Armenian "Massacre"

Having taken a twentieth-century genocide course last spring, the portion of Cooper and Burbank’s chapter that discussed Armenia intrigued me. The first mention of the Turkish people comes on page 379: “The Ottoman military, claiming that Armenians…were conspiring with the enemy, engineered a mass deportation from the combat zone, under atrocious conditions.”

In my previous class, we discussed the “atrocious conditions.” Thousands of Armenians were moved as part of a “resettlement program,” which was essentially deportation, and commonly referred to as death marches. The people were often forced to walk to their destination—many dying along the way, and many others slaughtered by bands of killers. Although there is some controversy over whether the Armenian situation can be labeled “genocide,” it typically is labeled as such. The Turkish government may not recognize it as genocide, but online searches and museums generally disagree. Seeing the emotionless language of authors Cooper and Burbank, in Empires in World History, was a little disheartening.

Fortunately, later in the chapter (page 385), the authors further highlight the “devastation” of the region and highlight the many deaths of not only the Armenians, but the Muslims and Greeks as well—something I did not remember studying in my genocide class. And although I understand that the Armenian portion of the chapter should not be extensive, I wonder why Cooper and Burbank chose to label the Armenian situation as “massacres.”

Still, this aspect is only one example of the devastations during World War I. The question of the ‘new world’ and “whether it was a world after empire or a world with new forms of empire” does not seem to be addressed as much in chapter twelve. Cooper and Burbank do, however, spend a great deal of time on the history of World War I; what took place, the conflicts between empires, and the present tensions. Here is where situations like the Armenian genocide are mentioned.

So, since much of the chapter was factual, historical information, I would like to pose a similar question to the one mentioned by Cooper and Burbank. After World War I, was the world one after empire, or simply a world with new forms of empire?