Introduction
The Introductory chapter discusses the overarching question of the book: how did it all begin? Since when did the self-defined Great Powers of the nineteenth century––Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia––come to assume responsibility for providing security in the Levant. Why? The Introduction traces the answer of these questions to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and maintains that Great Power interventions in the nineteenth-century Levant need to be considered not only in reference to their immediate causes, theatres, and implications. It is essential to take into account the continuity that European and Levantine actors saw in regional affairs from the late eighteenth century through until at least the mid-nineteenth. There is a need to foreground the persistent patterns or cultures of security within which violence was generated and sustained, and how the quest for security acted as an organizing principle of international relations. It also discusses the importance of considering these interventions in the fabric of the Eastern Question. It invites the readers to view the latter not only as a European question, as the existing literature has us believe, but also as an Ottoman question, whereby the agency of the Ottoman ministers and other local actors was more central than has been documented.