An estimated one million Armenians were killed in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Against the backdrop of World War I, reports of massacre, atrocity, genocide and exile sparked the largest global humanitarian response up to that date. Britain and its empire - the most powerful internationalist institutional force at the time - played a key role in determining the global response to these events. This book considers the first attempt to intervene on behalf of the victims of the massacres and to prosecute those responsible for 'crimes against humanity' using newly uncovered archival material. It looks at those who attempted to stop the violence and to prosecute the Ottoman perpetrators of the atrocities. In the process it explores why the Armenian question emerged as one of the most popular humanitarian causes in British society, capturing the imagination of philanthropists, politicians and the press. For liberals, it was seen as the embodiment of the humanitarian ideals espoused by their former leader (and four-time Prime Minister), W.E. Gladstone. For conservatives, as articulated most clearly by Winston Churchill, it proved a test case for British imperial power. In looking at the British response to the events in Anatolia, Michelle Tusan provides a new perspective on the genocide and sheds light on one of the first ever international humanitarian campaigns.

Prior to World War I, American involvement in Armenian affairs was limited to missionary and educational interests. This was contrary to Britain, which had played a key role in the diplomatic arena since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, when the Armenian question had become a subject of great power diplomacy. However, by the end of the war the dynamics of the international system had undergone drastic change, with America emerging as one of the primary powers politically involved in the Armenian issue. Dismantling the Ottoman Empire explores this evolution of the United States’ role in the Near East, from politically distant and isolated power to assertive major player. Through careful analysis of the interaction of Anglo-American policies vis-à-vis the Ottoman Armenians, from the Great War through the Lausanne Peace Conference, it examines the change in British and American strategies towards the region in light of the tension between the notions of new diplomacy vs. old diplomacy. The book also highlights the conflict between humanitarianism and geostrategic interests, which was a particularly striking aspect of the Armenian question during the war and post war period. Using material drawn from public and personal archives and collections, it sheds light on the geopolitical dynamics and intricacies of great power politics with their long-lasting effects on the reshuffling of the Middle East. The book would be of interest to scholars and students of political & diplomatic history, Near Eastern affairs, American and British diplomacy in the beginning of the twentieth century, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Caucasus.

The Armenian question -- The origins of a solution -- The Rooseveltian solution -- The missionary solution -- The Wilsonian solution -- The American solution -- Dissolution.

This book explores and comparatively assesses how Armenians as minorities have been represented in modern Turkey from the twentieth century through to the present day, with a particular focus on the period since the first electoral victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2002. It examines how social movements led by intellectuals and activists have challenged the Turkish state and called for democratization, and explores key issues related to Armenian identity. Drawing on new social movements theory, this book sheds light on the dynamics of minority identity politics in contemporary Turkey and highlights the importance of political protest.

Avoiding the sterile "was-it-genocide-or-not" debate, this book will open a new chapter in this contentious controversy and may help achieve a long-overdue reconciliation of Armenians and Turks.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

A landmark study of Turkish involvement in the Armenian genocide: A “groundbreaking and lucid account by a prominent Turkish scholar” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In 1915, under the cover of a world war, some one million Armenians were killed through starvation, forced marches, exile, and mass acts of slaughter. Although Armenians and world opinion have held the Ottoman powers responsible, Turkey has consistently rejected claims of genocide. Now Turkish historian Taner Akçam has made extensive and unprecedented use of Ottoman and other sources to produce a scrupulous charge sheet against the Turkish authorities. The first scholar of any nationality to mine the significant evidence—in Turkish military and court records, parliamentary minutes, letters, and eyewitness accounts—Akçam follows the chain of events leading up to the killing and then reconstructs its systematic orchestration by coordinated departments of the Ottoman state, the ruling political parties, and the military. He also examines how Turkey succeeded in evading responsibility, pointing to competing international interests in the region, the priorities of Turkish nationalists, and the international community’s inadequate attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice.