ABSTRACT
–In 1876, British opposition leader W. E. Gladstone published an influential pamphlet titled “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.” He argued there that British support for Ottoman rule in the Balkans should be withdrawn. In 1897, as a private citizen, he wrote in a letter to the head of the Byron Society, posing the question “Why not Macedonia for Macedonians, as well as Bulgaria for Bulgarians and Servia for Servians?” This “Macedonian Question” was a recurrent theme in European politics in the period 1878–1913. It acquired urgency after the Uprising and reprisals that occurred in Ottoman Bulgaria in 1876–7, and the subsequent war between the Russian and Ottoman Empires that made clear the fragility of Ottoman control of its Balkan provinces. Europe’s Great Powers balked at the prospect of this “Greater Bulgaria.” Their objections owed more to geopolitics than concern for the future of non-Bulgarians in a Bulgarian state.
