As Fernand Braudel astutely noted six decades ago, the history of people living in the mountains has often been overlooked. This omission has real consequences. Out of the forty-five conflicts in the world at the beginning of the 2020s, thirty-four of them were taking place in mountainous regions.Footnote ¹ In many cases, the histories of these conflicts can be traced back to nineteenth-century turning points when lowland states gained the technological means to exercise power in mountain areas, changing the lives of the inhabitants forever.

At the heart of this book is a microhistory of massacres in the Sasun region in 1893–1894, one of the pivotal episodes of the Ottoman conquest of the mountains. The Sasun violence began a chain of events that led directly to the Hamidian massacres of 1895 to 1897 and prefigured many patterns of the Medz Yeghern (1915–1917).

Throughout, my central argument is that efforts of the Ottoman State to conquer the mountains and monopolize legitimate violence, legitimate mobility, and legitimate narrative (authoritarianism) laid the grounds for the violence in Sasun and subsequently for the Medz Yeghern.Footnote ² If, as Max Weber contends, establishing the state entailed the monopolization of legitimate force, then these advances in transportation and communication allowed the state to assert a monopoly on legitimate mobility and legitimate narrative in ways that had scarcely been possible in earlier centuries. The tight imbrication between the state’s efforts to control the mountains and the development of authoritarianism contributed immensely to the breakdown of communal relations between the people of the Ottoman Empire.

Rather than focusing on nationalist frameworks to make sense of the bloodshed, I emphasize instead geography, technology, and authoritarian state building. I examine how three nascent technologies (modern firearms, steamboats, and the telegraph) were used to centralize Ottoman authority in the east. Using these technologies, the Ottoman State was able to first enter and then, over the course of decades, entrench its rule in areas that had hitherto been autonomous.

The wars fought in the mountains have been described simply as “rebellions” – a word used by those in the center – and the full extent of this violence has never been adequately told.Footnote ³ Putting the stories of the mountain warmaking into a single frame can itself be illuminating. Between 1804 and 1938, the Ottoman Empire and one of its successor states, the Turkish Republic, fought wars of internal conquest and colonialism from the Albanian highlands and the Balkans (a Turkish word, meaning “mountain”) to Yemen and the Zagros.Footnote ⁴ This violence in the mountains was not incidental to the empire, but central to the production of the modern Ottoman State – one predicated on military conscription (mass kidnapping). Likewise, the dark side of modernity – state-orchestrated mass violence toward internal “others” (Alevis, Yezidis, Druzes, Armenians, Assyrians, and Kurds) – lies in the history of how the Ottoman State sought to first conquer and then control its mountainous fringes.

One of the many episodes of state violence in the mountains unfolded in the summer of 1894 in the mountains of Sasun, south of the fertile plains of Muş, in present-day southeastern Turkey. The Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered several battalions of soldiers to destroy Armenian “bandits” operating in those remote mountains. The soldiers advanced on the villages of the Shadakh valley, and over a three-week period they systematically murdered men, women, and children.

According to some, it was in Sasun where the Ottoman State committed for the first time an organized massacre against its Armenian populace.Footnote ⁵ According to others, particularly those of an Ottoman State legitimist bent, it was in Sasun that Armenian radicals first organized a full-fledged rebellion against the Ottoman State.Footnote ⁶

Over the past twelve decades, those two narratives – one stressing state oppression, the other rebellious sedition – have been embraced by two different fields of history: Armenian and Ottoman. This debate has recently been reignited. In 2014, three historians, Justin McCarthy, Ömer Turan, and Cemalettin Taşkıran, published Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt. As the title’s reference to revolt suggests, the authors viewed the violence through the prism of Ottoman State sources, which concluded that there was no massacre, only rebellion. The book argued that all the evidence to the contrary “can fairly be characterized as imaginary,” rejecting out of hand nonstate perspectives from “journalists, missionaries, or diplomats.”Footnote ⁷ This sort of dismissal has defined the “legitimist” histories of Turkey and the broader Middle East for generations.Footnote ⁸ Toygun Altıntaş has pointed out that McCarthy etal. wrote “an apologetic account that seeks to whitewash mass violence.”Footnote ⁹

