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The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. By taner akçam. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. 528 pp. $39.50 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
"Now this is not the end," said Winston Churchill during World War II. "It is not even the beginning of the end," Churchill continued, "But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." "The position of Armenian Genocide research at this very moment could not be described better than this," writes Taner Akçam in the latest of his numerous volumes devoted to documenting and understanding the events of 1915-1916 (and their ongoing legacies for Armenians and Turks alike) (p. xxxi). Akçam himself has played a significant role in moving research on the topic from a situation in which, until rather recently, works on the Armenian genocide were stuck in an inert state of trying to either prove or deny that genocide took place, or to document the tragedies that befell the victims. Indeed, Akçam's weighty tome finds its place among the increasingly nuanced body of literature that engages with theoretical concepts advanced in the field of genocide studies and moves beyond essentializing and reifying historical relations among groups to examine the contingency of events that drove the perpetrators to engage in ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity expands and builds upon some of the efforts the author has made to delve more deeply into the contingent events in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, and to challenge existing historiography on the topic in his earlier works, namely, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (2004) and A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2006). Here, Akçam succeeds in demonstrating that the two disparate narratives and approaches that have evolved among historians espousing the official Turkish version of events, on the one hand, and the Armenian/Western version, on the other, can actually be reconciled to provide a fuller picture of late Ottoman history and the events that came to constitute the Armenian genocide. He shows that the "Turkish" focus, which has generally been on the "unjust end of the great empire" (p. xiii), and the "Armenian/Western" take on events, which...