Alongside political developments and the emergence of Armenian revolutionary parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the “Armenian question” has been largely associated with the emergence of an Armenian mercantile bourgeoisie in Anatolia during that period. Mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiographies have both emphasized this phenomenon—the former underlining the success and eventual wealth of an Armenian upper class, a prototype of a “national bourgeoisie” that was destroyed during World War I, and the latter analyzing the same phenomenon as a development of a fifth column within Ottoman society, a “comprador bourgeoisie” whose allegiances were not primarily to the Ottoman state. However, these approaches examine neither the larger social and economic transformations taking place in the Ottoman state and society during the nineteenth century nor the local conditions within which an Armenian mercantile bourgeoisie emerged in Anatolian towns. Moreover, since mainstream historiographies treating the Armenian question have been developing almost as independent subfields with their own agendas, they have failed to follow developments in other fields of Ottoman social and economic history (with only a few notable exceptions). The result is the failure to analyze the social and economic structures of Ottoman Armenian communities and, consequently, the power of the mercantile elite in within those groups before 1915. This paper, using local Armenian sources in conjunction with Ottoman archival documents and consular reports, examines textile manufacturing in the town of Yerzinka/Erzincan in the second half of the nineteenth century. It considers the social dynamics of the Armenian community in the town by making the manufacturing system the center of analysis. The paper does not approach the topic via well-known debates in Ottoman historiography about “resistance” and the “deindustrialization” of Ottoman manufacturing in the context of integration native into European markets; rather, it delves into hitherto underexamined questions regarding the social and economic organization of work, the hierarchical putting-out system (in which women workers were at the bottom), workplace organization, and accumulation of capital in the hands of Armenian merchant-entrepreneurs. Thus, the paper seeks to understand the structural basis of class relations among Armenians in a small Anatolian town during the second half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it aims to help integrate historiography on Ottoman Armenians into larger debates about Ottoman social and economic history.

Tlgadinsti (Hovhannes Harootiunean) was one of the early provincial authors of modern Ottoman Armenian literature. He was a native of Kharpert (Harput, a neighborhood of Elazığ today), a cosmopolitan Ottoman city in the East Anatolia. Tlgadintsi as a prolific author, not only wrote short stories and plays, but also produced essays for national newspapers and journals. His contemporaries in Istanbul praised his writings and in this way, he became almost a member of national intellectual elite. In this paper I aim to understand the making of a provincial writer in the age of nationalism. By analyzing Tlgadintsi’s and his fellow students’ literary work and Kharpert represented, I endeavor to develop a different perspective to reevaluate the emergence of modern literature in the Ottoman world which is generally accepted as a 19th century phenomenon original to Istanbul.

This paper will examine the utilization of violent methods by Armenian revolutionaries in Sasoun in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. It will focus on the organization of armed peasant bands, the establishment of limited control by revolutionaries over particular areas, and the prevalent features of the clashes between the Fourth Army and the Hamidiye regiments on the one side, and fedayi bands on the other. Armed struggle and counterinsurgency around Sasoun and its surroundings will form its backbone because of the sheer amount of documentation on revolutionary activity in the region, and its significance in both the renegotiation of the Armenian Question between the Great Powers and the Hamidian regime in the mid 1890s, and the Armenian nationalist imagination as the paragon of militant struggle against the state. Sasoun was among the first regions in the countryside of Ottoman Armenia to offer resistance to the encroachments of Kurdish tribesmen and the Fourth Army, and revolutionaries and peasants there continued to resist the state’s attempts to establish a permanent presence in the form of military barracks between the two periods of major armed insurgency in 1894 and 1904. In doing so, it seeks to treat the popularization of revolutionary violence within the context of the development and appropriation of alternative methods of opposition to the Hamidian regime.

This presentation examines the attitudes of Anatolian Armenians to the extension of compulsory military service to non-Muslims in 1909 by utilizing the contemporary journals in Armenian language published in various cities in Anatolia such as Sivas, Erzurum, Tokat, Izmit as well as booklets, brochures of the time. It documents their ideological willingness, enjoyment, and excitement for military service in the Ottoman army as an indicator of equal citizenship although they had some hesitation, confusion, and even fear most of which resulted from either complexity of bureaucratic regulations or lack of information about what they would face in the barracks. How would their Muslim peers meet them? How would their commanders treat them? What would be the physical conditions of the barracks? They worried about such questions which remained unanswered since there was a lacuna in the collective memory of the Armenians about the military service experience given that they had not been taken into the army massively before that date. This was one of the significant reasons of their hesitation and fear. Religious authorities were also worrying about whether Armenian soldiers could follow their religious feasts and practices in the army and more importantly whether they would be compelled to convert to Islam. Despite all these concerns, Armenian opinion leaders and institutions, both religious and political, tried to encourage and motivate the youngsters for military service, and informed them about the legal procedures they had to follow. Those Armenians who tried to circumvent the military service were condemned and denounced by other Armenians as a shame on Armenian national honor.