“Crimes against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide MICHELLE TUSAN IN EARLY 1919, BRITISH SOLICITOR GENERAL Sir Ernest Pollock faced the monumental question of how to prosecute those responsible for “crimes against humanity” com- mitted against minority Christians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. “I think that a British Empire war tribunal should do it,” he argued to fellow Allied jurists. 1 Although the notion of international justice was not new, initiating war crimes tribunals for perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres as a prosecutable offense had no precedent. Attempts to bring Turkish war criminals to justice for what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide had their roots in imperial politics and human- itarian intervention. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain considered it an imperial responsibility to enforce what we now understand as a universal standard of human rights. The response to the massacres of Ottoman Christian minorities in the late nineteenth century and the 1915 genocide in Armenia can be situated in the infrastructure and ideological commitments of the British Empire. Contemporary reactions to, and the subsequent politicization of, the Ar- menian question were part of an imperial framework that eventually undermined attempts to document, prosecute, and memorialize the genocide. The script that still shapes contemporary understanding of the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century relied on Britain’s positioning of itself as a global empire and an arbiter of international justice. At the same time, Britain looked to manage imperial concerns as a Christian power that ruled diverse Islamic peoples. This positioning became increasingly problematic after World War I, during the attempt to prosecute Ot- toman Turkey for “crimes against humanity” in a period of rising nationalism and I would like to acknowledge the generous support of scholars and institutions for this project. Kelly Mays read and commented on the manuscript at multiple stages. Philippa Levine read and discussed parts of the manuscript with me, and Peter Holquist shared his research on Russia. Tom Laqueur and Carla Hesse gave me opportunities to present my research at Berkeley. Barbara Metcalf and Tom Metcalf extended their warm hospitality and offered good advice. Peter Mandler kindly hosted me at Cambridge while I did research. Parts of this project have been presented as papers and invited lectures at the North American Conference on British Studies, the University of California at Berkeley’s Armenian Studies Program, the University of California Human Rights Collaboration, and Loyola Marymount University. Financial support for research came from a Faculty Opportunity Award at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Huntington Library Mayers Fellowship. 1 Sir Ernest Pollock to A. J. Balfour, February 8, 1919, Bodleian Special Collections, Oxford, Han- worth Papers, 1802–1938 [hereafter HP], MS. Eng. Hist. c. 943. 47