| Description |
It is a common assumption in much of the scholarship on Eastern Anatolia that groups in the region, both today and throughout the past, primarily defined and distinguished themselves in terms of their ethnicity and religious affiliations and that such distinctions were the primary causes of tension and conflict throughout history. However, an in-depth investigation of government documents, firsthand accounts, memoirs, interviews, court records, official and private investigations, and travelogues written in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Russian, French, German, and English reveals that tensions in Eastern Anatolia between 1800 and 1878 ran along a number of different lines besides religion and ethnicity and that groups did not appear to even imagine a conflict along such lines until the Great Powers became more involved in Ottoman politics. This study traces the major tensions and conflicts in Eastern Anatolia between 1800 and 1878 and seeks to understand what factors escalated and mitigated these. It contributes the growing body of literature that shows how groups who experienced large-scale violent ethnic and religious conflicts at different periods in history managed to coexist even amid tension before said conflicts. |
