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Abstract
This article examines British foreign policy towards the Greek Revolution (1821–1828), with a particular focus on the policies of Lord Castlereagh and George Canning. It uses Henry Kissinger’s 1954 scheme of the ‘statesman’ and ‘prophet’ to examine the intellectual antagonism between the Greek policies of Castlereagh and Canning. While Castlereagh saw the Greek Revolution as a threat to the principles consecrated at the Congress of Vienna, Canning saw the Revolution in isolation, not in relation to other European insurrections. While Castlereagh was willing to allow the war to continue rather than risk the principles underpinning the European order, Canning was willing to compromise those principles for peace in Greece. The debate that surrounded these policies further drew the Greek cause into a broader matrix of political associations: conservatives backed the Ottoman Empire while liberals opposed it, reflecting the dispositions of both towards the political status quo in Britain and in Europe. The article argues that the dialectics that their two approaches represented—universal and systemic versus particular and contingent, and order versus peace—became recurrent themes in British policymaking throughout the Eastern Question.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822 (Houghton Miffin, 1973), 187.
2 Elise Kimmerling Wirtschafter, From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy after Napoleon (Northern Illinois University Press, 2020), 54.
3 Paul W. Schroeder, Metternich's Diplomacy at Its Zenith: 1820–1823 (University of Texas Press, 1962), 110; Wirtschafter, From Victory to Peace, 57.
4 John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 9–13.
5 See Denis Vovchenko, Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians, 1856–1914 (Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Simon Dixon, ‘Russia and Greece in the Age of Revolution’ in Paschalis M. Kitromilides (ed), The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1848 (Routledge, 2021), 128.
6 For instance, August-Léonce Ravergie, Histoire De La Russie Et De Ses Projets D'envahissements Depuis Le Règne De Pierre Le Grand Jusqu'a Nos Jours (Krabbe, 1856), 136–84; Alexander Bitis, The Russian Army and the Eastern Question, 1821–34, 2000. Ph.D. Thesis, London School of Economics; Mara Kozelsky and Lucien J. Frary (eds), Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
7 See Bright, 231.
8 John Bright, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1883), 231.
9 Stephen Quinn, ‘Money, Finance and Capital Markets’ in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 162–3.
10 Quinn, ‘Money, Finance, and Capital Markets’, 162.
11 Richard Ashcraft, ‘Liberal Political Theory and Working-Class Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century England’, Political Theory 21, no. 2 (1993): 250–1.
12 See Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019).
13 Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (Penguin, 2019), 29.
14 For instance, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Liu Xing-hua, Die Entzauberung Asiens- Europa Und Die Asiatischen Reiche Im 18. Jahrhundert (Rive Gauche Publishing House, 2007); Malcolm, Useful Enemies; Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2018), 28–67; and Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
15 Paul L. Webb, ‘Sea Power in the Ochakov Affair of 1791’, The International History Review 2, no. 1 (1980): 23. Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkoff. ‘Simon Vorontsov and the Ochakov Crisis of 1791’, in Mikhail I Mikeshin and Tatiana V Artemyeva (eds), Intellectual and Political Elites of the Enlightenment, Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2014), 170–83.
16 A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 11–23.
17 A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 11–23.
18 Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2004), 100–115; Beaton, Greece, 24.
19 Michal Kopeček, Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries, Central European University Press: 2006), 73–79.
20 David A. Bell, ‘The Greek Revolution and the Age of Revolution’ in Kitromilides (ed), The Greek Revolution, 39; Beaton, Greece, 43.
21 See William L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments 1871–1890 (Vintage, 1950), 61.
22 Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin, 2021.) 48.
23 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 48.
24 ‘The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1820–1827’, in Adolphus William Ward and George Peabody Gooch (eds), The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783–1919, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press: 1922), 83.
25 See Rene Albrecht-Carrie, A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna (Methuen, 1958), 201; Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, The Great Powers, and The Straits Question, 1870–1887 (Indiana University Press, 1973), 102.
26 Including Russia’s ambassadors to Constantinople, London and Paris. Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester University Press: 2015), 108.
27 Heraclides and Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, 108.
28 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 52.
29 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 48.
30 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton University Press: 2015), 82. Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 56.
31 Rodogno, Against Massacre, 82.
32 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 56.
33 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 55.
