906); H.W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906).

46 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 123.

47 Wolfgang Höpken, ‘‘Modern Wars’ and ‘Backwards Societies’: The Balkan Wars in the History of Twentieth Century European Warfare’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutar (eds), The Wars of Yesterday: The Balkan Wars and the Emergence of Modern Military Conflict, 1912-13 (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 23.

48 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 16.

49 For accounts of the Bulgarian agitation and subsequent Midlothian Campaign in the 1880 General Election see, David Brooks, ‘Gladstone and Midlothian: The Background to the First Campaign’, The Scottish Historical Review, 64:177 (1985), 42-67; Anthony S. Wohl, ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34:3 (1995), 375-411.

50 William Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (New York: Lovell, Adam, Wesson and Company, 1876), 11.

51 Peter Stansky, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 123.

52 MacGahan’s reports for The Daily News were published as The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria: Letters of the Special Commissioner of the Daily News J.A. MacGahan (London: Bradbury Agnew, 1876).

53 Knightley, The First Casualty, 50-1.

54 Dorothy Anderson, The Balkan Volunteers (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 8-9. For some of the more notable British accounts from the Eastern Crisis see, Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876); G.M Mackenzie and A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe, 2 vol. (London: Daldy, Ibister and Co., 1877); Robert Jasper More, Under the Balkans: Notes of a Visit to the District of Philippopolis in 1876 (London: Henry S. King, 1877).

55 R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (London: MacMillan and Co., 1935), 2.

56 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 235.

57 Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 568-9.

58 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 14.

59 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 48.

60 For an overview of this significant aspect of the Balkan Committee’s work see, Report of the Proceedings at the National Conference on the Macedonian Question (London: Balkan Committee, 1904).

61 ‘The Balkan Committee: Objects’, in Macedonia 1903 (London: The Balkan Committee, 1903), rear cover.

62 Noel Buxton and Charles Buxton, ‘Public Opinion and Macedonia’, The Monthly Review, 13 (December 1903), 95; Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 14.

63 Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1966), 150-1; T.P. Conwell-Evans, Foreign Policy from a Back Bench, 1904-1918: A Study Based on the Papers of Lord Noel Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 4.

64 James Perkins, ‘British Liberalism and the Balkans, c. 1875-1925’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 2014), 144-5.

65 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 15.

66 A Diplomatist [George Young], Nationalism and War in the Near East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), 103; Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 579.

67 Dakin, The Greek Struggle, 150-1.

68 Noel Buxton, Europe and the Turk (London: John Murray, 1907), 19, 180.

69 Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 584.

70 Noel Buxton and Victoria de Bunsen, Macedonian Massacres: Photos from Macedonia (London: The Balkan Committee, 1907), 5-6.

71 Dakin, The Greek Struggle, 151.

72 Michail, ‘Western attitudes’, 223.

73 Arthur J. Evans, ‘The Drama of the Balkans and its Closing Scenes’, The Contemporary Review, 102 (1912), 766.

74 Kardjilov, The Cinematographic Activities, 28.

75 Marmaduke Pickthall, With the Turk in Wartime (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1913), ix. Pickthall’s steadfast support for the Ottoman Empire led to his conversion to Islam. See, Geoffrey Nash, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East,1830-1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, London, 2005), 6, 21.

76 Ernest Bennett, ‘The Turkish Point of View’, The Edinburgh Review, 217:444 (1913), 278-9. Bennett had been a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the Italo-Turkish War (1911). See, With the Turks in Tripoli: Being Some Experiences in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 (London: Methuen and Co., 1912).

77 Drapač, Constructing Yugoslavia, 44; Florian Keisinger, ‘Uncivilised wars in civilised Europe? The perception of the Balkan Wars 1912-13 in English, German and Irish newspapers and journals’, in Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (eds), The Wars Before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 352-5.

78 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 125.

79 Knightly, The First Casualty, 15-6.

80 Michael MacDonagh, ‘Can We Rely On Our War News?’, Fortnightly Review, 63:375 (Apr., 1898), 614.

81 A Journalist, ‘The Press in Wartime’, Fortnightly Review, 93:556 (Apr., 1913), 741.

82 ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 90:538 (Aug., 1904), 301-10; Michael S. Sweeney, ‘“Delays and Vexation”: Jack London and the Russo-Japanese War’, Journalism and Mass Communications, 75:3 (1998), 445.

83 Without official support from their respective embassies, journalists were not permitted to travel beyond Istanbul. It was for this reason that Henry Farnsworth, ‘a would-be war correspondent’, was rebuffed by Ottoman authorities. See, Henry Farnsworth, The Log of a Would-Be War Correspondent (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913), 31.

84 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1913), 72.

85 Herbert F. Baldwin, A War Photographer in Thrace: An Account of Personal Experiences During the Turco-Balkan War, 1912 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 214-5.

