The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism

Description

In the early part of the twentieth century, as Europe began its descent into the First World War, the Ottoman world - once the largest Empire in the Middle East - began to experience a revolution which would culminate in the new, secular Turkish state. Alongside this, in 1915, as part of an increasing nationalism, it enacted a genocide against its Armenian citizens. In this new study, Hans-Lukas Kieser marshals a dazzling array of scholars to re-evaluate the approach and legacy of the Young Turks - whose eradication of the Armenians from Asia Minor would have far-reaching consequences. Kieser argues that genocide led to today's crisis-ridden Middle East and set in place a rigid state system whose effects are still felt in Turkey today.Featuring new and groundbreaking work on the role of bureaucracy, the actors outside of Istanbul and re-centreing Armenian agency in the genocide, The End of the Ottomans is a vital new study of the Ottoman world, the Armenian Genocide and of the Middle East.

Hans-Lukas Kieser is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey. He is Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and president of the Switzerland-Turkey Research Foundation in Basel. Margaret Lavinia Anderson is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Seyhan Bayraktar is Senior Lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland and co-author of The Armenian Genocide Legacy (2015). Thomas Schmutz is based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

'One of the most important essay collections in existence on the mass violence at the end of the Ottoman empire...a superb collection of the best-established scholars of the Armenian genocide and some excellent younger scholars who are clearly destined to have fine academic reputations. The major "selling point" of this volume is the quality and depth of research at the meso- and micro-levels. In short, this volume is not just a sign of but a major contribution to the coming-ofage of the scholarship on the Armenian genocide and associated issues' Donald Bloxham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Edinburgh and editor of the Journal of Holocaust Education