Bedross Der Matossian.Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.

Abstract

As Bedross Der Matossian points out in the introduction to his book, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire, the 1908 Ottoman Constitutional Revolution stands out as “a factor that led to a decline of interethnic relations that culminated in the rise of ethnic nationalism,” where ethnic nationalism is understood as the flip side of its “civic” and presumably more benign counterpart. Conversely, he notes, the revolution has been romanticized as the “beginning of a positive project that was interrupted by WWI.” Der Matossian, by contrast, is interested in detangling the complex dynamics that shaped “the Weltanschauung of different ethno-religious groups in the postrevolutionary era” (2) and telling “the story of the shattered dreams of Arabs, Armenians, and Jews” during this period (3). Der Matossian is uniquely positioned to tell this story thanks to his ease with Ottoman sources, not only in Ottoman Turkish, but also in Armenian, Arabic, Ladino, and Hebrew. His monograph joins a growing list of works that “provincialize” the Ottoman center as a player in imperial politics by showcasing the ways in which various reform attempts originating from Istanbul were interpreted and implemented in the provinces. It also contributes to the recent literature that complicates our understanding of the empire’s constituent ethno-religious communities as internally diverse, fluidly defined entities in continuous contact with each other as well as the imperial center, as opposed to the static “millet” model that viewed them as monolithic, corporate bodies in isolation.