Previous chapters have identified several areas where the concept, rhetoric and practice of humanitarian intervention developed from the sixteenth century onwards. Nineteenth-century instances of humanitarian intervention certainly built on earlier precedents, especially as far as the discourse justifying and demanding protection, the groups of people deserving protection, and concepts such as ‘rights of mankind’ and ‘rights of humanity’ are concerned. In this chapter and then in Chapter 9, I deal more specifically with two instances of intervention, both related to the Ottoman Empire. The first (and the subject of this chapter) took place in Lebanon and Syria in 1860–1, and the second occurred in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire, known as Macedonian provinces, from 1903 to 1908. My objective is to illustrate when interventions took place, for what reason, who undertook them and on behalf of whom they were undertaken.

My starting assumptions are as follows: the structure of the nineteenth-century international system hindered unilateral intervention (whether for humanitarian or other purposes) by a European power within the boundaries of another European state, unless the latter wished to risk a war with the target state or a general war.