Fatma Müge Göçek

Fatma Muge Gocek

Examining the process of Westernization and social change during the 18th and 19th centuries in the Ottoman Empire, this study uses archival documents and historical chronicles to argue that social change precedes and contributes to the process of Westernization.

Ottoman Westernization and Social Change

Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire

Norman M. Naimark

Ronald Grigor Suny

A collected volume featuring the work of Armenian, Turkish, and other scholars, this book presents the story of the Armenian Genocide coolly and objectively, exploring how and why the Young Turk government ordered and carried out the mass deportations and massacres of its Christian subjects.

Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire

A Question of Genocide

What are the causes of imperial decline? This work studies the Ottoman empire in the 18th and 19th centuries to argue that the Ottoman imperial decline resulted from a combination of Ottoman internal dynamics with external influences. Specifically, it contends that the split within the Ottoman social structure across ethno-religious lines interacted with the effects of war and commerce with the West to produce a bifurcated Ottoman bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie, divided into disparate commercial and bureaucratic elements, was able to challenge the sultan but was ultimately unable to salvage the empire. Instead, the Ottoman empire was replaced by the Turkish nation-state and others in the Balkans and the Middle East. This work will appeal to students of sociology and Ottoman studies.

While much of the international community regards the forced deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish state still officially denies it. In Denial of Violence, Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Göçek undertook a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to 2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered, historical process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural elements of collective violence and situated modernity on one side, and the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events on the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages: (i) the initial imperial denial of the origins of the collective violence committed against the Armenians commenced in 1789 and continued until 1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early republican denial of the actors of violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (iv) the late republican denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974 and continues today. Denial of Violence develops a novel theoretical, historical and methodological framework to understanding what happened and why the denial of collective violence against Armenians still persists within Turkish state and society.

Fatma Muge Gocek

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