Daut Dauti. Britain, the Albanian Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914 London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. 224. $115.00 (cloth).

Daut Dauti's Britain, the Albanian Question and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1914 traces the relationship between, and mutual perceptions of, the British policy elite and nascent Albanian nationalist movement in the forty odd years leading to Albanian statehood.If for most of this time that relationship was largely muted, for a brief but critical moment during the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1912-13, Britain played a decisive role.Dauti's book provides useful background to these developments, delving further back in time than existing English language studies into the creation of the Albanian state, and utilizing Albanian language sources and former Ottoman archives.In the book, Dauti largely follows a chronological structure.Despite the book's titular timeframe, the first chapter begins in the late eighteenth century with the first published accounts of Albania in Britain-primarily travel writers, most notably Lord Byron the poet.Another sympathetic writer who traveled to the region was Benjamin Disraeli, who visited in 1830, shortly after the Ottoman's reasserted control by massacring several hundred Albanian leaders who had supported the Greeks in their earlier uprising.Byron and Disraeli's positive depiction of Albanians was premised on their secular outlook, a perspective that was opposed by William Gladstone's religiously underpinned Christian-centric liberalism.British attitudes toward Albania, the book argues, were largely shaped by the Conservative and Liberal positions that Disraeli and Gladstone represented.This did not guarantee differences in political outcomes for the Albanians however.Chapter 2 exemplifies this by noting that, despite Disraeli's sympathetic stance during the 1878 Congress of Berlin and after-his foreign secretary Lord Salisbury met with a delegation from the Albanian League, the first (short-lived) organized expression of Albanian political unity-ultimately "he did not answer their call" (37).Conservatives saw the Albanians as a bulwark supporting the Ottoman Empire, while for that same reason, Liberals saw them as Muslims unworthy of the support they gave to the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire.Chapter 3 examines these competing perceptions as they operated within the Balkan Committee, the foreign policy pressure group established in 1903 that advocated autonomy for Ottoman Macedonia but that largely viewed the region "through the prism of religion" and thus tended to overlook the role of the Albanians (56).Albania was, of course, always integral to the Macedonian question and the broader fate of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.Chapters 4-6 chart this, and in so doing also highlight the role of Britain in the Albanian national movement.The British and Foreign Bible Society had played an important role from the middle of the nineteenth century in translating and distributing the New Testament in Albanian, which as Dauti writes was "popular simply because it was a book in Albanian" (88).Britain played a role in the political plans of rising Albanian politicians too.When still a loyal Ottoman, and not yet the founder of modern