In the past decade, the study of the 1915 Armenian genocide has witnessed a proliferation that has significantly contributed to an expansion of our knowledge. Although it may be premature to compare this development to the post-Soviet historiographic boom, which settled several important bottlenecks in the relevant scholarship, the gains are not to be underestimated. These new studies rendered the Armenian genocide less ‘controversial’, depoliticised its study and established a rough consensus among scholars. Some colleagues continue to lead the debate into more sophistication, whereas others unearth new source materials and expand our knowledge base. All in all, on the eve of the centenary of the event, Armenian genocide studies are on the move.

Taner Akçam contributes to this trend with this edited translation of the 2008 Turkish original. The book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the Armenian genocide. Clearly structured, it consists of twelve thematic chapters ranging from the provenance of Ottoman sources to the wartime treatment of the Ottoman Greeks. Chapter v, ‘The initial phase of anti-Armenian policy’, and chapter vi, ‘Final steps in the decision-making process’, include detailed examinations of the Young Turks' decision-making processes in the period August 1914 – April 1915. These are followed by two long thematic chapters, one on forced cultural assimilation, and one on the spoliation of property. In essence, this book argues that Ottoman archival sources corroborate German, American and Armenian source bases on the Armenian genocide. It further concludes that these Ottoman materials conclusively prove that the Young Turk treatment of Ottoman Armenians was genocide, and that this was part and parcel of a broader policy of forcible demographic Turkification of the empire. The book's most captivating and long overdue discussion is the critical dismissal of specious arguments of Armenian revolts in the period between August 1914 and April 1915 (pp. 170–5). Akçam incontrovertibly demonstrates that despite widespread Young Turk fears of a united political revolt by Ottoman Armenians, governors across the board reported to Istanbul that Armenian attitudes to the Ottoman government were neither politically unified, nor uniformly antagonistic.

The book offers some captivating discussions. It provides further evidence for the ‘dual-track mechanism’ of the organisation of the genocide (pp. 193–202). Formal, written, telegraphic correspondence to the provinces was used for the deportations, whereas simultaneously trusted couriers were employed for issuing informal, oral, top-secret orders for massacres. This brilliantly demonstrates how a genocidal regime can attempt to cover its tracks. An idea put forward by the author is the 5–10 per cent principle. During the war, the Young Turk regime decreed that the Ottoman Armenians should not exceed the local population by these figures. Whenever and wherever the Armenian population did so, the regime used massacre to reduce the numbers. This is an innovative thesis, albeit not unproblematic as it smacks of monocausality. It reduces most of the continuous massacring to the 5–10 per cent principle and attributes it to the Young Turks' mathematical calculations (pp. xviii, 24, 61): these massacres happened because they had to happen.

Another criticism would be that the book, like so many Armenian genocide histories before, is moralistic and polemical instead of detached and analytical. The author explicitly and persistently polemicises against the official Turkish position and operates somewhat as its prosecutor. (Conversely, the voices of the victims are conspicuously absent, disappointing for a book on genocide.) Politicisation is clearest in the preface, an assault on official Turkish denial, and a call for activism: ‘The time has come … for the social sciences to contribute to the development of democracy and civic culture in Turkey’ (p. xxvii). General Clausewitz comes to mind: this book exemplifies how scholarship too can be ‘a continuation of politics by other means’. The four-page conclusion is unsatisfactory as the author does not return to the ‘crucial questions’ that he had asked in the preface (p. xvii). Instead, in the seventy-four-page final chapter, the author censures at length the Turkish state's official position on the genocide, moralising instead of analysing. Indeed, he identifies the ‘fundamental issue’ regarding the genocide as ‘moral’. The analytical is then fully abandoned for the normative: ‘This great injustice inflicted upon the Armenian people must be rectified’ (p. 450). Max Weber's ontological distinction between ‘politics as vocation’ and ‘science as vocation’ is now blurred and transgressed. Unfortunately, these political digressions do not offer a better understanding of the genocide, but distract from the book's intellectual potential.