Hasan Kayalı, Imperial Resilience: The Great War’s End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021, 249 pages.

Abstract

which the newly becoming Turkish Republic and the other signatories to the Treaty of Lausanne engaged, and how surviving Armenians lost any hopes about returning home and reclaiming the properties they were forced to abandon. It was not only the result of a “complex legislative framework” (p. 167) from Ankara but also the desertion by France. In the meantime, Aintab’s newly wealthy “Turkish-Muslim class : : : consolidated its economic status by seizing” (p. 167) Armenian properties. Through a series of legal and diplomatic maneuvers, these earlier liquidation laws the CUP put forth in 1915 were reenacted in a different guise and allowed to let stand because France had turned its attention elsewhere. Kurt closes his study of the genocide in Aintab by examining two things: the first is how perpetrators of the violence (including those who goaded authorities into extending deportation orders to Aintab) had “their own pecuniary motives” (p. 213). But this was only part of it. As Kurt notes, “Viewing the entirety of the process, the function of appropriation was as important as the individual purposes; huge numbers of people were bound together in a circle of profit that was at the same time a circle of complicity” (p. 213). This work rejects the idea that local actors were passive agents of the Ottoman center. Instead, it shows the interplay between the center and local points in the empire. It highlights the class component, and ultimately shows how the dispossession of Armenians served to create and strengthen a “national” bourgeoisie in Aintab. Readers may ponder what would Turkey be like today if it had not been constructed on the appropriation of wealth and death of so many of its people. Although Muslims in places like Aintab took over Armenian properties and businesses (and in some cases became – upon taking that wealth – big industrialists), Turkey really suffered from its lack of precisely those people who had made its economic base diverse. Kurt doesn’t say this, but his account makes us wonder – did the nationalist Turks shoot themselves in the foot when it came to rebuilding and constructing an economically viable republic? This beautifully crafted, richly researched book tells a powerful story that is sure to interest a wide audience of specialists and nonspecialists alike.