A counterpoint, firmly embedded within the narrative of oppression against Armenians, is the recent work of Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. In The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, Morris and Ze’evi acknowledge that while there were many causes behind the destruction of the Ottoman Christian population, “Islam played a cardinal role throughout the process” and was “an important driver to the events.”Footnote ¹⁰ This focus on Islam is commonplace among many scholars of the “oppression thesis.”Footnote ¹¹ As Vahakn Dadrian, a doyen of the “oppression” narrative, wrote, “it is necessary to examine Islam as a major determinant in the genesis and escalation of these conflicts.”Footnote ¹² His perspective reflects a long tradition within the narrative of oppression that runs the risk of being at best reductionist and at worst Islamophobic. Morris and Ze’evi, like many scholars of the “oppression thesis,” focus almost entirely on the violence enacted against Ottoman Christians, obscuring the broader pattern of state violence toward other mountain communities (such as Sunni Kurds, Druze, Yezidi, Yörük, and Alevi).

Both the sedition and the oppression narratives are often narrowly framed along essentialist ethnic categories. The habit of employing definite articles before ethnic terms (e.g., “the” Turks, “the” Armenians, “the” Kurds) treats these communities as if they possessed unchanging characteristics that bounce off each other as if they were billiard balls. In reality, ethnic terms had very different ramifications in different geographic spaces. Terms such as “Turk,” “Kurd,” and “Armenian” also had a complex welter of different markers across space and time. For instance, one must discuss the various Armenian populations – Catholic, Protestant, and Apostolic – rather than grouping them all together, which is too often the case in Armenian and Ottoman history. Similarly, Kurdish speakers included Christians, Alevis, and Yezidis, along with Sunni Muslims. Class and geography also played a role in complex nuances of difference within the Ottoman Armenian and Kurdish communities.

I place the history of the Sasun massacre of 1894 within a broader framework of how the Ottoman State conquered and colonized its eastern mountainous peripheries between the 1830s and 1895. This was a period of almost continual “small wars” in mountainous regions from the Balkans to Yemen, from Dersim to Sinjar. This process of upland conquest, control, and colonization was far from unique to the Ottomans. These processes can be seen around the world: in the French scorched-earth campaigns in the Atlas Mountains, in the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, and in the British efforts to control the “tribal” areas on the frontiers of its empire.

My methodology examines viewpoints against the grain. My interest is to understand not only how the violence took place but also how competing narratives fanned out from that violence. Rather than dismissing competing narratives, my book examines how such conflicting views came to be, and why narrative mattered so much in the high age of global imperialism. Massacres by Ottoman forces had indeed taken place, and stories about those massacres sparked diplomatic disputes and public outcry. Stories about the massacres also provoked a concerted effort by both local and central Ottoman authorities to cover up the violence.

In order to understand the history of violence in the Ottoman Empire, I argue that we must know more about how the narratives moved from the survivors to the press, and from Sasun to a broad newspaper-reading audience. The story of Sasun cannot be told, however, without continual reference to the larger story of the Ottoman conquest of the mountains. Throughout this text, the “camera” will switch between the specificity of the Sasun mountains and a larger narrative about mountain conquest and authoritarianism that echoed around the Ottoman Empire and throughout the nineteenth-century world.

