Home / Humanities / History / Modern European History / The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924

AUTHORS
Price
€33.40
€37.00 -10%
Upon request
Dispatched within 15 - 25 days.

Add to wishlist

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities.

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks 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 the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.

The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet 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, mass rape, and brutal abduction. 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.

Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.

Authors: Morris Benny, Ze'Evi Dror
Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 672
ISBN: 9780674916456
Cover: Hardback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2019

Glossary

Place Names

Introduction

I. Abdülhamid II

1. Nationalist Awakenings in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

2. The Massacres of 1894–1896

II. The Young Turks

3. A More Turkish Empire

4. The Eastern River

5. The Western River, and Downstream

6. A Policy of Genocide

III. Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists

7. Historical Background, 1918–1924

8. Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924

9. Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Index

Benny Morris, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published books about the history of the Zionist–Arab conflict. He has also written about the conflict in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, New Republic, and The Guardian.

Dror Ze’evi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published several books on Ottoman and Middle Eastern history.

Dror Ze’evi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published several books on Ottoman and Middle Eastern history.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to receive our new releases and offers
Your account Your wishlist

This website uses cookies

We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.