In July 1908, a euphoric hopefulness spread across the Ottoman Empire as news traveled of the constitutional revolution that had just restored the first Ottoman constitution of 1876. While there did exist certain groups of notables who feared that this event would pull from under them the rug of privilege they had enjoyed under Abdülhamid II, the joy expressed across the empire was genuine and public, and brought Ottomans of every ethnic and religious group into the streets to celebrate together. Within a year, however, the hopes and dreams of many were “shattered,” as Bedross Der Matossian shows. The revolutionary process carried with it the seeds of its own demise; it simply could not sustain its own internal contradictions. The revolution was about freedom, most agreed, but how was that freedom to be defined, and by whom? Competing and conflicting visions of community and nation could not be reconciled, particularly when faced with war, namely the Balkan Wars and World War I (although Der Matossian's study mostly focuses on 1908–1909). In the end, it was not only optimism that was shattered, but the entire Ottoman Armenian community, and the empire itself.

Der Matossian's Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire, stands out among the plethora of volumes on the events surrounding the Young Turk Revolution, as it looks at the revolution through the lenses of three nondominant groups in the empire—Armenians, Jews, and Arabs. Drawing upon a rich body of sources in at least five languages (Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ladino), the author provides the reader with a much richer understanding of the dynamics that brought about the revolution of 1908, as well as the postrevolutionary, counterrevolutionary, and subsequent dynamics than many other studies that have taken the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as their primary lens of analysis. The result is a complex picture of the diverse goals of different groups that both united them in their revolutionary mission as well as pulled them apart in the aftermath. Unlike many other studies that focus on nondominant groups that tell us much about life in their own communities but not a lot about the dynamics of the larger empire, Der Matossian's work sheds light on both. Indeed, his book stands to affirm a recent trend in Ottoman history that demonstrates how much more nuanced views of state-society dynamics can be appreciated when we shift our focus from the center to the margins, to the “periphery,” to the nondominant groups, and to the less focused upon regions of the empire.

Cracks appeared from the beginning. Even in the midst of celebratory demonstrations, gatherings, and parades, it was not only the CUP who sought to manage these manifestations of public elation and educate the public on what their proper understanding of the revolution (and its proclaimed goals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and nation) should be, but so did the nondominant groups in their own presses. By participating in these demonstrations, nondominant groups engaged in a performance of loyalty to the new regime and to the empire, but particularly for non-Muslim groups, the fragility of the foundation upon which their newly proclaimed equality rested caused them to use their presses to warn members of their own community about any drift from this loyalty. And while each community showed its commitment to the revolution in its press and in public speeches, the very fact that they used different languages “fractured understanding and contradicted the main principle of the Revolution, which was the creation of unity,” as Der Matossian puts it. “The collective aim of these [multilingual] speeches was a paradoxical unity based in diversity (p. 45),” but ultimately the revolution could not sustain this diversity.

Recent works of Ottoman history have increasingly turned to highlighting the diversity within Ottoman groups, and Der Matossian's book sits well with this trend. Far from being monolithic, Armenians, Jews, and Arabs had their own internal struggles. For Arab Muslims, the revolution had undermined the support that the palace had given to certain notables; as a result, there was a range of responses to the revolution in Arab communities in the empire. As Michelle Campos has also demonstrated elsewhere, some wholeheartedly supported the revolution, while others did not, and some jumped on the CUP bandwagon merely as a cynical act of self-preservation. Perhaps the deepest impact that constitutionalism had among the empire's Armenian and Jewish communities, though, was their experience of microrevolutions that redefined relationships within these groups. Both communities overturned their own ancien régimes: Armenians resuscitated their constitution and elevated the authority of the Armenian National Constitution above that of the Armenian patriarch. Jews also experienced a microrevolution within their own community, but Jewish progressives continued to find themselves at odds with more conservative notables who supported their own (Jewish) ancien régime. Adding to this was the expansion of the Zionist movement, which was embraced by only some of the empire's Jews.

In his examination of the phase prior to the elections, Der Matossian highlights the complex and intensive negotiations that unfolded between and within different ethnic communities. And people did not only back candidates from their own groups. The Dashnaks in Van, for example, not only won the support of most Armenians in the first-stage election, but also of Assyrian and Kurdish farmers, who embraced Dashnak promises to return property they had lost during the Hamidian period. Indeed, while there was much diversity within the Armenian community, and while non-Armenians supported the Dashnak platform, all of the Armenian members of Parliament formed a cohesive bloc once elected on the issues most pressing to Armenians, the so-called agrarian issue being key among them. Armenians had faced dispossession of their lands in eastern Anatolia at the hands of Kurdish tribes who had usurped their properties, and their elected officials worked to have them restored.

