The academic literature on the two major phases of violence preceding the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), namely the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909, remains in its infancy. While most historians have embraced the continuity approach which claims that the Armenian genocide was the culmination of the two other periods of massacres, only a handful of historians have argued that these episodes of violence should be analyzed and assessed as separate historical events by positioning them in their respective historical contexts. Following the latter approach the following entry analyzes the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909 both of which had catastrophic impact on the Armenians of the Empire. While the former took place during the despotic period of Sultan Abdülhamid II and led to the massacring of more than 200,000 Armenians in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, the latter took place after Young Turks Revolution of 1908 in the provinces of Adana and Aleppo leading to the death of more than 20,000 Armenians. The Hamidian massacres demonstrates the premediated nature of the massacres and the role of the central government. The Adana massacres were organized locally with the participation of the both the provincial authorities as well as local agents and their cronies.

Having documented the uneven and combined developmental trajectories of Britain and France, in this chapter I will begin to explore the significance of Jacobinism for our understanding of the rise of multiple modernities outside Western Europe. To this end, I seek to identify the precise nature and concrete outcome of the "combined" character of Ottoman modernization. It shows that the late Ottoman Empire can neither be understood as a "patrimonial state" nor can it be conceptualized as a "peripheral capitalism." Instead, the end result of the Ottoman experiment with modernity was a historically specific Jacobinism that combined and bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality.

This chapter makes an introduction to the key themes of the book and provides a book plan.

This chapter starts with a historical background of the Kemalist hegemonic paradigm, starting with the late Ottoman period. It argues that Turkish secularist nationalists and Islamists emerged due to their different explanations for the internal and external causes of the Ottoman decline. The secularist nationalist narrative of the Young Turks who ruled the Empire between 1908 and 1918, was later incorporated into Kemalist ideology following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This ideology shaped state thinking until the early 2000s despite transitioning to a multiparty political system in 1950. After discussing different variants of Kemalism, the chapter discusses how the Kemalist elite guaranteed the continuation of their hegemony by locking in their privileges into the 1960 Constitution and creating a dual tutelage system with anti-majoritarian institutions such as the Senate, the Constitutional Court and the National Security Council, whose decisions had to be implemented by the governments. These institutions were in control of high politics issues that were all securitised to the level of existential importance for the nation. Thus, the politicians were not allowed to modify the secularist Muslim nationalist identity of the state, the creation of the desired citizens project, state–Islam relations, Diyanet’s status, homogenisation policies and the discrimination of minorities.

This chapter examines the formation and development of modern Kurdish political activism in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. It charts the evolution of the movement through an examination of contemporary documentary evidence, including newspapers, publications and archival materials. Over the course of the period between 1880 and 1923, there was a slow but steady uptick in Kurdish political agitation. However, while growing numbers of Kurdish elites came to see themselves as part of a Kurdish ‘nation’ and began to advocate for Kurdish ‘rights’, there was little consensus on how or within what type of framework those rights might be secured. While some looked towards the creation of an autonomous or even independent Kurdish nation-state as a panacea to the Kurdish question, many early Kurdish intellectuals remained committed to the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, it was only in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat during the First World War that support for Kurdish statehood emerged as the dominant trend within Kurdish intellectual circles. However, ultimately the geopolitical circumstances that came into being with the empire’s collapse served to foreclose nationalist aspirations.

This chapter discusses the Ottoman sphere in relationship to anti-Western, anti-materialist thought as it evolved in various locations throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike the eloquent and persuasive writings of authors such as Dostoevsky, Ottoman texts turning against the West are written in a vain of disappointment that the West did not keep its part of a bargain or failed to honor the Ottomans' achievements, rather than an intellectual challenge to modernity.