Keith David Watenpaugh's Bread from Stones is a key contribution to the history of modern humanitarianism. This is a historical book that has some compelling insights for the reader who wants to understand the contemporary world. Watenpaugh's book is “about the lived places where the humanitarian act in various forms took place” (p. 3). These places are the Eastern Mediterranean and it was here, he writes, “where most modern humanitarianism was born” (p. 2). Much of the book focuses on the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath. This was not a marginal case in the development of modern humanitarianism, but, as Watenpaugh shows, a central one. From the beginning, Watenpaugh stresses that the objects of humanitarian intervention were highly selective—Muslim suffering in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire did not elicit the same kind of responses as did non-Muslim suffering in the very same regions. And this also became part and parcel of how Western humanitarian intervention was perceived.
Modern humanitarian action in these regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, as Watenpaugh describes it in six chapters, might appear, at first glance, very similar to or a continuation of the activities of missionary societies in these very same places in the decades before. But, as Watenpaugh stresses, these years saw the transformation of a previous missionary humanitarianism into a secular version. This is far from obvious. Especially because of the obvious continuity of some of the institutions and the fact that many missionary societies had anyway spent little energy in direct proselytization in the late Ottoman decades. Instead they had worked on educating and nurturing members of various non-Muslim groups. But Watenpaugh makes a convincing argument that after World War I something new took root.
Watenpaugh is very explicit in the goals of his book. One involves providing modern and contemporary humanitarianism with a genealogy that “helps clarify [its] further entanglements—in the past, with colonialism, and in the present, with neoliberalism and the corporatization and militarization of humanitarian action” (p. 19). Another act of disentanglement Watenpaugh sets out to undertake is that of the histories of humanitarianism and human rights. Contradicting other scholars such as Bruno Cabanes, Watenpaugh claims that humanitarianism worked as a substitute to human rights (and political rights) in the cases he studied. There was, he stresses, no linear progression from the one to the other.
In his chapters, Watenpaugh discusses the kinds of situation and groups that triggered a humanitarian response, while others did not, as well as how that humanitarian need and the response were understood and framed. Chapter 2 deals with the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I—and here Watenpaugh, for example, shows how crisis in Jerusalem became an object of humanitarian campaigning and relief, while crisis in Bagdad did not. Chapter 3 breaks with the chronology a bit and examines humanitarian reports and humanitarian reporting over a span of five decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s. Chapter 4 looks at American intervention for Armenian survivors (1919–23). Chapter 5 recounts attempts to rescue “trafficked women and children” (1920–1936). Chapter 6 examines “the practical failures of modern humanitarianism” for the period 1923–39. This chapter as well as the last one of the book offers many points of overarching analysis and summary. It is worth summing up Watenpaugh in his own words: “The relegation of the problem of the postgenocide Ottoman Armenians to that level [i.e. philanthropic, international, and diasporic institutions] after decades of international advocacy on their behalf demonstrates how swiftly a humanitarian emergency can fade from view or become an inconvenient and forgettable problem for humanity” (p. 160). And what is true for the Ottoman Armenians with this long history of advocacy on their behalf is even more true for other groups who followed and who had less lengthy campaigns in their name.
Instead of offering his readers a sweeping conclusion, he closes the book with the story of population transfers—and he rightly notes that these always aide those in power and even often reward those who have committed atrocities. His last story is of the transfer of Assyrians out of Iraq into Syria in the 1930s. As he writes, “interwar humanitarianism failed to challenge the dominance of states’ rights and their sovereignty” (p. 180). This is another legacy of these years.
Watenpaugh's book is packed with points of analysis and perspectives that take us far beyond their immediate time frame. One perspective that this book opens up concerns the integration of the Armenian Genocide into the overall history of humanity. Only few historians are taking up this challenge. Watenpaugh offers one such integration and through his discussions it becomes clear that the 20th century was also very much an Armenian century.
In his chapter on humanitarian reporting, Watenpaugh quotes one such report that exclaimed, “Modern History began on August 1, 1914, when Europe and Asia caught fire” (p. 84). This quote underlines an overall perspective of the book: it makes us think if we are today not still living in this era that began in August 1914. An era that exhibited many of its core features already in 1915 in the Eastern Mediterranean and that would haunt us again in the most recent years. Watenpaugh offers his research in intelligently packaged chapters that will hopefully find their way into university syllabi.
