Eleftheria Daleziou, Maria Georgopoulou, and Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, editors, In the Name of Humanity: American Relief Aid in Greece, 1918–1929. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 2025. Pp. 136. Paper $25.00.
In the aftermath of the 2025 dismantlement of USAID, reviewing a book about American aid to Greece over a hundred years ago appears almost like a crude joke, especially to those who have dedicated their life to the noble cause of humanitarianism. In the Name of Humanity: American Relief Aid in Greece, 1918–1929, however, presents a story uncannily similar to the present through its compelling and wide-ranging display of visual and material evidence. This book—more accurately described as an album—was published as a guide for an exhibition at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), marking the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne. Accordingly, the volume is intended for a broad readership, including those with little or no familiarity with the long and complex history of modern (Western) humanitarianism.
The album includes multiple photographs and twenty-one short essays written by both ASCSA and non-ASCSA scholars. The editors/curators managed to assemble a wide range of previously unseen sources from archival repositories throughout the United States and Greece. Some striking photographs depict toy replicas of vessels, dolls made by Christian refugees, and moments of everyday refugee life in Greece. The content unfolds across six overarching themes in loose chronological order. The first and second parts of the volume introduce the humanitarian endeavors taken between 1918 and 1923. The third part focuses on handicrafts and self-sufficiency—a term to which I will return later. The fourth and fifth sections delve into the long-term initiatives of Americans, namely the American-led infrastructural investments and educational programs in Greece. The final section is the briefest, yet it addresses one of the most compelling—and until recently largely overlooked—dimensions of the displacement of Ottoman Greeks: their migration to the United States and their cultural mark in the country. Admittedly, the intended readership and the brevity of the essays limit a more substantive engagement with existing scholarship, yet the selected topics require closer scrutiny.
Two emergent themes of the volume, refugee craftwork and global mobility, only recently began to concern the scholarship on humanitarianism. The third section of the volume further illuminates the story of handicrafts made by Christian refugees. It displays women who wove textiles, a Singer sewing machine, and a collection of bags and dolls crafted by refugees, mainly women, as part of Near East Industries (the industrial and vocational arm of the Near East Relief, an American relief organization founded to aid the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire), and other craftworks. Over the last decade, material culture, in general, and handicrafts, in particular, have been recognized as crucial components of humanitarian trade networks (Barber et al., 2025; Malkki, 2015; Småberg, 2018). This scholarship has illumined the less positive dimensions of humanitarian handicrafts, including the reproduction of gendered values (so prevalent in the volume’s photos of both workers and final products), the paternalist relationships that were closely interwoven with Western humanitarianism, and the limits of “self-sufficiency.” This last point is particularly salient as, in the early twentieth century “self-sufficiency” functioned as a core term within the rhetoric of humanitarianism, where it was routinely equated with “self-reliance” and “self-help.” Nevertheless, “self-sufficiency” did not guarantee economic security or independence for refugees. One indication of this persistent precarity was the transatlantic migration of Ottoman Christian refugees in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the “root causes” of migration should not be reduced to economic precarity alone, the ongoing economic disparities experienced by many Ottoman Christian refugees in Greece may have shaped their decision to migrate to the United States. Even though the book critically examines some lesser-known aspects of the story of Christian displacement, its overall framework fails to capture the nuances of the existing scholarship on humanitarianism, particularly regarding the political, civilizational, and cultural dimensions of humanitarian aid and the ASCSA’s institutional role.
A striking shortcoming is the volume’s presentation of American humanitarianism in non-political and non-civilizational terms, a framing that appears both in the volume’s photograph captions and in the essays themselves. In most cases, politics is conspicuously absent. The role of the American Red Cross (ARC) as a vehicle of American foreign policy in the aftermath of the First World War is largely concealed (see also Irwin, 2013). In other instances, the reader is misled to believe that the American Friends of Greece—strongly aligned with Venizelos’s Liberal Party and American internationalist circles—were “non-sectarian and non-political” (70); and that the testimonies of American relief workers “reflect the selflessness and empathy of American humanitarian relief” (61). According to most historians of humanitarianism however, relief aid was never apolitical. Despite the differences between British and American humanitarian visions, Western humanitarians adopted an orientalist attitude towards people in the Near East, deeming them to be morally promiscuous and culturally inferior (Tyrrell, 2010; Rodogno, 2020, 2021; Piller and Wylie, 2023). Thus, while one can only speculate about the editors’ own predilections, the limited contextualization of humanitarian politics and the emphasis on “selflessness” tend to suggest an idealized “golden age” of American humanitarianism as being disinterested and non-political.
