The goal of this paper is not only to explain the history of the little known affair of the British citizen William N. Churchill that occurred in the vicinity of Scutari (Üsküdar) in 1836 but also, and in particular, to demonstrate that as part of its course and outcome the European Powers utilized similar not very serious and largely insubstantial abuses of their citizens in other parts of the world in order to justify their own imperailistic conduct, and thus far exceeded the gravity of the alleged abuses through their own actions. To introduce this issue within a wider perspective, the present article links the Churchill Affair with another event from the same epoch, the so-called Fly Wisk Incident of an Algerian Dey in 1827, which enabled the French government to justify its subsequent occupation of Algeria, thus initiating the European conquest of North Africa in the 19th century., Miroslav Šedivý., and Obsahuje seznam literatury