Drawing on contributions from fifty established and emerging academics, The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire explores the scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on the Late Ottoman period and its legacies.
Seven chronological sections, featuring thirty-four chapters and eight supplementary essays, guides the reader from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
The first two sections cover the Ottoman Empire before the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. Section III addresses diachronic topics from Arab and Kurdish nationalism to missionaries and Zionism. Sections IV and V examine the post-1908 period, marked by the Young Turks' rise (specifically the Committee of Union and Progress), the Great War, and mass violence. Section VI discusses the post-Great War treaty system and its lasting impact, while Section VII explores post-Ottoman realities entangled with the late Ottoman legacy.
The volume includes two bibliographies, a chronology of political events, and an incisive afterword on the state of the field. Surveying scholarship and its interdisciplinary dimensions, and highlighting mass violence as a formative force in the region’s history, this handbook serves as a reference for researchers, diplomats, students, and general readers.
Editors’ Introduction–Hans Lukas Kieser and Khatchig Mouradian Section I. Late-Ottoman Coexistence: Reforms and Transformations in a Premodern Empire Section introduction Reform in the Ottoman Empire: Reform of the Ottoman Empire?—Marc Aymes The Rum in the Late Ottoman Empire—Merih Erol Armenians in a Plural-Late Ottoman Society—Varak Ketsemanian Ottoman Jews During the Last Ottoman Century—Julia P. Cohen Medical history of the late Ottoman Empire—Hratch Kestenian Section II. Crises, Violence and Revolutionism Section introduction Catalysing change: The late-Ottoman and ex-Ottoman Balkans—Dimitris Stamatopoulos The Late-Ottoman Army—Elke Hartmann Sultan Abdulhamid II: From Chaos to Autocracy—Edhem Eldem Public violence, regional and urban pogroms—Umit Kurt and Owen Miller New approaches to the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1897)—Jelle Verheij and Owen Miller The Muhajir: Muslim Displacement in the Last Ottoman Century—Candan Badem Section III. Nationalism, Transnational Actors, and International Relations Section introduction Genesis and Trajectory of Kurdish Nationalism towards the End of the Ottoman Empire—Metin Atmaca The Arab National Question at the End of the Ottoman Empire and its Afterlives—Seda Altug Palestine and Zionism During the Period of Abdülhamid II and the Young Turks—Louis Fishman Late Ottoman foreign policy, international relations and international law—Aimee Genell Western missionaries in the Ottoman Empire—Chantal Verdeil Section IV. The Constitutional Era: From the Ottoman Spring to Party Dictatorship Section introduction The 1908 Young Turk Revolution: Enthusiasm and Realities—Dikran Kaligian Particularism vs. Universalism: Ottomanism and Constitutionalism During the Second Constitutional Period—Banu Turnaoglu From parliamentarism to party-state with ‘Special Organisation’: The Committee of Union and Progress, 1908-1918—Erdal Kaynar Intra- and Inter-Communal Relationships in Palestine During the Last Years of Ottoman Rule, 1908-1917—Yuval Ben-Bassat Race as Culture: The Constructions of Race in the Formative Turkish Nationalism (1911–1916)—Umit Kurt and Dogan Gürpinar Section V. Wars and Genocide Section introduction The Balkan Wars, World War I and Ottoman Society—Yigit Akin Demographic Engineering and the Armenian Genocide—Khatchig Mouradian The Genocide of the Assyrians and the Pontus Rûm—David Gaunt Dispossession of Christians in Asia Minor, 1914-1923 —Mehmet Polatel The Anatolian Wars and commander in chief Gazi Mustafa Kemal—Ahmet Demirel Neo-Ottomanism and the Memory of the Great War in Turkey—Selim Deringil Section VI. Treaties and their defining impact Section introduction Treaty of Lausanne: The Foundation of the Post-Ottoman World—Hans-Lukas Kieser New States, New Borders, New Issues? The Kurds, 1918–38—Jordi Tejel Turkey and the League of Nations—Caroline Liebisch-Gümüs ‘Azniv Efendi, where were you five years ago?’: Nationalist Policies and the Precarious Situation of the Armenian Community in the Republic of Turkey—Ari Sekeryan Dead States and Living Legacies: Experiments in Self-Rule from the Republic of Mount Ararat to Northeast Syria—Amy Austin Holmes Section VII. The Quest for Belonging in the Post-Ottoman Space Section introduction The Afterlife of Christian Missionary Education in Turkey: Teaching Liberal Internationalism Under Kemalism—Erik Sjoberg Discarding the Ottoman and Asserting The National: Armenian Diasporic Church Architecture In 1930s Lebanon—Vahé Tachjian and Joseph Rustom Writing Ottomans into Arab History: Historiographies on the Empire in Late and Post-Ottoman Arab Spaces—Aline Schlaepfer Contention and protest in Turkey—Derya Özkaya Afterword: Historiography’s history—Hamit Bozarslan
Hans-Lukas Kieser is Associate Professor in the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Adjunct Professor of history at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He has been a guest professor at the University of Stanford, USA, the EHEES, France and the University of Michigan, USA. Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Specialist at the Library of Congress. He is the author of the award-winning book The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918.