86 James, With the Conquered Turk, 58.

87 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 18.

88 Rankin, The Inner History, 72-3.

89 Albert H. Trapman, The Greeks Triumphant (London: Foster Groom and Co., 1915), 11.

90 Noel Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff (London: MacMillan Company, 1913).

91 Rankin, The Inner History, 45.

92 Bernard Grant, To the Four Corners: The Memoirs of a News Photographer (London: Hutchinson and Co., n.d.), 272-3.

93 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 126; Melissa Bokovoy, ‘Remembering Serbia’s Balkan Wars in Pictures and Words’, Balkanologie, 17:1 (2022), 1.

94 Lancelot Lawton, ‘The Modern Camp-Follower’, The Academy and Literature, 2112 (Oct., 1912), 553.

95 M. Edith Durham, Through the Lands of the Serb (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), 147.

96 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 127.

97 Y. Dogan Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity Propaganda and the Nationalisation of the Masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 46:4 (2014), 763.

98 S.A.B., ‘The Aftermath of War’, The Academy, 2139 (May 1913), 551.

99 Bokovoy, ‘Remembering Serbia’s Balkan Wars’, 2-3.

100 Eyal Ginio, ‘Mobilising the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913): Awakening from the Ottoman Dream’, War in History, 12:2 (2005), 160.

101 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 22.

102 Theo Aronson, Crowns in Conflict: The Triumph and the Tragedy of European Monarchy, 1910-1918 (London: John Murray, 1986), 87.

103 Bernard Granville Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire in Europe (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1913), 78

104 Pitsos, ‘Marianne Staring at the Balkans’, 145.

105 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 222.

106 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 126.

107 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 11.

108 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 158.

109 James, With the Conquered Turk, 44, 30.

110 Richard C. Hall, ‘The Role of Thessaloniki in Bulgarian Policy During the Balkan Wars’, Balkan Studies, 33:2 (1992), 231-41.

111 ‘A Christian Europe and Afterwards’, The English Review (Dec., 1912), 144.

112 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 180-1.

113 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 56, 63.

114 John MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question (London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1912), 73. MacDonald, a Balkan Committee member, was a prominent advocate for Bulgaria in Britain and authored a popular history of the country. See, Czar Ferdinand and His People (London: T.C. and E.C. Jack, 1913).

115 Cyril Campbell, The Balkan War Drama (London: Andrew Melrose, 1913), 152.

116 Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 12.

117 Young, Nationalism and War, xv.

118 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 181.

119 Maurice Baring, Letters from the Near East, 1900-1912 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1913), 113-114.

120 MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question, 83.

121 Mabel St Clair Stobart, War and Women from Experience in the Balkans and Elsewhere (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), 31.

122 David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999), 24-5.

123 MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question, 75.

124 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 26-8.

125 Walter Harrington Crawfurd Price, The Balkan Cockpit: The Political and Military Story of the Balkan Wars in Macedonia (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), 55.

126 Baring, Letters from the Near East, 159.

127 Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 230.

128 Eric Jan Zürcher, ‘The Ottoman Conscription System, 1844-1914’, International Review of Social History, 43 (1998), 447.

129 Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 230.

130 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 9.

131 Stobart, War and Women, 172.

132 Ernest Ialongo, ‘Futurism from foundation to world war: the art and politics of an avant-garde movement’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 21:2 (2016), 315.

133 F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Manifesto’, in Adrian Lyttleton (ed), Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 211-2; F.T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo, ‘Against Passéist Venice’, in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67.

134 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 43.

135 Nevinson’s article was reprinted from the Manchester Guardian as a preface to Nevinson’s son, Christopher, and Marinetti’s manifesto for ‘Vital English Art’ and is available to view on Yale University (Beinecke) Library’s collection of Digital Images Online: <https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10649148> [accessed 03.11.22].

136 C.R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 77.

137 Hall, The Balkan Wars, 136-7.

138 Biondich, ‘The Balkan Wars’, 389.

139 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 35.

140 Robert J. Donia and John V.A. Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1-5.

141 Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass violence against civilians during the Balkan Wars’, in The Wars Before the Great War, 78.

142 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 83.

143 ‘Souvenirs of Misrule’, The Bystander, 6 Nov., 1912, 293.

144 Norman Angell, Peace Theories and the Balkan War (London: Horace, Marshall and Son, 1912), 13-5, 58.

145 Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity’, 763.

146 David Welch, ‘Atrocity Propaganda’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopaedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003), 24.

147 Emily Robertson, ‘Propaganda and “Manufactured Hatred”: A Reappraisal of the Ethics of First World War British and Australian Atrocity Propaganda’, Public Relations Inquiry, 3:2 (2014), 246.

