Building on previously undisclosed archive, this chapter investigates the entangled British-American relief response to the 1894-1896 Armenian massacres. To do so, the chapter focuses on the two main collecting organizations, which operated at the national level with governmental acknowledgement on both sides of the Atlantic: the ARF and its American counterpart, the National Armenian Relief Committee (NARC). Currently absent from the historiography, this joint perspective allows for the investigation of the two private organizations’ strategies in light of developing norms of humanitarian accountability, shedding new light on foreign interference in the Ottoman Empire and on ongoing debates over humanitarianism at a time when clearly established international relief patterns were still relatively absent from international law. Inspired by the work on late-Victorian humanitarian accountability norms engaging with the concept of ‘gift reciprocity and transactional charity’ in the work of Marcel Mauss (see S. Roddy, J.-M. Strange & B. Taithe, ‘Humanitarian Accountability, Bureaucracy, and Self-Regulation’, Disasters, 39:2 (2015)), this chapter asks what moral contract these norms imposed on the ARF and the NARC vis-à-vis donors, governments and victims. The chapter argues that the discreet, though strong, bond between the ARF and the NARC opened new perspectives for Anglo-American collaboration in the field of aid, which in fine marked a turning point in the history of humanitarianism. The chapter shows how in the face of extreme violence, in loco relief actors, together with local Armenian relays reconceptualized relief and helped to implement mass refugee relocation and colonisation schemes with the support of the British ambassador at Constantinople, Philip Currie, foreshadowing what we now know as humanitarian diplomacy. The chapter also addresses the limits of that benevolence.