Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Donald Quataert
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comings, it is intellectually honest and makes important contributions to shattering the taboos that still prevail. The author has
strong biases, but readers will detect the presence of a scholar
struggling with complex political, economic, and moral issues.
From this reviewers perspectiveas expressed in The Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2000)Ottoman civil and military personnel in 1915 committed mass murders of Armenian subjects,
persons whom they were sworn and bound to protect and defend.
As I wrote in the second edition to my book, however, debate
that centers around the term genocide may degenerate into semantics and deect scholars from the real task at hand, to understand
better the nature of the 1915 events.
My concern about the term genocide is partly a reection of
the current state of debate among Ottomanists and the reluctance
of both these professional historians and the Turkish government
to consider the fate of the Armenians. These politics mean that use
of genocide creates more heat than light and does not seem to promote dispassionate inquiry. Moreover, genocide evokes implicit
comparisons with the Nazi past, which precludes a full understanding of the parameters of the Ottoman events. Nonetheless, I
use the term in the context of this review. Although it may provoke anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues, to do otherwise in this essay runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive
and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its
military and general populace committed against the Armenians.
Indeed, as I state in the second edition, accumulating evidence is
indicating that the killings were centrally planned by Ottoman
government ofcials and systematically carried out by their underlings.5 Bloxham sometimes offers inadequate evidence to buttress
his arguments concerning the central planning of the massacres.
For example, he documents a spring 1915 decision to deport all
of the Armenians from an area in western Anatolia by citing a
Berlin newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt, of 4 May 1916 (78, n. 88).
Citing a secondary source dated a year after an event is not presenting sufcient historical evidence and does not make a convincing case.6
Nonetheless, what happened to the Armenians readily
5 Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 17001922 (Cambridge, 2005 [2d ed]; orig. pub. 2000).
Compare 183186 and 186188.
6 For more persuasive documentation, see Taner Akam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish
Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (New York, 2004), 145.
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perspective of the U.N. and the U.S., but not of the actual participants in the tragedy.
Given its focus on the foreign policy of the Great Powers, the
book is sufciently documented. One confusing note, however,
occurs at a key point in Bloxhams discussion of a meeting in an
eastern Anatolian town at which prominent government leaders
agitated for an immediate massacre of certain Ottoman Armenians. Bloxham reports the meeting as taking place on April 18,
1915, but the footnote cites an April 15, 1915, source for it. Elsewhere in the same footnote, Bloxham cites an April 22, 1915,
source for a different matter, the passage of irregular troops (83 n.
142). Either one of the dates relating to the meeting is a typographical error, or the April 22 source is the one that actually documents the meeting. Such an error should not have crept into the
nal manuscript; it will only give credence to those who wish to
deny and invalidate the authors argumentsmore the pity, given
the moral integrity in Bloxhams treatment of a subject over which
actual blood and not merely scholars ink has been spilt.16
Bloxhams contributions are many. He calls for a normalization [his stress] of the study of state-sponsored mass murder . . . that
. . . emerges . . . often piecemeal, informed by ideology but according to shifts in circumstances (69). He criticizes the Eurocentric bias among many critics of these Ottoman events who neglect
imperial Germanys slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in
Southwest Africa. Similarly, the silence surrounding the 1880s
Czarist massacres of Muslim Circassians (who would later themselves slaughter Armenians) and the killings of Ottoman Muslims
either by Ottoman Christian subjects of the sultan or by the newly
independent states in the former Ottoman Balkans is untenable. A
double racism appears to be at work. Observers are willing to condemn atrocities by the Ottomans against Armenians, but, as
Bloxham says, they seem to worry less when the victims are those
not like us, in this case the Herero peoples or Muslims during the
nal Ottoman decades.
To his credit, Bloxham also places the denials of the republican Turkish state in the eighty years since its formation in historical context. He notes that Turkeys leaders feared that the atten16 I refer also to the assassination of many Turkish diplomats by Armenians during the
1980s.
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