34 ‘Greece’, Leeds Mercury, 10 November 1821 in Rodogno, Against Massacre, 82.
35 John David Scott, In This Victory: Whigs, Tories, Greece, and the English Constitution, M.A. Thesis, Western Carolina University, 2015, 77.
36 Address on the King’s Speech at the Opening of the Session, House of Commons Debate, February 5, 1822. Hansard, Vol. 6. CC. 19–93, 26.
37 Lord Londonderry to Lord Stewart, June 12, 1821, Wellington Papers, WP1/667/10 in John Bew, Castlereagh (Quercus: 2015), 533.
38 Lord Londonderry to Lord Stewart, June 12, 1821, Wellington Papers, WP1/667/10 In Bew, Castlereagh (2015), 533.
39 Letter to Lord William Bentinck (7 May 1814), quoted in Correspondence, Despatches, and Other Papers, of Viscount Castlereagh, Second Marquess of Londonderry. Third Series. Military and Diplomatic, ed. Charles William Vane, Marquess of Londonderry, Vol. II (John Murray, 1853), 18. See also J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Clarendon Press, 1960), 569–572.
40 The Marquess of Londonderry to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias, July 16, 1821 in Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh: Second Marquess of Londonderry, Vol. 12 (Henry Colburn, 1848), 407.
41 Casltereagh to Sir Charles Bagot, December 14, 1821 in Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 443.
42 Castlereagh to Bagot in Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 443.
43 Heraclides, Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, 106.
44 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 153.
45 Cause of the Greeks, House of Commons Debate, July 15, 1822. Vol. 7, CC. 1649–53.
46 Cause of the Greeks, House of Commons Debate.
47 See William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Open Book Publishers, 2008).
48 Rodogno, Against Massacre. 65–66.
49 Anna Karakatsouli, Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the 1820s: Philhellenism(s) in the Public Sphere in Kitromilides, The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions, 71.
50 Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790–C.1845 (Australian National University Press, 2010), 152.
51 Parolin, Radical Spaces, 153.
52 Cause of the Greeks, House of Commons Debate.
53 Gary Jonathan Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Vintage, 2009), 70.
54 Dixon In Kitromilides, The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions, 131.
55 Scott, In This Victory, 115.
56 Scott, In This Victory, 105.
57 Scott, In This Victory, 106.
58 H.V.W. Temperley, Life of Canning (J. Finch and Co., 1905), 94.
59 Temperley, Life of Canning, 44 Temperley.
60 Thomas Forster, A Biographical Memoir of the late Right Honorable George Canning, To which is added, the Whole of His Satires, Odes, Songs and Other Poems (J. Gardiner, 1827), IX, 3.
61 Allan Cunningham, ‘The Philhellenes, Canning and Greek Independence’, Middle Eastern Studies, 14 (1978): 151–81.
62 Christoph von Lieven to Nesselrode on 13 June 1825: ‘N’ayant ni systeme, ni prncipes arretes d’avance, c’est dans les seules circonstances q’il cherchera la boussole de asa politique’ in Cowles, ‘The Failure to Restrain Russia’, 702.
63 George Canning to Stratford Canning, October 12, 1825. In Dispatches, Correspondence and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur, Duke of Wellington, K.G., Vol. 2 (John Murray, 1857), 530–35.
64 Heraclides and Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, 112.
65 George Canning to Lord Granville, June 22, 1826, in Augustus Granville Stapleton, George Canning and His Time (Parker, 1859), 475.
66 Miroslav Šedivy, Metternich, the Great Powers, and the Eastern Question (University of West Bohemia: 2013), 189.
67 Mazower, The Greek Revolution, 275.
68 Memo of Meeting, October 25, Canning and his Times, 474.
69 Canning to Bagot, August 20, 1823 in Cowles, The Failure to Restrain Russia, 695.
70 See ‘Memorandum upon the Greek Case’, October 1827 in Arthur Wellesley (ed), Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington K.G., Vol. 4 (John Murray, 1871). 143: ‘Upon inquiry there was no ground whatever to impute either the Porte or to Ibrahim Pacha a plan for the extermination of the Greek population’.
71 Heraclides and Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, 114. Cowles, ‘The Failure to Restrain Russia’, 702–4.
