You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Statistics have played an important role in the recognition of the Armenian question on the international landscape as well as its "definitive solution" resulting in the Armenian genocide. The importance of statistics first surfaced at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where differences in the approach toward numbers between the Armenian and the Ottoman Empire, and the role of statistics within the Ottoman state apparatus, became an issue. At that international gathering, the Armenian question was considered part of the "Eastern Question" paradigm of Western diplomacy. It would soon become a code word for the question of "civilization" itself. Those administering the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empir...
An unprecedented look at secret documents showing the deliberate nature of the Armenian genocide Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam's most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was int...
This volume gives a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the Kurdish issue in Turkey from a spatial perspective that takes into account geographical variations in identity formation, exclusion and political mobilisation. Although analysis of Turkey’s Kurdish issue from a spatial perspective is not new, spatial analyses are still relatively scarce. More often than not, Kurdish studies consist of time-centred work. In this book, the attention is shifted from outcome-oriented analysis of transformation in time towards a spatial analysis. The authors in this book discuss the spatial production of home, identity, work, in short, of being in the world. The contributions are based on the tacit ...
The relationship between the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire and the Church of England developed substantially between 1895 and 1914, as contacts between them grew. As the character of this emerging relationship changed, it contributed to the formation of both churches’ own ‘narratives of identity’. The wider context in which this took place was a period of instability in the international order, particularly within the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the outbreak of the First World War, effectively bringing this phase of sustained contact to an end. Narratives of Identity makes use of Syriac, Garshuni, and Arabic primary sources from Syrian Orthodox archives in Turkey and ...
This book traces the history of everyday relations of Greek-Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, an Ottoman countryside inhabited by various ethno-religious groups, either sharing the same settlements, or living in neighbouring villages. Based on Ottoman state archives, testimonies collected by the Centre of Asia Minor Studies, and various pre-1923 hand-written and printed sources mostly in Ottoman- and Karamanli-Turkish, and Greek, the study covers the period from 1839 to 1923 and proposes an anthropological perspective on everyday cross-religious interactions. It focuses on questions such as identification and mapping of communities, sharing of space and resources, use of languages, and religiosity in the context of conversions and of shared sacred spaces and beliefs to investigate everyday realities of a multireligious rural society which disappeared with the fall of the Empire.
This open access book brings together contributions from an internationally diverse group of scholars to celebrate Taner Akçam’s role as the first Turkish intellectual to publicly recognize the Armenian Genocide. As a researcher, lecturer, and mentor to a new generation of scholars, Akçam has led the effort to utilize previously unknown, ignored, or under-studied sources, whether in Turkish, Armenian, German, or other languages, thus immeasurably expanding and deepening the scholarly project of documenting and analyzing the Armenian Genocide.
From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.
The systematic extermination of about 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman government during and after WWI inspired the formulation of a new term that would come to haunt the modern “civilized” world—genocide. It was a harbinger of other genocides that would deeply scar and stain the twentieth century. To this day, Turkey denies the genocide, instead claiming that the victims died of starvation or the violence of isolated gangs or the unintended effects of legitimate deportation. These ongoing denials and evasions have generated enormous debate, criticism, and controversy—within and without Turkey—all of which is laid out here for readers to sift through and evaluate and within which they may pursue and locate the truth.
Ayhan Aktar has been working on anti-minority policies in modern Turkey since 1991. In the Ottoman Empire’s final decade (in 1906), non-Muslims constituted 20% of the population; by 1927, they were reduced to 2.5% and, nowadays, they make up less than 0.02% of the population of Modern Turkey. Armenians were subjected to deportations (1915), Greeks were ‘exchanged’ (1922–1924) and Jews were forced to migrate abroad (after 1945). Like many other nation-states in the Near East, Turkey has been able to homogenize its population on religious grounds. This book is a collection of Aktar's articles about this transformation. Aktar criticises nationalist historiographies and argues "For insta...
One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here a compelling reconstruction of what happened and why. This volume gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on Armenian genocide, looking at how the event has been written about in Western and Turkish historiographies; what was happening on the eve of the catastrophe; portraits of the perpetrators; detailed accounts of the massacres; how the event has been perceived in both local and international contexts, including World War I; and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then. The result is a comprehensive work that moves beyond nationalist master narratives and offers a more complete understanding of this tragic event.