History Of The Eastern Question

During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today. The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.

'Seminar Studies in History ...provides a means of bridging the gap between specialist articles and monographs and textbooks. They are written by acknowledge experts on the subjects who are not only familiar with current thinking but have often contributed to it.' -- 'Teaching History'

"For generations the great powers and their leaders struggled with the problems created by the weakness and slow disintegration of the ottoman empire and with the rivalries among the states of Europe to which it gave rise; then strategic and economic factors - seen, for example, in the building of the suez canal in Baghdad Railway scheme -- combined with the growing nationalism of the small Balkan peoples and the development of Panslavism in Russia to complicate the picture. In a masterly clarification the author surveys the development over a period of a century and a half of one of the greatest issues, or series of issues, in international relations in Europe. This book is based on an extremely wide range of printed materials, including many in russian as well as in west European languages, and thus brings together in a convenient and coherent form a great deal of important information, much of which would otherwise be inaccessible. No work in English of comparable scope and purpose has appeared since the publication in 1917 of J. A. R. Marriot's The Eastern Question; An Historical Study in European Diplomacy. -- Publisher.

THE EASTERN QUESTION is a clever, politically neutral, graphic exploration of geopolitics from the days of Alexander the Great and the Persians to today's headlines. In the 19th century, the term the 'Eastern Question' referred to the problem posed by the impending dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the fall of which in the second decade of the 20th engendered the modern 'muddle' of the Middle East in the 21st. In a larger sense the East has always been a question for the West, for the simple reason that's where the trouble comes from: Huns, Goths, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Russians, Soviets--to now a less well-defined, 'non-linear,' and 'asymmetric' trouble. As the West declines relatively and the East rises, seemingly new questions are asked that are in fact old ones. The West's current issues with Ukraine, Crimea, ISIS, Israel, and Iran are present-day manifestations of geopolitical dynamics that have been active in the historical process from its beginning. In 108 elegant and whimsical maps and drawings, The Eastern Question looks at these dynamics through a geopolitical lens with a scope of three millennia. The drawings are historical political cartoons; the maps ground the reader in the geography of time and place. Painting with a broad brush, the author sketches in the story with short texts that explain the drawings as much as the drawings illustrate the texts. The Eastern Question portrays history as a drama with stock characters improvising their lines in a plot whose action has been determined by the dynamics of Desert & Sown, East & West, and Order & Fragmentation. The first half of the book is thematic, exploring these three dynamics. The second half focuses on one of the six characters, the Ottoman Empire -- of which the modern countries of the Middle East are mere fragments -- its rise, decline, and fall, which opened the Eastern Question--and the concurrent rise of the West to world domination, now being challenged by the rise of the East. With vast perspective and extensive view The Eastern Question seamlessly connects today's events to these unchanging geopolitical dynamics.

Benjamin Disraeli is primarily remembered as a two-time Prime Minister, founder of modern British Conservatism, and popular novelist. However, in the course of a few fateful years, he had a decisive influence on the history of the countries of the Balkan peninsula.Like all British Prime Ministers in this period, Disraeli was forced to confront the Eastern Question: what to do about the political future of the Balkans and the Levant, as the Ottoman Empire began to implode. During the 'Eastern Crisis' of 1875 to 1878, Disraeli played a key role, in the end imposing his will on the rest of Europe at the Congress of Berlin.It is a commonplace in biographies of Disraeli that his attitude to the East and the Eastern Question is essential for understanding his complex persona and the most crucial period of his career, yet until now this topic has not been researched in detail. Disraeli and the Eastern Question now fills this gap, providing the first complete reconstruction of Disraeli's attitudes towards the East and the Eastern Question as a whole, from his early youth onwards, and using a wide range ofprimary sources, from Disraeli's private papers, correspondence, and novels, the manuscript collections of Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister's closest associates, to the minutes of Parliamentary debates and the official correspondence of the Foreign Office, as well as Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, andAlbanian documents. Blending a biographical approach with the history of ideas, Milos Kovic analyses Disraeli's role in the Eastern Crisis, at the Congress of Berlin, and after, to provide a full intellectual biography of his attitudes to the Eastern Question and how these affected the history of international relations in the late nineteenth century.