“A Strange Survival”: The Rev. W.A. Wigram on the Assyrians before and after World War I

Abstract

One of the most prolific writers on the Assyrians of the Church of the East was the Anglican missionary William Ainger Wigram (1872–1953), who worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission to the Assyrian Christians from 1901 to 1912. His range of well-illustrated books on the history of the Church of the East and the life of the contemporary Assyrians are considered to have played an important role to bring the plight of the Assyrians to the attention of the general public, especially in Great Britain.Wigrambecamemost famous for his post-war pamphlet entitled Our Smallest Ally, in which he lauded the military contributionof theAssyrians to theBritish andAlliedwar-efforts in theKurdish region. Together with the Russians and Armenians, they took up arms against the Ottoman armies after it became clear that the Ottomans were on their way to expulse all Christians from Eastern Turkey. However, the fight for Kurdistan was lost andmany of the Assyrians from the Hakkari Mountains ended up in a British refugee camp in Baquba, near Baghdad. In Our Smallest Ally Wigram pressed home British responsibility for the future of this vulnerable people that had been caught up by events beyond their control. The pamphlet’s frank criticism of British politics in Iraqmade it an important source for contemporary and later anti-colonial Assyrian historiography, even if the pamphlet, like Wigram’s other works, was firmly rooted in British imperial and colonial perceptions of the world. This may come across as a pretty straightforward way of a missionary acting as an advocate for a people with whom he became involved over the years. A closer look, however, at Wigram’s publications suggests that his advocacy in many respectswas different frommost of hismissionary colleagues of the time. Most obviously, Wigram’s activities were further removed from the struggles of day-to-day relief work that brought so many of the American missionaries to their pleas for humanitarian action. Their experiences led them to become actively engaged in humanitarian aid, in connectionwith but also independent