https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7866-1613
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Tsolin Nalbantian, Talin Suciyan. Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 401–402, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae649
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Extract
Talin Suciyan’s book Outcasting Armenians challenges progressive and affirmative characteristics ascribed to the Tanzimat, such as reform and modernization, and focuses instead on how it repressed Armenians in southeastern and eastern Anatolia. This is a very welcome study. It revises our understanding of how areas populated by Kurds, Armenians, Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Rum interacted with the Tanzimat. It makes an important contribution to the fields of Ottoman and Armenian studies, and to how we understand the Tanzimat’s effects on local, marginalized people, using petitions and other legal documents from the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople housed in the Nubar Library in Paris.
The rich details of daily life in local inhabitants’ encounters with the Tanzimat, especially in the book’s third and fourth chapters, demonstrate the—Suciyan would say purposeful—inability of the Tanzimat to alleviate Armenians’ everyday oppression. The book shows how Armenians navigated local and central power structures, attempting to call on central authorities to mitigate oppression at the hands of local elites. Thus, how Armenians coped with the state’s settlement of Circassians in or near their villages while experiencing severe economic hardship—evidenced by men’s internal and international migration—illuminates the daily threats facing Armenians outside of Istanbul. What makes their stories especially poignant is their eventual destruction a few decades later. Suciyan’s “bottom-up historiography” (7) of centralization is therefore necessary while reminding the reader of the eventual Armenian Genocide.
