Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This article discusses the international conditions and actions that in the mid-nineteenth century have led to the creation of a service to prevent shipwreck and save lives at the entrance to the Bosporus, at the time an increasingly important strategic and commercial global passage. The initiative for its creation originated in lobbying by the western shipping and insurance industry in Constantinople, the provision of expertise from the British Board of Trade, and the diplomacy of several foreign missions to the Ottoman government. Why did these actors go to such lengths to create a lifesaving service that could not be found at any other transit point of global trade in the nineteenth century? How to make sense of the framing of this initiative as ‘humanitarian’? The article uses the example of this Black Sea Lifesaving Service to address larger questions of the mixing of moral and material values in humanitarian projects.
Source: The International History Review
Author: Lukas Schemper
Institution: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung
Language: English
Topic: Historical Turkish Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: University of Warwick
OpenAlex ID: W4402118541