Preference in Paris

The pursuit of knowledge, cultural relations and diplomatic practice are discussed in this chapter in the context of the Treaty of Sèvres, the framing the League of Nations, and the role of early twentieth-century philanthropy and academia. The boundaries of where European and US scholars and businessmen penetrated Anatolia are defined as much by the lure of antiquity, recalling the vision of the Megali Idea, as by political posturing and economic gain embedded in the Wilsonian agenda. I trace the strategic diplomacy of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Learned Societies, and two members of the Princeton Expedition to Sardis, Howard Crosby Butler and William Hepburn Buckler, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Turkish War of Independence. I argue that colonial networks writ large framed the nineteenth-century Western gaze of entitlement that underwrote duplicitous claims to Anatolian soil between 1919 and 1922.