The London Review of Books recently published a ‘review’ of Ronald Suny's new book which failed, almost entirely, to discuss the book itself. Edward Luttwak's piece was a classic example of a writer using the invitation to review as an opportunity to air his own views, which, as it happens, are quite the opposite of Suny's views. Suny wrote in to the LRB not just to bemoan the fact that his book had not actually been reviewed in Luttwak's lengthy piece but to complain that the The London Review of Books had provided a mouthpiece to what Suny regards as genocide denial. The exchange indicates the extent to which the Armenian genocide continues to be politically charged, in a world in which Turkey still officially refuses to speak of genocide and the country's allies are wary of angering it for fear of damaging their interests in the Middle East.

Anyone who reads Suny's engaging and thorough book can hardly doubt that what happened to the Ottoman Armenians was genocide; this non-debate will not be the subject of this review. The bulk of the serious scholarship, by authors such as Raymond Kévorkian, Taner Akçam, Donald Bloxham, Fatma Müge Göçek, Hilmar Kaiser and many others leaves no room for doubt in that respect. Where historians debate, as of course they do, the issues concern the extent to which the genocide was planned in advance, the context one needs in order to understand the decisions of the CUP triumvirate – Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Cemal Pasha – who were the genocide's principal architects, the role played by local authorities, the international context, and the balance to be struck between ‘objective’ factors such as the existence of Armenian nationalist groups and ‘mental’ ones such as the CUP imaginary, in which Armenians were perceived to be fifth columnists in league with the Allies, especially the Russians, to bring down the Empire. Suny handles all of these questions with skill and deep knowledge.

What is striking to someone schooled primarily in Holocaust historiography is the changing ways in which the historiography of the Armenian genocide has responded to that on the Holocaust. In the historiography of the Holocaust, those who seek to provide contexts that are chronologically longer (e.g. nineteenth-century Germany) or geographically broader (e.g. European overseas colonialism, national homogenisation plans in Hungary, Romania or elsewhere) for understanding the origins of the Holocaust are sometimes subject to the criticism that they are ‘downplaying’ or ‘relativizing’ the Holocaust. By contrast, the trend in scholarship on the Armenian genocide seems to be in the opposite direction. Historians still see in the huge literature on the Holocaust many signposts for understanding what happened to the Armenians, for example, the notion of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ or the role played by the ‘Special Organisation’ with its superficial similarity to the Einsatzgruppen. Yet the bulk of scholarship on the Armenian case is reaching back in time in order to find the deep causes of the genocide in a way that is highly contested in Holocaust historiography. No analysis of the Armenian genocide comes without discussion of the Tanzimat period or the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96, whereas it has become quite unusual to write the history of the Holocaust including a discussion of nineteenth-century völkisch movements or antisemitism during the Weimar period. Where Holocaust historians contest the desirability of ‘contextualisation’, historians of the Armenian genocide now regard it as de rigueur. Suny pushes this trend even further, beginning his book with discussions of the origins of the Armenian people and their status – along with that of Jews, Greeks and other minorities – in the Ottoman Empire, only slowly building up a picture of the increasingly superannuated Empire of the late nineteenth century, the Young Turk reforms of the early twentieth and the crisis of the Empire during World War I.

Despite providing all that context, Suny still argues that, in the end, the genocide of 1915–1916 was different from preceding massacres of Armenians “and that the Genocide was a largely contingent event that occurred in a moment of radicalization following the catastrophic defeat at Sarıkamış in the winter of 1914–1915” (p. 358). The point is to take on those who regard the genocide as part of long-term plan to eradicate Armenians but also to note that earlier attacks on Armenians indicate a propensity for violence against them on the part of the Ottoman authorities, one that could be operationalised in a more radical fashion under more extreme circumstances.

The argument is well taken and is trenchantly developed by Suny over several hundred pages which make up one of the most authoritative and readable narratives of the Armenian genocide available. Suny stresses that although there were Armenian nationalist groups, the argument that the Empire was merely defending its integrity as any state would do is unsustainable. The Young Turks’ fears, in the context of a dying empire surrounded during the Great War by enemies, that they were facing an existential threat, was what permitted, in their minds, the jump from rational response to a limited security threat to a full-blown attack on the Armenian group as such. “The war,” he writes, “presented a unique opportunity to eliminate this long-term existential threat to the empire and the plans of the Young Turks for a more Turkified empire. Reason (strategic advantage) and emotion (fear, a sense of future danger) as well as humiliation at the hands of Armenians and a sense of betrayal conspired together to generate plans for mass deportation” (pp. 282–282). Suny here captures nicely the emotional side of genocide, the fact that although it often takes place during war, it is not a rational response to an actual military threat but a radical response to a terrible fear. In order to reach this point, as well as to argue most powerfully that the camps in the Syrian desert, ending at Der el Zor, were “death camps” (p. 314), Suny provides not only nuanced portraits of the perpetrators and the circumstances in which they were acting but some extraordinary quotations from perpetrators and observers alike. From the claim of Tahsin Bey, governor of Van, just before the outbreak of the Great War, that Armenians’ “eyes are always turned towards the Great Powers” (p. 196) to Enver's claim to American Ambassador Morgenthau in late 1915 that the Young Turks had “deliberately adopted the plan of scattering them so that they can do us no harm” (p. 302), Suny's book catalogues a process whereby Armenians were transformed in the Young Turks’ minds from a suspiciously-regarded, but tolerated minority, to an existential threat to the empire and dealt with accordingly.

Suny's book is unlikely to tell scholars a great deal that they do not already know. Its strength lies less in his own original research than in the structure of the narrative and the nuanced arc of interpretation. Suny does not deal in black and whites; nevertheless, he is clear that what we are talking about here was not the clash of nationalisms or an excusable response to treachery. Rather, it was a catastrophic response to a situation where the Young Turks’ security fears could be magnified out of all proportion to the facts. For clarifying that point alone, apologists for Turkish denial such as Luttwak will be irritated and historians of the Armenian genocide have much to thank Suny for.