This collection of a dozen articles by leading scholars of the late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg empires is the result of a culling of thirty papers delivered at the Lepsiushaus Potsdam and the University of Potsdam in 2016. It circles the wagons around current concepts of the hybrid term genocide, as first coined by the Polish writer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 with reference to the German atrocities in the east during the Second World War. Lemkin's term was enshrined in Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention four years later as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Sadly, the Article did not define perpetrators of genocide. Thus, we are left with the problem of defining genocide and calling out its practitioners. The field is wide open. In November 1641, for example, a group of Irishmen killed 100 English Protestants in what came to be called the Portadown Massacre. At about the same time Zhang Xianzhong's army murdered perhaps 1 million people in the Sichuan Massacre. Both are listed as genocide. In our time, the Canadian prime minister called the brutal murders of undisclosed numbers of First Nations, Inuit and Metis, mostly women and girls, a case of “race-based genocide” by undisclosed perpetrators. At the same time, he declined to apply the term for the Xi Jinping's regime savage oppression of Xinjiang's Muslim Uyghurs, suggesting that the word genocide in this case was “extremely loaded.” All the i's first had to be dotted and all the t's crossed, he argued before a genocidal “determination” could be made. The book under review is a step in the long and tortuous road of helping people such as Justin Trudeau reach that “determination.”

The anthology features an introduction by editor Christin Pschichholz, followed by three introductory chapters by Ronald G. Suny, Mark Levene, and Arno Bath on the transnational demographic policies of the three European empires under consideration. The central argument in each is that pre-1914 ethnic homogenization and the escalation of ethnic violence paved the way for wartime radicalization. Eight geographically organized chapters follow. Three deal with Turkey and the Armenian massacres. Hans-Lukas Kieser argues that WWI did, in fact, constitute a caesura in the field of ethnic engineering, but unsurprisingly makes the point that this practice dates back to 1912 when the Young Turks “inaugurated the Europe of dictators, genocide, and demographic engineering” (65). Hilmar Kaiser and Oktay Özel revise widely accepted views of the Armenian Genocide as a single, formal government policy, and instead argue that it was more the “product of improvisation” (110) and evolution. What began as the removal of a perceived internal fifth column under the Special Organization of the Committee of Union and Progress, by 1916 had become the final destruction by regular forces, bandits, criminals, and gendarmes of some 800,000 Armenians.

Heiko Brendel investigates the population policies of the Prince-Bishopric, the Principality, and the Kingdom of Montenegro, 1916–18. These policies basically amounted to repression, expulsion, and the killing of Muslims and Albanians by the Orthodox Serbo-Croatian majority. Ironically, the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Montenegro reversed this pattern and under a Habsburg military governate-general ushered in a period of “public order and safety.” The same could not be said of either the Habsburg or the Romanov population policies in Galicia. Serhiy Cholly uses both official records and unofficial information to describe how both Russia and Austria-Hungary used policies of population displacement for the purpose of state security—a “decisive and novel military technique in the First World War” (160). Konrad Zielínski uses the well-worn stereotype of “Judeo Communism” to analyze the rapidly deteriorating Polish-Jewish relationship before, during, and after WWI. In the final chapter, Peter Holquist traces the Soviet policy of “De-cossackization” during the early phase of the Russian Civil War. He argues that it took a combination of implosion of empire, revolutionary violence, and the violence of civil wars to set the stage for a policy that evolved from extermination of the borderlands people (as many as 10,000 Don Cossacks) to one of populations management not for nationalist or ethnic reasons but for specific socio-economic goals. In this, the Communist Party, much like the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress, operated as a centrist agency able to “override routine administrative and political counter-currents and resistance” (195).

The contributions vary in approach. Some relied almost exclusively on secondary works while others featured deep archival research. All used the vocabulary of the social sciences—mainly from the disciplines of psychology, political science, and sociology. None are easy reading. A more careful scrutiny of some of the chapters would have corrected innumerable grammatical and stylistic mistakes. A summary chapter on the major arguments and findings of the dozen contributions would have been most helpful. And while every generation has not only the right but also the duty to reassess past interpretations of critical events, the classics of a generation gone by should not be totally ignored. Thus, for the Ottoman essays, the pioneering work of Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914–18 (1968), which first laid out clearly the reports of the Armenian massacres by German consuls in the Ottoman provinces, should have been cited. The Habsburg way of war in general has been well established by Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (1993); while the specific cases of ethnic violence in Galicia were thoroughly documented by Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (2014).

Finally, the question raised in the title requires comment: was WWI really a caesura, a break, a respite, a discontinuation, a standstill of the ethnic violence and ethnic homogenization of the prewar eras in the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov lands? For the social-science authors of this volume, the answer is a loud “Yes.” For more traditional historians it is an equally loud “No.” If one looks at the rest of the twentieth century, WWI seems more a jumping-off stage than a caesura. Radicalized violence and ethnic cleansing—at times generously called demographic engineering—hardly stopped in 1918. It would break the limits of this review to attempt a compilation of even the most egregious demographic crimes of the century after the end of the WWI “caesura.”