This book draws on a number of different sources, including published documents from the Ottoman Archives, archival documentation from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), documents from the British Foreign Office (FO), and finally published newspaper accounts, especially from reporters such as Emile Dillon of The Daily Telegraph and Frank Scudamore and Edwin Pears of The Daily News. Their reporting was seminal, as it was based on careful investigations using both Ottoman Turkish (Scudamore, Pears) and Armenian (Dillon) as their investigative languages. Within the Ottoman Empire, newspapers were heavily censored, and the accounts of journalists from abroad are pivotal in understanding the history of the Sasun violence. This book also draws from travelers’ accounts from across the nineteenth century in German, French, and English. As Jelle Verheij, the doyen of scholars studying the Armenian massacres during the Hamidian period, has noted, there are a number of archives (French, Russian, and Italian) that need further investigation.Footnote ¹³

In Chapter 1, I examine how three technologies (firearms, steamboats, and the telegraph) were used to centralize Ottoman authority in the mountains. Through these technologies, the Ottoman State was able to first conquer and then, over the course of decades, entrench state rule in areas that had hitherto been autonomous. From the point of view of the inhabitants of the highlands, this period of centralization, or reordering (Tanzimat), represented nothing short of a violent conquest by the state.

Recently, historians have reexamined how certain technologies of the Industrial Age critically shaped the social, political, and economic history of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁴ Other historians have explored the history of the purchase of weaponry and military exchanges between the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and Germany over the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ This book draws inspiration from the work of Daniel Headrick, who explored the interaction between technology and colonialism, and Michael Adas, who examined how technologies of violence shaped colonial and racist ideologies.Footnote ¹⁶

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was composed of a patchwork of different polities. In the aftermath of the early nineteenth-century Napoleonic wars (1803–1815), the Ottoman State began to expand its control over its hinterlands. The violent centralization by Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) and his sons Abdülmecid (r. 1839–1861) and Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876) might be compared to the centralization efforts of Germany, France, and Italy. In each of these cases, independent or semi-independent principalities were seized by the expanding power centers of Berlin, Paris, and the Piedmont. The processes that unfolded across Eurasia bore striking similarities.

Istanbul was able to use technologies of conveyance (steam), military force (rifles, artillery, conscription), and communication (telegraph) in its own effort to seize control over many parts of the Ottoman Empire that were not controlled directly. Such was the case in the Sasun Mountains, part of the Taurus mountains that separate the high plateau of Anatolia from the lowlands of today’s Iraq and Syria, known to many as Kurdistan. The Ottoman conquest of the mountains laid the groundwork for subsequent violence by turning mountain people against each other. This form of upland colonialism replaced the porous world where there had long been interplay between the mountains and the plains. The lowlands and the uplands had been linked by trading relations and the seasonal migration of nomads. No single people dominated throughout the dozens of mountain valleys. Instead, they were composed of many different worlds.

As the Ottoman State toppled the local emirs who traditionally ruled in the plain of Muş, a new system of warlord-bureaucrats moved into the power vacuum. For many, this new system meant that local resources were sent off to build palaces in Istanbul and warships in the Mediterranean. One of the unintended consequences of these transformations was the creation of new forms of political identity, as Armenian peasants from many areas migrated to Istanbul, and once there, began to identify their homeland as “Armenia.”

In Chapter 2, I situate the inception of the “Armenian question” as a struggle in the Muş highlands between Armenian peasants and their warlords in the 1880s. The stage was set decades before, when the Ottoman State overturned the autonomously ruled Kurdish emirates in the mountainous east, bringing large numbers of Kurdish and Armenian speakers directly under Ottoman rule. The efforts to divide and conquer local populations created the Armenian and Kurdish “questions” that have preoccupied ruling elites since the mid-nineteenth century.

The “Armenian question,” like many of the questions of the nineteenth century – the “woman question,” the “Negro question,” or the “Jewish question” – related to the rights of those who had long been denied equality. This “question” of equality was intensified at the mountainous edges of the Ottoman Empire, where the Ottomans backed local nobles who expressed loyalty. As elsewhere, the story of colonialism is one that pits some locals against others.

