| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Donald Bloxham. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 329. $35.00.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire tried to stave off military defeat and dissolution as it was beleaguered by the Great Powers and harried by its own minorities. In dealing with the European empires, various sultans tried to strengthen the state, modernize the military, and balance one power against the other in the great game of international politics. In dealing with minorities, the sultans vacillated between reform on the one hand and repression on the other. Nor did the Ottomans shrink from widespread massacre as a method of intimidating or even eliminating minorities that called for or seemed to demand self-determination.	1
In 1894–1896, under the rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred, following a period when some political parties had agitated for Armenian independence and had called on the Great Powers for aid in their efforts. In 1908, the Young Turks staged a political revolution. They were led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), whose original purpose was to reform the empire in order to preserve it. But after the disastrous Balkan wars of 1912, the Young Turks and the CUP were themselves further radicalized as they abandoned earlier pluralist notions and became converts to a hard-edged integral Turkish nationalism. Whereas even under Abdülhamid II, Armenians and other minorities had legitimate albeit inferior roles to play in the empire, increasingly under the nationalists no Christian minority had a secure place in the new Turkey. The Armenians especially aroused the CUP's suspicions: they could make claims to be the original settlers of Anatolia—the heartland of Turkey—and their population centers in the east were located on the border with Russia, Turkey's traditional enemy.	. . .

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