The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) as a global humanitarian moment

Abstract

This article explores the global spread of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to colonial India. By looking at the Great Eastern Crisis (1875-78) and the intense public ferment the events in the Balkans created in Britain, Switzerland, Russia and India, this article illustrates how humanitarian ideas and practices, as well as institutional arrangements for the care for wounded soldiers, were appropriated and shared amongst the different religious internationals and pan-movements from the late 1870s onwards. The Great Eastern Crisis, this article contends, marks a global humanitarian moment. It transformed the initially mainly European and Christian Red Cross into a truly global movement that included non-sovereign colonial India and the Islamic religious international. Far from just being at the receiving end, non-European peoples were crucial in creating global and transnational humanitarianism, global civil society and the world of non-governmental organizations during the last third of the nineteenth century.