In the 1840s, during the Ottoman conquest of the Emirate of Bitlis, Mirza Bey, a local ruler in the mountainous region of Sasun, sided with the Ottoman forces in their conquest of the region. The Ottoman State rewarded him with a bureaucratic position in the region, which basically meant that Mirza Bey, and later Mirza’s son, Musa Bey, were able to continue to rule in the mountainous regions still outside of direct state control. The Ottoman central authorities continued to support the warlord Musa Bey, despite accusations of malfeasance, kidnapping, and murder. For many of the Armenian peasants, the final straw came in 1889 when Musa Bey kidnapped and raped Gülizar, a young daughter of a priest.

Local protests spread through migrant networks to Istanbul, and then through the press to readers around the world. The protests gained international attention and played a role in the formation of both the Muslim nationalist Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Istanbul branch of the Hunchak (“The Bell”), a radical movement for Armenian political liberation. The Istanbul protests of the peasants from Muş centered on the violent activities of Musa Bey. Those protests gained attention from newspaper readers around the world. The most serious allegation was that the Ottoman State was protecting Musa Bey and condoning his violence and corruption. To undercut the charges of corruption on the international stage, Sultan Abdülhamid II summoned Musa Bey to Istanbul to stand trial. The court acquitted Musa Bey after a highly irregular three-day trial. Back in Muş, the struggle between peasants and warlord-bureaucrats such as Musa Bey gave rise to the fedayi (“those who sacrifice themselves”) movement, a collection of Armenian nationalists, which only increased the fears of the central state about armed groups in the mountains.

In Chapter 3 I show how, in the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman State grew increasingly anxious about perceived civil unrest in the mountainous eastern provinces. This concern was heightened by an uptick in reporting on the Armenian issue in the British press and by protests across central Anatolia. Convinced that history was repeating itself in the manner of the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876 – also widely reported in the British press – the Ottoman State sanctioned repression of any dissent. Some officials used this repression to enrich themselves by arresting and extorting Armenians. In the summer of 1894, the Governor-General of Bitlis reported to the Sultan that there was an insurgency in the Sasun mountains, likely to distract from his own corruption. Orders were sent to the Ottoman military that “all of the bandits should be immediately violently obliterated in such a way that they are left with an extraordinary terror and this degree of discord would be prevented from repeating again.” The resulting state violence – clothed in the language of counterinsurgency against bandits – resulted in the massacre by Ottoman soldiers of 1,000 to 2,000 Armenian villagers. This massacre laid the groundwork for subsequent massacres throughout the Ottoman Empire in 1895–1897.

Chapter 4 describes how stories of the violence in the mountains spread quickly by word of mouth and telegraph. Before the end of September 1894, Armenian radicals, British consuls, American missionaries, and Ottoman State officials were beginning to struggle over their interpretations of the violence. Over the course of the next few weeks, two competing narratives coalesced. The first narrative, based on accounts by survivors of the massacres and participating Ottoman troops, reported by ABCFM missionaries and British consuls, stressed how Ottoman troops had been directed to murder large numbers of Armenian villagers under the pretext of destroying a rebellion. The second narrative, composed by the powerful commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, stressed that the Ottomans restored the peace in a turbulent area at the mountainous edges of imperial control. Throughout this period, the Ottoman State labored to monopolize legitimate narrative, certain reports were endlessly reproduced within the Ottoman bureaucracy, and those reports remain to this day the official interpretation of what took place in Sasun. At the same time, stories of violence appeared in the British and American press, with calls for political reform and an impartial investigation of what had taken place.

Chapter 5 discusses how the efforts of the survivors of the Sasun massacre, and their allies in the ABCFM, to disseminate narratives of violence were mirrored by the efforts of the Ottoman State to maintain a monopolization of legitimate narrative. This authoritarian turn placed the story of Sasun on a global stage.

