First Published in 1993. This book is ‘about’ the Armenians but it is also about the diplomats, missionaries and politicians whose interests and involvement helped to create the Armenian question in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also about public opinion, and particularly the religious and racial biases that were usually carried into any discussion of Ottoman affairs.
First Published in 1993. This book is ‘about’ the Armenians but it is also about the diplomats, missionaries and politicians whose interests and involvement helped to create the Armenian question in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also about public opinion, and particularly the religious and racial biases that were usually carried into any discussion of Ottoman affairs.
In the first half of the 20th century, throughout the Balkans and Middle East, a familiar story of destroyed communities forced to flee war or economic crisis unfolded. Often, these refugees of the Ottoman Empire - Christians, Muslims and Jews - found their way to new continents, forming an Ottoman diaspora that had a remarkable ability to reconstitute, and even expand, the ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity of their homelands. Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era.
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.
“Set against one of the most horrible atrocities of the early twentieth century, the ethnic cleansing of Western Anatolia and the burning of the city of Izmir, Smyrna’s Ashes is an important contribution to our understanding of how humanitarian thinking shaped British foreign and military policy in the Late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Based on rigorous archival research and scholarship, well written, and compelling, it is a welcome addition to the growing literature on humanitarianism and the history of human rights.”—Keith David Watenpaugh, University of California, Davis “Traces an important but neglected strand in the history of British humanitarianism, showing how its efforts to aid Ottoman Christians were inextricably enmeshed in imperial and cultural agendas and helped to contribute to the creation of the modern Middle East.”—Dane Kennedy, The George Washington University “Tusan shows vividly and compassionately how Britain’s attempt to build a ‘Near East’ in its own image upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire served as prelude to today’s Middle East of nation-states.”—Peter Mandler, University of Cambridge “An original and meticulously researched contribution to our understandings of British imperial, gender, and cultural history. Smyrna’s Ashes demonstrates the long-standing influence of Middle Eastern issues on British self-identification. Tusan’s conclusions will engage scholars in a variety of fields for years to come.”—Nancy L. Stockdale, University of North Texas
Legislating Reality and Politicizing History: Contextualizing Armenian Claims of Genocide is the first in-depth study of Armenian and Armenian Diaspora identity viewed via the prism of a historical trauma. Though numerous attempts to define a larger Armenian identity through history, language and/or religion have been performed, no major study has demonstrated the centrality of the events of 1915 to this identity and the formation of Self and Other. The book demonstrates how the Armenian campaign to have the events of 1915 recognized as the Armenian Genocide, flawed and racist as the campaign may be, remains the single bond possessing enough strength to bind the otherwise linguistic, geographically and religiously diverse Armenian Diaspora communities together. Utilizing a quantitative and comparative approach, peppered with International Relations theory and the political economy of lobbying (niche theory), this book demonstrates the pervasiveness and political power of the re-imagined trauma of 1915 to Armenian large group identity. This identity, divorced by time and space from historical realities, relies on efforts to gain ad hoc legislation through the politicization of history in order to convince the world of what Armenians refer to as the Armenian Genocide. This groundbreaking book argues that these political actions as well as the powerful identity narrative underpinning these actions is significant for several reasons. One, this emotive issue and the campaign it has spawned directly affects the future of multiple nation-states (Turkey and Armenia, in particular) as well as a non-state entity, the powerful Armenian diaspora. Two, the campaign regarding which semantics to use in referencing century-old events increasingly dominates international relations between Turkey and the West. Three, by deconstructing the role the trauma of 1915 plays in the development and fecundity of Armenian large group identity, as well as its transmission from generation to generation, an understanding of the quest to legislate reality through the politicization of history is gained. That is, century-old images and caricatures, often racist and bearing no relationship to present-day realities, underpin the campaign (the terrible Turk, anti-Muslim sentiments) and still carry weight - not only for Armenians but much of the West and Russia. This has normative implications and this book demonstrates how Armenian identity, which drives and informs the Armenian diaspora’s campaign of Armenian genocide, recognition actively undermines the strict legal definition and therefore legitimacy that is the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. This is done through the wanton application of term “genocide” to the events of 1915, which undercuts established definitions and norms and therefore allows and encourages the rather elastic use of the term for political gain. This further undermines the symbolic weight and power of the UN convention and thereby complicating the courts ability to punish genocide perpetrators.
This book brings together for the first time a large collection of essays (including three new ones) of a leading writer on diplomacy. They challenge the fashionable view that the novel features of contemporary diplomacy are its most important, and use new historical research to explore questions not previously treated in the same systematic manner
Muslims constitute Britain's second largest religious grouping, and writing about their experiences has found a new audience in recent years-though not always through a positive lens. But a proper historical treatment of their arrival, settlement and establishment had been conspicuously absent until Humayun Ansari's seminal work, reissued here in an updated edition. "The Infidel Within" draws together rich archival research and first-hand experience into a broad, integrated history of the Muslim presence in Britain. Among the topics addressed are migration and settlement in Britain before 1945, the evolution of a British Muslim identity, Muslim women and families, Muslims and education, and the growing mobilization of Muslims in Britain's political, religious and economic life. This definitive and sympathetic history, brought right up to date, is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern Britain.
Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.
In 1903 Tsar Nicholas II issued a decree allowing the confiscation of Armenian Church property, marking the low point in relations between imperial Russia and its Armenian subjects. Yet just over a decade later, Russian Armenians were fully supportive of the Russian war effort. Drawing on previously untouched archival material and a range of secondary sources published in English, French, Russian and Turkish, this is the first English-language study of this drastic change in relations in the Caucasus. Onur Onol explains how and why the shift took place by looking in detail at the imperial Russian authorities and their relationship with the three pillars of the Russian Armenian community: the Armenian Church, the Armenian bourgeoisie and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun). Onol places the evolution within a context of wider political questions, such as the Russian revolutionary movement, Russia's nationalities question, Tsarist fears of pan-Islamism, the path to World War I and the influence of key characters in Russian policy making, from Pyotr Stolypin to Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov.This book fills a conspicuous void in the extant historiography, and will be of interest to scholars working on Russian, Armenian and Ottoman history.
