Tuesday, March 5, 2024, 6:00pm Pacific/9pm Eastern

In Person at UCLA, Bunche Hall, Room 10383, 315 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095. RSVP for In Person.

Live on Zoom. Registration is required and free.

FEATURED SPEAKER
TALIN SUCIYAN, Associate Professor of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

This lecture will discuss the pivotal Ottoman era of Tanzimat not just through use of the Ottoman Archives, but also a far less known but just as important source, that of the Armenian Patriarchate. It will argue how unlike Tanzimat’s reputation for reform and the promotion of rights, it actually set into motion a process from the first half of the 19th century which disenfranchised Armenians in every respect and set the foundation for the policies of governance throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

These archival sources demonstrate how the Armenians of the era faced abusive and oppressive taxation, forced labor, kidnapping of their women, migrant work, and forceful deportations, practices which were in fact fostered by Tanzimat’s policies. While they occurred throughout the empire, this talk will particularly focus on villages of the coastal Cilicia region, as it is one of this period’s least researched areas. It is through the smallest units, namely the lives of Armenian peasants in their villages during Tanzimat, that the true effects of Ottoman temporal and territorial policies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are brought into focus.

Talin Suciyan's Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces is available from the NAASR Bookstore.

ORGANIZER
Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA

CO-SPONSORS
Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
Ararat-Eskijian Museum