Armenian massacres of the Hamidian period, 1894-1897 An empirical inquiry

This PhD thesis deals with the mass violence against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, in the years 1894-1897. This dramatic crisis in Armenian-Ottoman relations, despite the enormous interest it evoked contemporarily and more recently, has hitherto not been the subject of a separate monograph.
Firstly the existing historiography of the incidents is scrutinised. It is demonstrated that there exists from the very beginning a dichotomy between an Armenian/western perspective that considers the events intentionally organized massacres by the Ottoman state of the Armenian civilian population, and an almost diametrically opposed Ottoman-Turkish narrative characterising the episode as an Armenian revolt. The origins and context of these strongly different historiographical traditions are investigated. Recent, more critical historical research on the issue is discussed and evaluated.
Introductory chapters offer information on the social geography, history and ethnology of the area in which the violence took place and an outline of Armenian-Ottoman relations and the “Armenian Question” in the decades preceding the massacres.
The research focuses on three topics: (1) An exhaustive survey and description of all incidents of violence and determination of a more reliable estimate of the number of victims on the basis of the death toll of individual incidents (2) Construction of a perpetrator profile and investigation of the motivation of the perpetrators (3) The issue of premeditation and the role of the various administrative levels of the Ottoman state.