The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province by Ümit Kurt (review)

Ümit Kurt has written an important book on the economics of genocide. The Armenians of Aintab seeks to explain the Armenian genocide as a process of economically motivated destruction in a case study of the Ottoman province of Aintab. Through examining the "plunder of Armenian property" in Aintab, Kurt shows the relationship between local actors and central authorities in perpetrating genocide (1). The narrative traces this development in three distinct periods: the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, World War I, and the postwar period. This local study, using an impressive range of archival source material from Turkish, Armenian, and European archives, moves from the macro story of the causes of the decline of intercommunal relations starting in the nineteenth century to the micro story of local incentives provided to regional actors to rid Anatolia of all Armenian presence. Significantly, this approach demonstrates how genocide works as a top-down and bottom-up process where local incentives provided by the government (dominated by the Committee of Union and Progress [CUP]) prompted the participation of the Muslim majority in eliminating the Christian minority in Aintab and, ultimately, the possibility of a multi-ethnic Ottoman imperial state.

To read the Armenian genocide as a process rather than a distinctly bounded event with a clear beginning and end raises the stakes in genocide studies. It shifts the scholarly gaze away from definitions—what counts and what does not count as genocide at a given moment—to explaining the how and the why of the destruction of a people over time and in a deeply textured local context. Kurt opens the book with a discussion of Raphael Lemkin's definition of genocide but then quickly moves to his main concern: the legal mechanism of expropriation of Armenian property in Aintab. The first two chapters explain rising resentments fed and encouraged by centralized authorities and even given "permission" to escalate in the mid-1890s and continuing through to the 1909 Young Turk Revolution (56). The familiar story of intercommunal tensions caused by Ottoman fears of a declining empire and exacerbated by European pressure and internal strife and exacerbated by the Balkan Wars that preceded World War I explains what Kurt calls "the economy of plunder" that took root in Aintab (10). This context set the stage for the deportation of Armenians and eventual destruction of the Armenian community in Aintab.

The heart of the primary source research that supports Kurt's thesis appears in chapter four, "Confiscation and Plunder under the Abandoned Properties Laws," and chapter five, "The Flawed Restitution Process." Here laws passed by the Ottoman government to facilitate the dispossession of Armenians are read in connection with local records that chronicle the expropriation of Armenian property in Aintab. This results in a detailed and sometimes intimate portrait of what the legal policies of the CUP looked like when enacted by Aintab Muslim elites against their Christian neighbours. Kurt lists the names and properties appropriated and tells the stories of some of those who claimed these properties and justified the process of expropriation. An appendix lists the names and professions of Armenian merchants and the economic and commercial activities of Aintab Armenians, as well as a list of those "who played a primary role in and bore responsibility for the deportation and destruction of the Aintab Armenians" (233). This methodology, which analyzes local records, interviews, and previously untapped archives, helps fill in the gaps of the historical record currently inaccessible to researchers in the Turkish archives. It also shows the very human costs of genocide as a process that unfolded as a long series of events on the local level aided, abetted, and directed by the central government through laws of deportation and appropriation of Armenian property.

The Armenian genocide was the first internationally observed and well-documented attempt to destroy a people. It implicated actors in the Ottoman Empire and in the West. Kurt...