This incomplete depiction of American interwar humanitarianism is further compounded by the aesthetic dimensions of both the ASCSA’s exhibition and the institution itself. For example, many of the book’s illustrations were produced by the relief actors themselves for the purpose of publicity. However, the book offers neither a disclaimer nor adequate contextualization regarding the production and circulation of these images. This omission is particularly striking given that, from the late nineteenth century onward, the Western humanitarian vanguard developed well-established philanthropic and missionary communication strategies, including extensive reporting, “waif stories”—stories that focused on abandoned, orphaned, or destitute children (“waifs”) to evoke sympathy—as well as photographs, posters, and even film footage depicting refugees in dire conditions (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; Watenpaugh 2015; Tusan 2017). Crucially, these artifacts were never neutral representations of reality; rather, they functioned as humanitarian-oriented mediations that reduced refugees into archetypical “suffering subjects” (Malkki, 1996) in order to illicit donations and attract American interest. In contrast, recent historiography has begun to grapple with the aesthetic dimensions of displacement, particularly as exhibited in museums (Carden-Coyne et al. 2026). Specifically, over the past fifty years, art and museum critics have used the term “institutional critique” to examine both artistic practice and the apparatuses that distribute, collect, and display art in a broader sense (Fraser 2005). By contrast, the book contains no institutional self-critique of the ASCSA. It is almost as if the institution operated above and outside the Greek interwar context. For instance, the careful reader wonders whether the Gennadius Library’s “Promethean project” was another case of refugees providing cheap labor for the sake of “self-sufficiency,” or how it was that the ASCSA was able to gain influence with the Greek authorities within a highly polarized Greek political landscape. To be sure, it is challenging to write a critical history of one’s own organization and to reflect on its politicized dimensions but doing so does not diminish the significance of the relief work that took place. Rather, it demonstrates the complexities of operations that sought to save lives and, in some cases, failed considerably.
Overall, the critique offered here should not preclude engagement with the book and its compelling content. The richness of the collection makes it a valuable repository for those interested in the thorny question of interwar humanitarianism. Even though the volume’s essays do not engage with broader historiographical debates on humanitarianism, the publication of such a vast and diverse album can only be welcomed, especially given its aim to “inspire us to act with compassion and humanity” (11), an aim that carries a particular weight in the present moment.
Panagiotis Karagkounis
University of Manchester
January 19, 2026
Panagiotis Karagkounis recently completed his PhD in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response at the University of Manchester. His research interests include forced displacement and the history of humanitarianism. His recent publications appeared in Contemporary European History and Diasporas.
Works Cited
Barber, Claire, Helen Dampier, Rebecca Gill, and Bertrand Taithe , eds. 2025. Humanitarian Handicraft: History, Materiality and Trade, c. 1840-1980. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Carden-Coyne, Ana, Charles Green, Chrisoula Lionis, and Angeliki Roussou. Forthcoming 2026. Understanding Displacement Aesthetics: History, Art and Museums. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Fehrenbach, Heide and Davide Rodogno, eds. 2015. Humanitarian Photography: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fraser, Andrea. 2005. "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique." Artforum, 44 (1): 100–106.
Irwin, Julia. 2013. Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malkki, Liisa. 1996."Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization." Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3): 377–404.
Malkki, Liisa. 2015. The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Piller, Elizabeth and Neville Wylie, eds. 2023. Humanitarianism and the Greater War, 1914–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rodogno, Davide. 2020. "Certainty, Compassion and the Ingrained Arrogance of Humanitarians." In The Red Cross Movement: Myths, Practices, Turning Points, edited by N. Wylie, M. Oppenheimer, and J. Crossland, 27–44. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rodogno, Davide. 2021. Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East (1918-1930). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Småberg, Maria. 2018. "Material Help and Self-Help: Materiality and Cosmopolitan Care in the Swedish Humanitarian Work Among Armenian Refugees in Thessaloniki, 1923-1947." In Middle Eastern Christians and Europe, edited by A. Schmoller, 79–104. Wien: LIT Verlag.
Tusan, Michelle. 2017. "Genocide, Famine and Refugees on Film: Humanitarianism and the First World War." Past & Present, 237 (1): 197–235.
Tyrrell, Ian. 2010. Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Watenpaugh, Keith. 2015. Bread from Stones. The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism. Oakland: University of California Press.