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

Having occurred over a century ago, the mass violence that has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide may appear today as a tragic but increasingly distant historical event. In The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, Ümit Kurt begins by shattering this assumption with a set of arresting observations during an outing in the present-day Turkish town of Gaziantep, known as Aintab during the Ottoman period. On his way to meet a friend for coffee in a café located in a beautiful old house, he began chatting with the owner in an attempt to understand its history. Kurt discovered that the owner had inherited the house from his grandfather. When Kurt asked from whom he had acquired the place, the owner looked at the ground and quietly acknowledged, “There were Armenians here.” Kurt then asked what happened to them. The owner answered, “They left” (xii). Those two simple words constitute a present-day silencing of the history of the persecution of Aintab’s Armenian community. Compelled by such encounters in his hometown, Kurt sought to understand “the story of the Aintab Armenians, who were torn away from their homes, neighborhoods, and the city where they were born and raised.” The book that resulted from this journey is a deeply researched and a pathbreaking analysis “of how their material and spatial wealth changed hands and was transformed,” and it constitutes “the historical record of their persecution and subsequent erasure” (xiii). As such, this study reveals how the economics of genocide forever transformed Aintab, and have left deep scars that continue to be visible in present-day Gaziantep, at least for those like Kurt, who are willing ask difficult questions in order to face them head-on.

As a study of the economics of genocide in a single locality, this book follows in the footsteps of recent pioneering work on the local dynamics of mass violence in other contexts, some of which have sought to better understand how dispossession and expropriation are often integral in the unfolding of genocide (e.g., Gross, 2012; Gerlach, 2017). A key objective in this literature is to shed fresh light on the relationship between the objectives of the central authorities and their allies in local communities, a dynamic that has often been thought to have functioned in a straightforward, top-down manner. Against this notion, and in line with what scholars have revealed in other regional contexts, Kurt asserts that “the relationship between the central and local power brokers is symbiotic: the central authorities need the local actors to carry out their orders, while the local actors need the central authorities to ‘legitimize’ their actions, in turn solidifying their social standing” (p. 209). Through the case of Aintab, Kurt convincingly demonstrates that “what motivated urban Muslim Aintab notables to join the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress] and take part in its genocidal policies was self-interest rather than a shared ideology; much of the implementation was enacted by local elites and the Muslim population at large out of a base desire to plunder the assets and property of the Armenian community, instead of the generally assumed ideological pressure and encouragements of the political center” (p. 214).

Kurt sets out to prove this intriguing thesis by impressively expanding the source base that scholars have thus far utilized in telling the history of the Armenian Genocide. He notes that, “the existing research on the violence in the Ottoman Empire suffers from an important methodological problem: the lack of sources from ethnic groups subjected to violence. Some works reconstruct the history of violence solely through the prism of the Ottoman archives, while others rely only on European sources; both are deficient in terms of Armenian sources (p. 22)”. Kurt’s use of sources produced by the victims of the violence enable him to expose just how...