Herbert Adams Gibbons (April 8, 1880 – August 7, 1934) was an American missionary and journalist who wrote about international politics and European colonialism during the early 20th century.

[3] During the course of his career, Gibbons wrote more than two dozen books on international affairs and the shifting borders of the early 20th century.

[8] In April 1909, Gibbons and his wife, Helen, personally observed the Turkish attacks on Armenians, in what is today modern Turkey.

[16] Gibbons spent his early career in the Ottoman Empire and worked on his doctoral thesis and lectured at Robert College, in Istanbul.

One article, dated May 24, 1922, described the massacre of the Greeks of Pontus, located along the Black Sea, in the northeast of modern Turkey.

Gibbons concluded that a second war could be avoided if the Allies were to give Germany a reasonable amount of territory to colonize in Africa.

If they did not, he accurately predicted that Germany would dominate Poland and the Balkans, which happened in the early days of the Second World War.

[22] Gibbons had a conflicted attitude towards the colonial system, under which the European powers and the United States gained control over large portions of the globe in the late 19th century.

When Gibbons was writing, the British Empire controlled 23% of the world's population[23] and covered 24% of the Earth's total land area.

Early in his career, in 1919, Gibbons threw his support behind Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points," which called for a League of Nations and self-determination for all people subject to colonial occupation.

[25] In his book, The New Map of Asia, written that year, Gibbons wrote the following about colonialism, which he called "European eminent domain": When we examine analytically and weigh dispassionately arguments advanced for the maintenance of European eminent domain, we realize that they are based upon principles we have proscribed.

He believed that doing so would undermine the international colonial system, and would threaten the position of the French in Indo China, the Dutch in the East Indies and the British in Malaysia.

[27] Gibbons also believed that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would threaten America's commercial interests in the Far East, because the United States would not have a convenient place to keep an army and navy in the area.

[21] In the early 1930s, Gibbons argued that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would be futile because Japan would immediately colonize the country if the United States were to pull out.

[30] (Ultimately, the United States did not grant Philippine independence until 1946, after Japan was no longer a military threat to the former colony.

In a front-page article for the New York Times, written in 1932, Gibbons expressed frustration with the constant warfare that characterized China in the 1920s.

"[35] Gibbons attributed this unrest to unfair economic policies imposed on the east by the European colonial powers.

He predicted that by the end of the 1930s, there would be a "radical curtailment of the special privileges in Asia that we Occidentals have spent a century in acquiring.

[5] In 1927, he was awarded the Silver Medal of the city of Paris, and was made an honorary citizen of Le Touquet, France.

[6] Gibbons was an early member of the Ends of the Earth Club, a group of artists and explorers founded in 1903.

Its members included Mark Twain,[39] General John Pershing, Admiral Robert Peary,[40] and Gutzon Borglum (the sculptor of Mount Rushmore).

The contemporaneous reports that Gibbons made to western news organizations concerning these massacres helped corroborate and document these events for present-day scholars.

He traveled to remote corners of the world to gain first hand information on the life, religions and political conditions in Asiatic and African territories."

In 1923, Gibbons donated to Princeton University over 1,100 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, personal notes and photographs relating to World War I.