Socio-political reflections and expectations of the Ottoman Armenians after the 1908 revolution: between hope and despair

Abstract

This thesis aims to shed light on perceptions and evaluation of the Ottoman Armenians in the second constitutional period about their relations with the state and the other groups and also about the changes in the state apparatus in making the constitutional government. Besides, it explores the internal relations between different segments of the Armenian community. By doing so, it tries to widen the perspective of the historiography of the second constitutional period in which non-Muslims are rarely handled as autonomous subjects. In the thesis, those Armenians’ societal relations are analyzed under the categories of internal and external. Internal relations mean the relations among Armenian institutions, parties, and social classes. External relations, on the other hand, are analytically divided into two as vertical and horizontal relations where the former denotes the relations with the state and the latter the relations with non-Armenian ethno-religious communities, i.e. Turks, Kurds. In order to understand Ottoman Armenians’ subjectivity this work largely utilizes the texts, i.e. newspaper articles, books, and booklets which they produced, and which are expected to reflect their mentality. The larger portion of the material are the Armenian newspapers published in Anatolian cities such as Sivas, Tokat, Erzurum, Trabzon, Harput, Adapazarı, and Izmir which constitutes a representative sample of the Anatolian Armenians who constituted the vast majority of the Ottoman Armenians. On the basis of all primary resources it can be concluded that the Ottoman Armenians were living in a continuous ebb and flow of hope and despair, optimism and pessimism just before the catastrophe of the First World War.