A HISTORY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE "They Can Live In the Desert but Nowhere Else:"

by Ronald Grigor Suny

In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny provides an unmatched account of the atrocities that were committed in 1915-16 As it lost territory during the war, the Ottoman Empire was becoming a more homogeneous Turkic-Muslim state, but it still contained large non-Muslim communities, including the Christian Armenians. The Young Turks believed that the Armenians were internal enemies secretly allied to Russia and plotting to win an independent state. Suny shows that the great majority of Armenians were in truth loyal subjects who wanted to remain in the empire. But the Young Turks, steeped in imperial anxiety and anti-Armenian bias, became convinced that the survival of the state depended on the elimination of the Armenians. Suny is the first to explore the psychological factors that helped lead to genocide.

Princeton University Press (2015)