Once Parliament was in session, the fissures in the revolution grew deeper. The different ethnic groups faced a dilemma—how were they to protect and advance the rights and interests of their own communities while demonstrating their loyalty to the empire? How could they defend their program of decentralization (something that united Arabs, Armenians, and some Jews alike) while the CUP saw constitutional assembly as a way for them to march forward with their centralization program in hopes of maintaining the empire's territorial integrity? Der Matossian shows the process through which these conflicting aims caused the breakdown of many communities' hopes for the revolution. As he writes, “Some of the nondominant groups had sincerely believed that Parliament ultimately would allow them to find a remedy for the maladies that inflicted the empire in general and their communities in particular. They would soon realize that their weak position in Parliament and the dominance of the CUP made such attempts futile” (p. 124). Their dreams of representative government evaporated as democracy gave way to a one-party dictatorship.

While many communities shared in dismay at the counterrevolution of 1909 and the clearer writing on the wall that their hopes for democracy and justice were increasingly at odds with the CUP agenda, it was the Armenian community and their Parliamentary representatives in particular whose frustrations tell us much about what led not only to the shattering of these aspirations, but to the genocidal destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community. Armenian members of Parliament persisted in bringing attention to the plight of Armenians in the eastern provinces. The unwillingness of the CUP and Parliament to rectify this situation, combined with the Adana massacres of 1909, led to the rise of European intervention in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire and to their expanded commitment to Armenian reform projects, which the CUP considered to be an intolerable affront to its authority and to the territorial integrity of the empire.

Few works on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 devote adequate attention to the massacres of Armenians that shook the Adana province in 1909. Der Matossian's analysis of these events is another distinguishing feature of his book. Why Adana? Der Matossian explains that its unique economic and agricultural centrality to Anatolia and its ethnic complexity were major factors in the violence that erupted in April 1909. What happened in Adana was a clear demonstration of how tenuous the expressions of brotherly love had been at the beginning of the revolution. All it took was rumor-mongering by Ihsan Fikri, a CUP leader in Adana, that provoked many Muslims into believing that the Armenians had instigated a coup in order to establish their own Kingdom of Cilicia. In his paper, which was distributed free of charge to thousands, this CUP leader argued that Armenians were stockpiling weapons and had betrayed the revolution. Turks in the town were convinced that Armenians had attacked their own community in order to attract foreign intervention, and rumors about Armenian atrocities against Muslims abounded. Der Matossian finds that the level of destruction indicates that these attacks may have been premeditated. An article in Droshak, an Armenian gazette, was particularly prescient: It warned “the CUP that if it turned the constitution into a party dictatorship and declared millet-i hâkime (the ruling nation), the people of the empire would witness internal agitation, external intervention, and the dismemberment of the empire” (p. 171). Der Matossian's chapter on Adana is particularly relevant to students of mass violence in that it reminds us of the importance of rumor and fear in the calculation that causes individuals and groups to treat their neighbors with suspicion, and to ultimately commit acts of violence against them when propaganda stirs groups to perceive their neighbors as “threats,” particularly to the “nation.”

While Der Matossian's study is about Armenians, Jews, and Arabs, it is admittedly much more focused on the Armenian part of the story. This may be a flaw in the book (broad as the author's source base might be); however, if we consider the very prescient quote from Droshak (above), it may make some sense that the author drifted more towards the Armenian weight in recounting the story of the Young Turk Revolution from another angle. It is, after all, not simply the attention given to Armenians in Shattered Dreams of Revolution that helps us to understand the 1908 revolution and its path to the end of the empire; rather, it is the actual connection of foreign intervention to Armenians more than any other group in the empire (whether most Armenians wanted this or not) that contributed to the end of the empire, and to a larger process (perhaps not treated in full by this author) of Turkish nationalism that lasted long beyond the period under discussion.

Shattered Dreams of Revolution will be welcome not only among historians of the late-Ottoman Empire, particularly those interested in nondominant groups, but also of historians of other revolutions. There are a few images and maps in this work, but no index for them. While the author provides extensive footnotes, a bibliography would have been most helpful.