The Puzzle

Why were the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire accommodated until 1875, but targeted with exclusionary policies thereafter, including mass killings? This empirical puzzle from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire remains unresolved. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottomans still occupied significant parts of Southeastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. During the early nineteenth century, the Tanzimat reform institutionalized the pre-existing accommodation of religious difference within the context of the Empire through the millet (religious community) system. However, external involvement by the Great Powers and the diffusion of nationalist ideas put pressure on the Ottoman way of managing diversity, undermining its multiethnic character and pushing it toward homogenization.

Armenians and Turks had lived in relative harmony in the Ottoman Empire for centuries. The Ottoman administrators treated the Armenians as the “most loyal millet” in the Empire. This was justified, since many different peoples in the Empire had already rebelled during the nineteenth century (e.g., the Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians), while the Armenians had not. By the 1890s, however, the Ottoman ruling elite’s views had changed significantly, and systematic persecution of the Armenians began. Two decades later, during World War I, the Young Turks – then ruling over the Ottoman Empire – perceived the Armenians as being used as a fifth column and thus threatening their country’s security and targeted them with mass killings and deportations. The result was the Armenian genocide.