Across Frederick Chessons career, the emergence of cheap newspapers, the prevalence of postal networks, and development of a global telegraphic system revolutionised how information was distributed. As Secretary for the Aborigines Protection Society for over three decades, Chesson was a nodal point for communication about human trafficking, effects of imperial conflicts on Indigenous peoples, the brutal retaliation for the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, and other outrages. Long before Lemkin coined the term genocide, Chessons journalism and activism described and decried such atrocities on several continents. Liberal activists work represents multiscalar thinking about abuses, to which Chesson contributed a repertoire demonstrating his innovative tactical and organisational forms championing racial justice.

This telling fusion of humanitarianism, interventionism and imperialism can, however, also be found in altogether different parts of the world. Chapter 8 accordingly considers three key case studies of collective European great power intervention for the protection of Ottoman Christians, in the imperial context of the so-called ‘Eastern Question’. The first of these cases is the intervention in the Greek war of independence of 1821–30. The chapter argues that the European reaction was decisively conditioned by abolitionist ideas and was based on the very conception of humanitarian intervention that had crystallised in the fight against the slave trade. The intervention in Greece did mark a precedent in its novel linkage between abolitionist themes and those of the protection of minorities, with a distinct narrowing of the idea of international protection to the Christian population. This selective conception of intervention was then ready to be reactivated by the European powersagainst the Ottoman Empire – as testified to by the crises in Lebanon (1860–61) and the Balkans (1876–78). What is remarkable about these instances of intervention is the increasing degree to which practices of international governance emerged in the form of international commissions alongside rudimentary forms of international criminal prosecution and minority protection. Above all, however, this period witnessed the consolidation in international law of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, with the decisive impetus coming from the fight against the slave trade on the one hand and the relief of Christian minorities on the other.

Chapter 6 explores to the ways Ottoman subjects and Western Europeans residing in the Middle East contended with actual plague epidemics and argues that Western conceptions of plague informed their broader evaluations of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter examines how easily diplomatic conundrums filtered into the casual discourse of travelers and how closely medical and political evaluations were intertwined. Plague helps open up the Eastern Question by making clear how the political dilemmas it posed were not the exclusive purview of high diplomacy but were deeply implicated in medical and cultural perceptions of the “East.” It was possible, we see, for Western Europeans to construct the presence of plague as a central civilizational dividing line even as Ottoman and Western responses to the disease were relatively similar.

Between 1812 and 1828 Friedrich von Gentz acted as political correspondent for three successive princes of Wallachia. This chapter reveals the complex relationship between the freelance diplomat and his generous clients, in which Gentz acted as an unofficial diplomatic agent, confidant and tutor, thereby engaging in a process of ‘distance social teaching’ in relation to his princely correspondents, who themselves were ‘intelligence brokers’ in Europe’s southeastern periphery. In turn, the hospodars kept Gentz regularly updated on the Danubian principalities' political situation, and appealed to Gentz’s expertise for guidance in the diplomatic conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, in which ambassadorial conferences worked for the cooperative management and resolution of international crises. The relationship between Gentz and his Wallachian correspondents provides a telling example of a practice that disseminated to southeastern Europe a new political and security culture.