The Markaz Review:

Sean Casey

In the early twentieth century, the province of Adana was an economically vibrant and culturally diverse province of the Ottoman Empire on the Mediterranean coast, center of cotton production and home to populations of Muslims and Christians — Turks and Kurds, Armenians and Greeks. Over the course of two weeks in April 1909, massacres in Adana killed over 20,000 Armenians. What became known as the Adana massacres were covered at the time in the international press, but have since been absent from many of the period’s histories..

In The Horrors of Adana, historian Bedross Der Matossian provides a sustained examination of these momentous weeks in a deeply researched work of microhistory. Following historian Jacques Semelin’s contention that massacres resist the explanatory power of a single discipline, Der Matossian takes a multidisciplinary approach, infusing history with psychology and anthropology to portray both events and the emotional disposition of the events’ actors. While the historical focus of The Horrors of Adana is narrow, Der Matossian’s work nonetheless achieves a remarkable breadth, marshalling an international and multilingual array of primary sources to limn the atrocities from the vantages of Ottoman and Armenian histories as well as international journalism. His contention, throughout, is that violence does not inhere in a particular culture or religion; rather, in what becomes the book’s refrain, “given the appropriate conditions and political stresses, ordinary men can turn into brutal murderers.” 

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