Like all technologies, the telegraph was a powerful tool. It could help actors disseminate information, but central authorities could also use it to broadcast their approved version of events at the exclusion of others. In the Ottoman Empire, the telegraph allowed the state to centralize information. Newspapers used the telegraph to relay stories around the world, but most of that information had to pass before the watchful eyes of the Ottoman State. Never before had the Ottoman State exerted such control over information flows. Yet, the telegraph also disseminated narratives that largely circumvented Ottoman censors: narratives collected by missionaries, consuls, and journalists and delivered to a newspaper-reading public around the world. As more stories of massacres appeared in newspapers abroad, the Ottoman State clamped down ever more to maintain its desired public image.

In Chapter 6, I examine how the violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Abdülhamid II. It shows how the Ottoman State relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the measure of “truth.” To retain a monopoly on legitimate narrative, the Ottoman State utilized various forms of censorship – from banning newspapers from abroad, to forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, to preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread by word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire.

When news of the violence finally reached London through missionary networks in mid-November 1894, it ignited a much larger debate about the British government’s support for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a support understood by many as complicity. The same missionary networks in the United Kingdom and the United States that had taken up abolitionism in the early nineteenth century now focused their activist energy on the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire. It is worth noting that many of the same individuals agitated against lynching in the Jim Crow South and the genocidal violence of Leopold II in the Congo. Conversely, many of the individuals and media networks that opposed U.S. support for Ottoman Armenians corresponded to those that minimized or denied the lynchings in the South and the atrocities in the Congo.

Chapter 7 explores how the conquest of the mountains was represented in very different ways. Within a year of the violence, two broad stories had coalesced. As the Ottoman State monopolized the legitimate use of violence, it also sought to monopolize the use of legitimate narrative. Through tight control over the medium of print, it censored narratives deemed dangerous or seditious. Zeki Paşa, the commander of the Fourth Army, wrote the legitimized account of the Sasun violence. His account whitewashed all Ottoman culpability and placed the blame on Armenian “bandits.” Other narratives emerged from the British press, which was not a monolith. The liberal press looked with suspicion at the Ottoman government and with sympathy at the Armenian population of the empire. The conservative press urged the public to consider the Sultan as a well-meaning ruler and a key ally against Russian aggression. Some conservatives cast doubt on Armenian sources as suspect due to their “racial propensity” for deception. Two experienced journalists were able to reach the Ottoman east and reported detailed accounts based on interviews with Ottoman soldiers and Armenian survivors. Their accounts dovetailed with the account of an Ottoman-born American missionary, which became a contrasting narrative to the legitimized narrative of the Ottoman State.

For the next two decades (1894–1914), the Sasun region became an epicenter of violence. During the Medz Yeghern (1915–1917) in the nearby plain of Muş, tens of thousands of peasants were systematically murdered right where they lived. The killing bands were organized in part by Musa Bey, the aforementioned warlord. In the mountains of Sasun, however, some Armenians were able to find refuge and protection within Kurdish-speaking mountain communities, and in a few cases have been living there until today.

The details presented in this book are only a small selection from extensive primary sources about the 1894 Sasun massacre. These sources include accounts by survivors, consuls (British, French, Italian, Russian, American), ABCFM missionaries, Armenian Patriarchal records, Catholic missionaries, journalists, Armenian-language memoirs, Kurdish oral histories, and Ottoman State documentation. When news of the Sasun massacre broke in November 1894, it created a fervor among the newspaper-reading public and a crisis that reverberated around the world. Due partly to this enormous interest, historians have more documentation about the massacre of Sasun than perhaps any other such act in the late Ottoman Empire. One indication of this interest was the large number of journalists, including more than twenty from the United Kingdom. Although most of these journalists were able to get no further than Istanbul, due to strict bans placed on travel into Anatolia, at least two, Emile Dillon and Frank Scudamore, succeeded in evading the embargo.

There were dozens of massacres in the Ottoman east between 1894 and 1897. Unlike the massacre in Sasun in 1894, most of the massacres have, until recently, received little attention and have a dearth of historical records.