72 Harold W.V. Temperley, England, the Near East, the Crimea (Longman, Green, and Co, 1936), 53.
73 Heraclides and Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, 115.
74 Beaton, Greece, 100.
75 Canning to Granville, January 13 1826 in ‘The Lion and the Phoenix - 1: British Policy toward the Greek Question, 1831–32’, Middle East Studies, 24:2 (April 1988): 161.
76 Ibid.
77 George Canning to Stratford Canning, 5 September 1826 In Schwartzberg, The Lion and the Phoenix, 162.
78 Stapleton, George Canning and his Time, 492–3.
79 Schwartzberg, The Lion and the Phoenix, 161.
80 Christopher Montague Woodhouse, The Battle of Navarino (Hoddler and Stoughton: 1965), 82–3.
81 Charles William Crawley, The Question of Greek Independence: A Study of British Policy in the Near East, 1821–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 1930), 110.
82 Address on the King’s Speech, House of Commons Debate, January 29, 1828. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1828-01-29/debates/018512af-5d4b-4684-b93d-26153e4d2ba1/AddressOnTheKingSSpeech.
83 Ward and Gooch, Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 99.
84 Address on the King’s Speech, January 29, 1828.
85 Address on the King’s Speech, January 29, 1828.
86 Address on the King’s Speech, January 29, 1828.
87 Ottenfels to Metternich, November 5,1827 In Šedivy, Metternich, 199.
88 Alexander Bitis, Russia and the Eastern Question: Army, Government and Society, 1815–1833 (Oxford University Press and the British Academy, 2006), 167–76.
89 Earl of Dudley to the Prince of Lieven, March 8 1828, in Papers Relative to the Affaires of Greece (J. Harrison and Son, 1835), 29.
90 See Arthur Wellesley (ed), Supplementary Despatches, 332–5. See also, Metternich to Esterhazy, ‘The Formation of States in the East According to Metternich’s Proposal’, March 15, 1828 in Prince Richard Metternich (ed), Memoirs of Prince Metternich: The Papers Classified and Arranged by M.A. de Kliskowstrom, Translated by Mrs. Alexander Napier (Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), 461–76.
91 Proposed Measures for the Settlement of Greece, March 1828 in Wellesley, Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda, 308.
92 Wellington to Earl Bathhurst, May 2 1828 in Wellesley, Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda, 422–4.
93 Brewer, The Greek War of Independence, 344.
94 Settlement of Greece, House of Lords Debate, February 12, 1830, Vol. 22: CC.395–429.
95 Wellington to Aberdeen, October 4, 1830 in Dispatches, Correspondence and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur, Duke of Wellington, K.G., Vol. 6 (John Murray, 1857), 192.
96 See Miroslav Sedivy, Austria and the 1820s Revolutions: Between the Heritage of the Congress of Vienna and Political Change in Kitromilides (ed), The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions, 53–61.
97 See Christopher Clark and Christos Aliprantis, ‘Greece and 1848: Direct Responses and Underlying Connectivities’ in Kitromilides (ed), The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions, 95–104.
98 Castlereagh to Sir Charles Bagot, December 14, 1821 in Cowles, The Failure to Restrain Russia, 695.
99 Ivan Davidson Kalmar. ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 2 (2005): 367–8.
100 ‘Turkey – Negotiations, Guarantees, Resolution’, House of Commons Debate, March 23, 1877. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1877-03-23/debates/4131ab60-e14d-46fc-b18c-daffba124e61/Turkey—TheNegotiationsguarantees—Resolution/.
101 Sir Henry Layard, Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1877 to 1880, wrote that the Ottoman defeat in Bulgaria contained ‘the elements of future wars and disorders without number’, while Sir Henry Elliot anticipated the ‘break-up and partition’ of the Empire ‘within a very short period’. Layard to Elliot, July 5, Layard Papers, Add. MSS. 39, 138, Vol. CCVIII and Elliot to Layard, July 26, in Robert W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (W.W. Norton and Company, 1972), 510.
102 Isa Blumi, ‘Reorientating European Imperialism: How Ottomanism Went Global’, Die Welt des Islams 56, no. 3–4 (2016): 298.
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Jay Mens
Jay Mens is Executive Director and Recanati-Kaplan Fellow for Applied History at the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum, a think-tank researching the politics and international relations of the Middle East at the University of Cambridge.