The past decade's upheavals of the Arab Spring, Syria's civil war, the jihadism of the so-called Islamic State, and Turkey's emergent autocracy have made the study of the Ottoman Empire's collapse one hundred years earlier as timely as ever. As this volume's editors compellingly argue, the cataclysmic events during the decade 1912–22, which witnessed the Balkan Wars, the empire's fateful entry into the Great War, and the 1915 Armenian genocide remain key to understanding the forces that have shaped the modern Middle East. Situating their contribution to genocide studies in the “long” First World War, they aim for “a new approach to the empire's long final decade: one that questions a Eurocentric chronology fixated on 1914–18; that reinstates agency to Ottoman actors, on both sides; and that moves them…from the peripheries of greater Europe's history and closer to its centre” (2).

Given official Turkey's denial of culpability, scholarship on the 1915 genocide has until recently centered on the issue of establishing the facts, proving the Young Turks’ intent to annihilate the Ottoman Armenian minority. Consequently a number of studies have focused on the leading perpetrators and top-level decision-making at the expense of studies of how the genocide unfolded across the empire. Although the present volume commences with a chapter reproduced from Hans-Lukas Kieser's excellent 2018 biography of Talaat Pasha, the architect of the Armenian genocide and, as Kieser argues, the real founder of modern Turkey as well as of Europe's first single-party dictatorship, the bulk of the contributions represent a shift away from what might be called the Wannsee of Istanbul to the realities of genocide at the regional and local level. The case studies, many of which are informed by similar trends in Holocaust scholarship, with their emphasis on local responses to the deportation orders, ranging from collaboration to resistance, constitute the main strength and appeal of the volume.

In Chapter 2, Candar Badem examines the jihadist violence unleashed before and during the Ottoman invasion of the Russian Caucasus in December 1914, arguing that the massacres of Russian Armenians carried out by Muslim irregulars responding to the Istanbul government's call suggests that the decision for genocide was already taken, prior to its usual dating in April 1915. Badem sets out to offer a corrective to Turkish nationalist historiography on the causes and sequence of events with regard to the inter-communal violence that engulfed the Caucasus during the Great War. The argument is somewhat weakened by the inconsistent use of the terms “genocidal” and “near-genocidal” violence, and the conclusion that genocidal “intent may not be the most crucial factor” (66). Badem offers a more convincing analysis of the factors determining the Russian response to the violence, marked by restraint in order not to antagonize Russian Muslims and foreign allies.

Chapters 3, 4, 8, 9, and 11 present case studies of men reacting to the orders for the deportation and massacre of Armenians, ranging from leading members of the ruling Unionist Party, such as Minister of Finance Cavid Bey, portrayed by Ozan Ozavci as a bystander with a troubled conscience who in the end sided with the perpetrators, to regional governors and local thugs carrying out Talaat's orders, often taking initiatives of their own. Of particular interest is Ümit Kurt's chapter on the enigmatic Cemal Pasha, general governor of Syria and often portrayed as number 3 in the empire's ruling troika. Cemal's policies toward the Armenians in his domain differed from those of his fellow génocidaires in that he opted for forced Islamicization rather than physical extermination, in recognition of their usefulness as slave labor. As a result, he has paradoxically been remembered as a rescuer by Armenians whose lives were spared.

The local dynamics of the genocide in different parts of the empire are further explored in chapters 5, 6, and 12. Mehmet Polatel's analysis of massacres in Bitlis province and Ümit Kurt's account of the deportations from Aintab show the active participation of local Muslim elites, whose fear that previously announced reforms would empower their Armenian neighbors, as well as the desire for enrichment as seized property and businesses were up for grabs, motivated them to go beyond the initial instructions from Istanbul. Hilmar Kaiser's case study of Angora (Ankara) offers an interesting contrast. Here, many local Muslim notables resisted Talaat's orders by shielding Armenians through either foot-dragging, open defiance, or claiming that the victims were converts to Islam and hence exempt from deportation. Kaiser even argues that those officers and officials who refused to collaborate “were probably not acting alone” and that their “systematic effort” to hold the Unionists accountable after the war “points to the existence of a more formally organized resistance” (165); actions which qualify “the stereotype of a state apparatus united in the pursuit of genocide and of a largely complicit Muslim population” (166).

While most contributions focus on perpetrators, the experiences of Armenian victims are addressed in chapters 7 and 10. Raymond Kévorkian presents a portrait of two leading Ottoman Armenian politicians and reformists, Krikor Zohrab and Hovhannes Seringulian (Vartkes), betrayed and murdered by their former Unionist allies. Khatchig Mouradian takes a different approach in his chapter on the Armenian community of wartime Aleppo, which emphasizes the resistance of the collective at the bottom-level rather than individuals at the top. Arguing that scholarly and public attention to the Armenian genocide has been biased in favor of perpetrator-centered narratives, armed resistance and western humanitarianism, Mouradian attempts to restore agency to Armenians allegedly described as passive victims and recipients of foreign aid. Informed by similar debates in Holocaust literature, he argues that the various survival strategies employed by the victims themselves constitute active resistance.

In an afterword to the volume, Hamit Bozarslan discusses continuities across time, from the attempted reforms in the nineteenth century and what Kieser refers to as the betrayal of the “Ottoman Spring” of 1908, meaning the brief promise of Ottoman liberalism, to the current regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a reformist-turned-rogue much like the Young Turks of the 1910s. Although the discussion of these analogies remains a bit sketchy, the afterword as well as the volume's chapters as a whole offer plenty of insights about the mass-violence and its legacies in the post-Ottoman world. The End of the Ottomans is a major contribution to Armenian genocide scholarship and a promising sign of its vitality.