148 Welch, ‘Atrocity’, 24.

149 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 102, 17-8, 8-9.

150 Baring, Letters from the Near East, 135-6; Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 154.

151 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 248-9.

152 Baldwin, A War Photographer, 149.

153 Stobart, War and Women, 53.

154 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 129.

155 Grant, To the Four Corners, xi.

156 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 169. For the perceived realism of war photography see, John Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991).

157 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).

158 ‘Best wishes for the success of the Balkan States’, The Bystander, 9 Oct., 1912, 77; ‘Souvenirs of Misrule’.

159 Campbell, The Balkan War Drama, 183.

160 Robert Nye, ‘The duel of honour and the origins of the rules for arms, warfare and arbitration in the Hague conferences’, in Maartje Abbenhuis, Christopher Ernst Barber, and Annalise R. Higgens (eds), War, Peace and International Order? The Legacies of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (London: Routledge, 2017), 121-37.

161 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 104.

162 Darko Majstorovic, ‘The 1913 Ottoman Military Campaign in Eastern Thrace: A Prelude to Genocide?’, Journal of Genocide Research, 21:1 (2019), 29-30; Syed Tanvir Wasti, ‘The 1912-13 Balkan Wars and the Siege of Edirne’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40:4 (2004), 64-5.

163 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 77.

164 MacDonald, Czar Ferdinand, 338.

165 Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie (eds.), The Balkan Wars: British Consular Reports from Macedonia in the Final Years of the Ottoman Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 4-5.

166 André Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 241-2.

167 M. Edith Durham, The Burden of the Balkans (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), 81.

168 Henry Noel Brailsford, ‘Two Views on the Balkans’, The Speaker (1905), 618.

169 M. Edith Durham, The Struggle for Scutari (Turk, Slav and Albanian) (London: Edward Arnold, 1914), 239, 269, 185; Joyce Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), 68.

170 Letter to General George Fraser Phillip, 23 January 1913 [Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DRU 33]; Letter to M. Edith Durham, 26 May 1914 [Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DRU 47].

171 Bejtullah Destani and Jason Tomes (eds), Albania’s Greatest Friend: Aubrey Herbert and the Making of Modern Albania: Diaries and Papers, 1904-1923 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2011), xvi; Margaret Fitzherbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert (London: John Murray, 1983), 12.

172 Larry Wolff, ‘The Western Representation of Eastern Europe on the Eve of World War I: Mediated Encounters and Intellectual Expertise in Dalmatia, Albania, and Macedonia’, The Journal of Modern History, 86:2 (2014), 394-7.

173 Pierre Loti, Turkey in Agony (London: The Ottoman Committee, 1913), 45.

174 ‘A Vindication of Turkey’, Nottingham and Midland News, 22 Nov., 1913, 7.

175 ‘Fact Outdoes Fiction’, Leeds Mercury, 20 Nov., 1913, 4.

176 Pickthall quoted in Jamie Gilham, ‘Marmaduke Pickthall and the British Muslim Convert Community’, in Geoffrey P. Nash (ed), Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 53.

177 Young, Nationalism and War, xvi; ‘Fratricidal War in Balkania’, The Sphere, 19 Jul., 1913, 61.

178 Price, The Balkan Cockpit, 345.

179 J.G. Cassavetti, Hellas and the Balkan Wars (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914), 336-51.

180 Trapman, The Greeks Triumphant, 277.

181 Florian Keisinger, ‘The Irish Question and the Balkan Wars’, in, The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory, 164.

182 H.C. Seppings Wright, Two Years Under the Crescent (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1913), 173.

183 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 70.

184 ‘Indian Moslems and the Balkan War’, The Scotsman, 14 Feb., 1913, 5.

185 Loti, Turkey in Agony, 9.

186 R.L. Shukla, ‘Some Aspects of the Indian Muslim Response to the Balkan Wars’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 35 (1975), 417. See also, Syed Tanvir Wasti, ‘The Indian Red Crescent Mission to the Balkan Wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45:3 (2009), 393-406.

187 Perkins, ‘British liberalism’, 169.

188 Young, Nationalism and War, 379.

189 Perkins, ‘British liberalism’, 170.

190 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 128.

191 Trampan, The Greeks Triumphant, 143. See also, Walter Harrington Crawfurd Price, Light on the Balkan Darkness (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1915).

192 Enika Abazi and Albert Doja, ‘International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29:2 (2016), 586.

193 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 108.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Studentship.

Notes on contributors

Ross Cameron

Ross Cameron is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD researcher based at the University of Glasgow examining British travel writing and political commentary on southeastern Europe before 1914. He was the co-organiser of the 2023 Borders and Crossings Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing at the University of Łódź and has undertaken a visiting doctoral researcher position at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, sponsored by the AHRC.