The Treaty of Lausanne, signed just over 100 years ago, ended the First World War between Turkey and the Allies. It paved the way for a modern internationalism led by the British and politicized the treatment of minorities who had been the victims of exclusionary nationalism and genocide. Amy Grubb and Elisabeth Hope Murray offer an in-depth look at the lead-up to this moment in British foreign policy. British Responses to Genocide focuses on the crucial years between 1918 and 1923, when humanitarian commitments came face to face with the winding down of the First World War.

Scholarly interest in the First World War has yielded important research on the long-term implications of the Allied fight against what was then the Ottoman Empire. We now know that the slow process of negotiating peace that took place between 1918 and 1923 and culminated with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne belongs to the long history of the First World War as well as the birth of modern Turkey. This book traces the maneuverings of the Foreign Office alongside the experiences of officials, naval officers, and diplomats charged with enforcing British policy as war continued between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies.

Each chapter chronologically traces the diplomatic relationship between Britain and the Ottoman Empire using documents from the National Archives. The introduction and conclusion frame this story around how humanitarianism shaped official policy. This organizational history of British foreign policy argues that Britain was “highly invested in an ideology of humanitarianism” (24). At the same time, officials ultimately lacked the political commitment to enforce dictates that protected minority interests in the Ottoman Empire. Grubb and Murray expertly trace the process by which Britain abandoned its commitment to “saving strangers” over the course of interactions and negotiations with both its own Allies—most especially the French and the Greeks—and the Ottoman Empire between 1918 and 1923 (175). The story culminates with the Lausanne Treaty negotiations, where what they refer to as Britain's “contradictory and confusing” policy fell apart as a result of Allied disunity and events on the ground (144).

British Responses to Genocide begins with Britain’s negotiation of the Mudros Armistice with the Ottoman Empire in October 1918, which failed to end the fighting. Negotiators, arguably, were more focused on the simmering rivalry between Britain and France than on finding a sustainable peace. British negotiators signed the armistice with the Ottoman Empire at Mudros in the Aegean Sea on a British Navy destroyer almost two weeks before the armistice with Germany. Subsequent chapters trace key moments that slowly eroded Britain’s commitment to enforcing the minority protections agreed to at Mudros. In August 1920, Ottoman representatives of the Allied-backed government in Constantinople (Istanbul) signed the Treaty of Sèvres. While the Allies maintained a significant military presence during this period, a drawdown of troops began the summer after the signing of the armistice, making the enforcement of the Sèvres Treaty increasingly unlikely. The book simultaneously recounts the atrocities committed against Ottoman minorities as diplomatic negotiations continued and the power of Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal, grew to challenge Allied power in the region.

Strangely, British Responses to Genocide contains no substantial discussion of the Allied attempt to try perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The Constantinople War Crimes Tribunals were guided by Britain. In April 1919, the issue of holding those responsible for the persecution of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians that had started in 1915 came to a head. Still focused on enforcing the terms of the Mudros armistice that promised justice for Allied POWs and Ottoman minority massacre victims, British officials launched an extensive investigation in the spring of 1919 that resulted in a series of war crimes trials. Assessment of this important episode would have proved an ideal opportunity to connect the diplomatic and humanitarian questions at the heart of British Responses to Genocide.

The Sèvres Treaty's failure to stop the fighting and persecution of minorities made a new treaty inevitable, as Grubb and Murray make clear. The burning of the city of Smyrna in September 1922 by Kemalist troops showed how much the British position had deteriorated since the signing of the armistice in 1918. Less than two months after the last fires died out, the Allies were back at the negotiating table and ready to make concessions for peace. The final agreement—the Treaty of Lausanne—reflected a new reality. Britain, France, and Italy had refused to help Greece fight Kemal, who was now firmly in charge of the former Ottoman government. The Lausanne Conference stumbled toward peace. Despite challenges, the Allies kept pressure on the minority question, which they cast as a strategic and humanitarian issue. The British brokered a population exchange between Greece and Turkey fully realizing that Turkish negotiators would not allow outside interference in how they dealt with the remaining Christian population in the new Turkey. Lausanne, as a result, enacted the first compulsory civilian exchange between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks and codified the idea of forced removal as a tool of minority protection into international law.

British Responses to Genocide is a welcome addition to the literature on the relationship between foreign policy and humanitarianism. Detailed footnotes show an impressive depth of research. Unfortunately, the lack of a bibliography renders the book less useful as a reference work. Overall, this well-researched and argued monograph effectively uses the Foreign Office archive to show why foreign policy debates matter and how a nation can proport humanitarian beliefs while failing to affect positive change for the population on whose behalf it claims to act. It also reveals how interactions between bureaucrats, politicians, and those charged with enforcing policy on the ground often fail to produce consistent results. This study rightly suggests that, in the end, the stillborn project of protecting Ottoman minorities mattered because it motivated and inspired local actors to see crimes committed against civilians as more than collateral damage from a seemingly unending war.