Enthusiasm for humanitarian interventions in foreign conflicts tends to go in waves, as David Rodogno demonstrates in this erudite and well-researched book. In Britain after World War II, a certain type of late-imperial intervention culminated in the 1956 Suez campaign. The disappointing results of Suez and the crisis it brought in the Conservative party leadership affected general attitudes to foreign deployments for a generation. Suez, of course, was not undertaken for humanitarian motives in the sense that something like the NATO campaign in Kosovo was, but from the point of view of the uncommitted spectator many of the mechanics of it were similar. Overwhelming western military force was deployed against an unpopular and dictatorial ruler who was acting against the interests of the developed world. In his exploration of the nineteenth-century roots of intervention within the Ottoman Empire, Rodogno explores some little known nooks and crannies of regional history in that period. The classically-educated elites of Britain and France saw little difficulty in defining the Ottomans as a barbarian, uncivilised ‘Other’, and their Christian subjects as uniquely deserving of sympathy. But, as with current and recent history, western attitudes and political responses varied a great deal, linked to issues of practical military reach and capacity. There was, for instance, almost universal sympathy for the difficulties of the Armenians in the empire across the political spectrum of late nineteenth-century London elites, but the geography and landmass of the mostly eastern regions where they lived prevented any significant practical assistance coming to them, something that was finally played out in the massacres of the First World War period. Rodogno is strongest on the realpolitik, pointing out that media coverage, even then, had a profound influence on what transpired, so that, for instance,

A similar dialectic played out in the Balkans recently, so that the Bosnian Muslim victims of shelling in Sarajevo were seen in a different way from the tough ethnic Albanian cetas of the Kosova Liberation Army. Rodogno is strongest on the political and diplomatic history, particularly a brilliant section on the crisis over the Crete intervention in 1867. He is less sure-footed on ideology, tending to see all Christians in the East as the same and he does not really much explore the complexities of different views in England. Comparison with non-Ottoman intervention controversies might have been helpful: to take a well known example, the complexities of the English Catholic response to the Irish Famine in the mid-century. His epilogue on current and recent interventions, for example in Iraq, is short and rather abstract and although interesting points are made, it has something of the feeling of afterthoughts to the substantive narrative.