Armenian Genocide and Provincial Histories

"Armenian Genocide and Provincial Histories: Dispossession and Migration in the late-Ottoman Empire"

While the Armenian genocide is oftentimes associated with the events of 1915 and its aftermath, the pre-years of genocide and shifting local practices have been less discussed. Although scholars explored 1894-1896 Hamidian Massacres and the Adana Massacre of 1909 to exemplify the empire-wide hostile policies toward Armenians, we know little about how macro-policies were differently interpreted at the local level and what kind of (agentive) responses it produced. In this panel, we bring two groundbreaking scholars together to understand the interplay between persistent violence and the wide variety of responses the same violence brought. Revisiting the provincial histories of the Ottoman state through local and regional perspectives, David Gutman will highlight the Armenian migration to North America and Umit Kurt will discuss processes of dispossession and economics of genocide.

Register here.

The Economics of Genocide in Ottoman Aintab: The Active Participation of Local Elites in Plunder Ümit Kurt
Ümit Kurt received his PhD from Clark University, History Department in 2016. He is the author, with Taner Akçam, of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015). He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2016-2017 and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Armenian Studies Program at California State University, Fresno in 2017-2018. He is currently a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and teaching in the Dept. of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His recent book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, has been published in 2021 by Harvard University Press.

Organized by Berkant Caglar (PhD student, Anthropology)