Talin Suciyan’s new book works from a rich source base that includes Ottoman state documents, Armenian memoirs, newspapers, and largely unexplored documents from the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate, which are now housed in the Nubar Library in Paris. True to its title, Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces, the book argues that the Tanzimat era (1839–76) of reform, opposite the promises of the state, brought about insecurity, dishonor, and inequality for provincial Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Suciyan concludes that the Tanzimat laid the ground for the eventual annihilation of Armenians from Ottoman lands in 1915. While her argument about the Tanzimat stands in opposition to mainstream positive perceptions of this historical era in contemporary Turkey, it largely disregards the last two decades of Ottoman historiography that approached the Tanzimat from a bottom-up and critical lens.
The book is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter Suciyan maps out...
