Bedross Der Matossian’s Shattered Dreams of Revolution is a broad examination of the meanings of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution as seen by Ottoman Armenians, Jews, and Arabs in the immediate aftermath of that revolution. Unlike other investigations of politics in the revolutionary era, Der Matossian’s narrative relegates the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) to a secondary position in favor of a focus on (mostly) journalists, intellectuals, and political elites within these “nondominant groups”—the author’s collective appellation for these three communities. With the Armenian, Jewish, and Arab voices at its center, Der Matossian’s analysis endeavors to explain the evaporation of the revolution’s promise of liberty, brotherhood, and equality into “a dramatic rise in ethnic tensions and pessimism among the nondominant groups” (p. 5). The temporal focus of the book is narrow, bookended by the reinstatement of the Ottoman Constitution in July 1908 and the failed counterrevolution of April 1909. Regardless, this is, as the author concedes, a “macrohistorical” study “that includes different regions of the empire, ranging from central to peripheral areas” (p. 5). This approach is aided by Der Matossian’s magisterial linguistic abilities—he cites a broad array of sources in Ottoman, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, German, French, and English—which provide him with a unique ability to discuss and compare a number of responses to the revolution among the empire’s various ethno-religious communities.
Over the course of the book’s six chapters, Der Matossian reveals how competing interpretations of the revolution’s significance arose not only within the nondominant groups, but also between these communities and the increasingly powerful CUP-affiliated segments of the post-revolutionary Ottoman government. These competing interpretations revealed the contradictions that existed between the revolution’s lofty promises and the challenging political realities that the empire and its population faced. According to Der Matossian, these tensions were instrumental in undermining and eventually destroying the good will and optimism of the revolution’s early days.
The first chapter of the book vividly captures the excitement that initially surrounded the revolution and the reinstatement of the constitution. Armenians, Jews, and Arabs welcomed the end of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s despotic rule and looked forward to the dawn of a new era governed by the revolutionary slogans of justice, equality, and fraternity. However, even these early, hopeful outpourings of euphoria revealed a tension that would come to plague the post-revolutionary period. The nondominant groups, while echoing calls for a strengthened sense of Ottoman unity and identity that crossed ethno-religious boundaries, simultaneously advocated for the retention of certain pre-existing communal privileges as well as the preservation of their group identities.
In line with this, in Chapter 3 we discover that these communities were hardly uniform in their responses to the revolution and their views of its significance for the empire’s future. Armenian newspapers and political organizations reflected deep-seated disagreements about how to resolve the problems facing their co-religionists in the eastern provinces of Anatolia, as well as the extent to which they should cooperate with the CUP. Jews, increasingly split between the growing European settler population in Palestine and the more rooted populations in such traditional centers of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire as Salonika and Istanbul, grew more and more divided in terms of their support for or opposition to Zionism. And even among Zionists, there were deep disagreements about the extent to which the revolution offered an opportunity for or an obstacle against achieving Jewish political autonomy in Palestine. At the same time, Armenians and Jews both saw the revolution as an opportunity to take on entrenched elites within their own communities, especially those whose power derived from the millet system or who were otherwise seen as beneficiaries of the ancien régime. Similarly, for many Arab intellectuals and journalists, the revolution was as much, if not more, about challenging the power of local landed elites and the ulema as it was about ending the despotic rule of Abdülhamid II. Yet Arabs were also very divided in their responses to the revolution’s aftermath. For example, in Damascus, those seeking to challenge the power of entrenched elites allied themselves closely with the CUP, viewing it as the only institution with sufficient muscle to take on these local notables. In contrast, many on Mount Lebanon feared the revolution could disrupt the region’s tenuous sectarian political balance, and thus advocated maintaining the pre-revolution status quo there.
Despite these differences both within and between these three groups, Der Matossian argues, in Chapters 2 and 4, that many within the empire’s various nondominant groups had a common vision for the post-revolutionary period; namely, the creation of a more decentralized system of governance that would allow for greater political and cultural rights and privileges for the empire’s various ethnic and religious communities. As the CUP increasingly consolidated power—especially following the October 1908 election, in which it won significant support from the empire’s Turkish- and Arabic-speaking populations—such a vision clashed with the Unionists’ desire to privilege allegiance to the state, and, as Der Matossian suggests in the book’s conclusion, increasingly to the Turkish identity of the empire, as both came to be considered central benchmarks of Ottomanism.
