Historians have now decisively shattered the popular misimpression from the 1990s that humanitarian intervention was born thanks to the Cold War's ending. 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 law—especially the nineteenth 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 number of distinct ways. First, it is a comprehensive treatment of humanitarian intervention through a century of the so-called “Eastern Question,” as observers called the much debated fate of the Ottoman empire in its declining era, and from which Rodogno shows humanitarian intervention was inseparable. Thus, Rodogno adds to Bass's original case studies and places them in a larger matrix. Second, and pleasingly for this journal, Rodogno gives somewhat more attention to the specifically legal rationales for the great power politics 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 civilians 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.

If the main virtue of this book is its archivally grounded, exceptionally detailed, but fluidly presented series of case studies—including several in which intervention failed to occur—Rodogno also presents two key arguments. First, Rodogno's evidence forces him to cabin the sentiments of citizens 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 committed to any larger liberal worldview, in which intervention would lead to liberal 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 intervention actually came to pass (16). As late as the atrocities visited on Armenians in the 1890s, Rodogno shows, if it was “multilateralism” that made intervention 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 developments 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 era—which Rodogno shows crystallized on this question only late in the nineteenth century — eerily tracking recent tempestuous 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.