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 three succeeding sultans between 1839 and 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 due to three technologies. These 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 highlands, this period of centralization or reordering (Tanzimat) represented nothing short of a violent conquest by the state. The Ottoman conquest of the mountains laid the groundwork for subsequent violence by dividing mountain people against each other.

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 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." The other story 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. The account of an Ottoman-born missionary became the contrasting narrative to the legitimized narrative of the Ottoman state.

The Ottoman conquest of the mountains resembled in many respects the process of upland colonization around the world from the eighteenth century until today. This particular expansion of state power into the mountains – variously termed centralization, internal colonization, or conquest – has led to dramatic transformations of governance, ideas of difference (race, ethnicity, national identity), religion, economy, class and society, and the environment. So dramatic were these transformations that they gave rise to conditions that would facilitate the extreme violence of the Armenian massacres in the 1890s and the Medz Yeghern during World War I.

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. 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.

The violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Ottomans relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the state’s measure of "truth." To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman state utilized various forms of censorship – banning newspapers from abroad, forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence 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.

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 about 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 highly 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.

The efforts of the survivors of the Sasun massacre, and their allies in the ABCFM, to disseminate narratives of state violence were countered by the Ottoman state as it sought to maintain a monopolization of legitimate narrative. In both cases, the story of Sasun played on the global stage. Telegraph wires carried the story of Sasun, and the apologetics of the Ottoman government, to readers around the world. Like all technologies, the telegraph was a Janus-faced tool. It helped actors disseminate information, but it also helped them control it. In the Ottoman Empire, the telegraph allowed the state to centralize information. Never before had the Ottoman state possessed such control over information flows. Yet, the telegraph also disseminated narratives that largely circumvented Ottoman censors. These narratives, collected by missionaries, consuls, and journalists, contributed to protests in the United States and Great Britain. As more stories of massacres appeared in newspapers abroad, the Ottoman state clamped down to maintain its desired public image.

The interplay between local and global history is where the trials of empire are held. 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 these populations created "Armenian" and "Kurdish" questions that have occupied 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" intensified in a struggle in the Muş highlands between Armenian peasants and their warlord in the late 1880s. As elsewhere in the mountainous regions of the empire, the Ottomans backed local nobles who expressed loyalty. In the plain of Muş, 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 was 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.

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 of 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 the 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 presses, with calls for political reform and an impartial investigation of what had taken place.