The increasing dominance of the CUP’s vision for the empire’s future is on clear display in Chapter 5, which centers on major parliamentary debates following the 1908 elections. While the small Armenian bloc in the Ottoman parliament was largely successful in advocating for Armenian interests, the other nondominant groups were either unable to challenge or uninterested in challenging the CUP’s growing political clout. Furthermore, as Der Matossian argues, the parliamentary debates of 1908 and early 1909 also revealed what would, in subsequent years, become hallmarks of CUP rule: the marginalization and restriction of opposition voices at the expense of sincere negotiation and dialogue. In the end, the tension between calls for a greater devolution of power to nondominant communities and a desire for greater unity under the central state became a contributing factor to the violence of the counterrevolution and the massacres of Armenians in Adana that followed. For Der Matossian, this latter event, which anchors Chapter 6 of the book, put an end to the high hopes nondominant groups had for the revolution and its aftermath, and ensured the triumph of the CUP’s interpretation of the revolution’s importance for the empire’s future.
Der Matossian’s work is an important and in many ways path-breaking contribution that moves our understanding of the political history of the non-Muslim and non-Turkish speaking populations of the Ottoman Empire forward beyond the tried and tired tropes of the rise of separatist nationalisms and the meddling of the Great Powers. For a variety of reasons, not least of which is the tendency of nationalist historiographies to ignore the experiences of other groups, historians have either read the experiences of the Ottoman Empire’s nondominant groups in isolation, or have ignored them altogether. In the span of less than three hundred pages, Der Matossian provides an expansive snapshot of the multiplicity of actors and of the interplay of competing interests that sometimes—but by no means always—crossed over lines of religion and ethnicity to shape politics in the empire’s waning years. Such complexity could only be captured by a researcher with a unique and enviable linguistic and methodological toolset, one which Der Matossian not only has, but has put to very good use here.
There are, however, limitations to Der Matossian’s macrohistorical approach. Armenians, Jews, and Arabs together comprised a significant percentage of the empire’s population and could be found throughout its vast territory, and as such the intellectuals, politicians, and journalists that populate Der Matossian’s narrative do not constitute a representative sample of the broader communities of which they were a part. As a result, a certain degree of historical specificity is lost in Der Matossian’s broad comparison. For example, one wonders how Der Matossian’s characterization of Armenian responses to the revolution would have changed had he focused on such sources as the petitions, memoirs, village histories, and newspapers produced by Armenians in the eastern provinces of the empire rather than on the works and deeds of the (largely) Istanbul-based elites. Furthermore, while the comparison of Ottoman Armenians and Jews seems logical given that both groups comprised a rather small percentage of the Ottoman population, were similarly geographically dispersed, and had to contend with the legacy of the millet structure, Arabs did not historically constitute a “community” in quite the same way, and therefore their inclusion in the study works less well. We are left, then, with the voices of intellectuals in Damascus and Beirut, whose experiences and views were likely much different than those of their Arabic-speaking brethren in Baghdad, Basra, or Benghazi, who receive little to no mention in the book.
That said, these limitations hardly undermine the work’s overall significance. In fact, such lacunae are an inevitable byproduct of the magnitude and scope of this work, and indeed seem almost intentional—an invitation for scholars to delve more deeply into how the nondominant communities, whether individually or together, shaped the trajectory of Ottoman history in the empire’s final decades. Finally, with the recent centenaries of both World War I and the Armenian genocide—occasions that have served as stark reminders of the Ottoman Empire’s brutal end—this book reminds us that for a fleeting moment less than ten years before the events of 1915, Ottomans from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds did imagine and strive for a more just and equitable future. While Der Matossian clearly underscores the tragedy—and perhaps the inevitability—of the revolution’s failed promise, he nevertheless invites us to ponder what might have been had the empire and its constituent populations taken an alternative path in the months following July 1908.
