I met Harry Harootunian only once, for a few hours, when he took me on a tour of the University of Chicago campus to convince me to move from the history department of the University of Michigan to the political science department of the university in which he had made his career. He must have been persuasive, for the following fall I started teaching at Chicago, just as he decamped for NYU. We shared a love of history and Michigan, where Harootunian had grown up; the university in Ann Arbor from which he received his doctoral degree and to which I would return eleven years later; and the legacy from our parents: both of us were Armenians born in America. Beginning this review biographically makes sense because his reflections on the Armenian Genocide and its effects are both personal and scholarly and coincide with my years of work on the tragedy of 1915, which arose from the mixed curiosity of an historian and a grandson of two immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, who had fled from earlier massacres at the hands of “the Turk.”

Harootunian is a very distinguished historian of Japan and has a deep interest in Marxism (something else we share). He turned to this life writing from an initial “voluntary indifference to anything related to Armenian life,” and I remember once being asked by an important Armenian writer, “Why do you look down on Armenians?” Harootunian explains his ambivalence about his ancestry as the effects of “the force of the Americanizing process to which we were subjected in the schools and in daily life, the effort to make us all look like Americans or some version of WASP American but not quite” (pp. 2–3). My father had reported his own experience of disidentification in unwelcoming America, how in the 1920s he tried to defend himself when called an “Orie” (Oriental) he used one of the few English words he knew, “box,” when in fact he did not know how to box. It did not end well.

Harootunian deliberately decided not to recycle the history of the Armenian Genocide but instead to unearth archaeologically what his immigrant parents “sought to repress through silence [but which] probably refused to go away” (p. 5). That search into a void without documents and a meager archive of photographs was a construction rather than a reconstruction of their traumatic experiences and simultaneously a search for himself and his two sisters, Sena and Victoria, to whom he dedicates the book. He juxtaposes two modes of cognition, history versus experience and memory, the first dealing with narrative and events, the other with everydayness and uneventfulness. A lasting heritage of genocide was the elimination of the everyday ordinary ties of family life and the loss of affect and warmth that Harootunian sees in his own parenting. The “affective division of labor” among family and relatives was absent; closeness with aunts, uncles, and cousins, so much a part of village life, was unavailable in Depression-era Detroit where his parents ended up and their son was raised. Genocide began the process of removal and alienation from others. Capitalism, with its competitive, instrumental utilization of people, along with American assimilation, with its erasure of “everybody’s past” and its orientation “to a permanent present” dedicated to endless progress, completed it (p. 82). Blood might be thicker than water but not when your cousin cheats you in a business deal.

An ungenerous way to read this book would be as the author’s personal therapy, and there certainly is much rummaging around in an empty trunk of memory searching for the sources of his own affective profile. But the careful and sensitive handling of the little evidence he finds repeatedly unravels layered insights into a past that can only be surmised and suggested through imagination. “This loss or absence of affection among survivors of genocide must be calculated as one of its greatest consequences, resembling an emotional emptying out and, perhaps, the principal condition of surviving its inhuman excess that demands unyielding silence. For those, like us, who came after, this inheritance became an inexpressible rage” (p. 56). His parents deployed strategic silencing to deal with grief, as well as – I would add – an acquired courage.

His mother Vehanush had left village life, abandoned by her mother in a German Protestant mission school in Maraş, and once she emigrated to the United States she evidenced no interest in returning to Armenia and the past. His father, Ohannes, born in a village near Harput (present-day Elazig, Turkey), moved to America before World War I and the Genocide and returned as a fighter for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to his abandoned village only to find absence: “Even the fruit trees had died.” A few years ago, as a Kurdish friend drove me and my daughter along the shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, he pointed out an empty field and mourned that once there had been orchards there but now that his own people, Kurds, had taken over there was emptiness. The effects of genocide had scarred victims and perpetrators.

Harootunian brilliantly uses Marx’s idea of the primitive and ongoing accumulation of capital as his key explanation of genocide. Making a nation-state and capital accumulation work together, “neither could exist without the other just as in time the nation came to serve as the placeholder for capital and capitalism, which in turn was seen as the basis of the nation’s ‘natural political economy’” (p. 94). He rejects as a sufficient explanation organic nationalism, which he sees as “merely the political means to achieve primitive accumulation and is not incompatible with the promotion of economic interests” (p. 104). In the Ottoman case, “Augmenting a process of capital accumulation necessitated the active dispossession and expropriations of the wealth of minority ethnicities and deprivation of their forms of production and subsistence” (p. 95). The exercise of coercion – mass murder, deportation, and forced assimilation by conversation to Islam – created the base for ethnic, religious, and social cohesion among Turks by the excision of Armenians, Assyrians, and eventually Greeks, who were “seen as pollutants and contaminants of the national body, corrupting their history and fouling the idea of racial purity and religious homogeneity” (p. 92). The Genocide was the foundational crime of the Turkish nation-state, the Kemalist republic founded some eight years later. Successive governments in Ankara and enabling “intellectuals” have not only averted their eyes but actively, cynically denied that a genocide ever occurred.

Where did they go, these Armenians? When I visited the Museum of the Erzurum Congress and Turkish War of National Independence a few years ago, I was intrigued as a historian how the story of 1915 would be told by our guide. I asked what this impressive building had been before it was the place of the Kemalist congress, even though I knew it had been the prominent Sanasaryan varzharan (Sanasarian College) where my grandfather, Grikor Suni, had taught music before World War I. The pleasant, accommodating guide unhesitatingly answered:

“Were there many Armenians in Erzurum at the time?” I went on. “Not many,” she replied, “one in four in the population.” Mentioning what happened to the Armenians before the Congress, her answer deployed a wonderful tense in Turkish that we do not have in English, the –miş tense. “Ama tabii o sırada Ermeniler gitmiş,” she said flatly, which can be translated as: “Before that time, the Armenians apparently left,” or “It is said, the Armenians left.”

In contrast to the Erzurum guide’s dismissal of an inconvenient historical past, a few days later in Bitlis I met some Kurds in a café and asked them if there had been Armenians in that beautiful, rundown, and yet unrestored city. One of the men answered, “Yes, there had been.” “What happened to them?” I enquired. “Soykırım,” he said with a sly smile. “Genocide.” That was our shared secret. We hi-fived, and I departed.

For Ohannes, escaping from Anatolia to America required an adjustment from the precapitalist “natural economy” of village, household, and kin to the possessive individualism of modern capitalism (p. 9). “If Anatolia promised certain death, the U.S. signified permanent uncertainty” (p. 84). Ironically the middle-class Armenians – merchants and independent professionals (pharmacists, photographers, dentists, architects, etc.) – along with Greeks and Jews had been the harbingers of capitalism in the Ottoman lands. “Eliminating minorities like the Armenians and Greeks in Anatolia by murder and mutilation,” writes Harootunian, “was actually unnecessary since the quest for capitalist modernization would have been more easily carried out with their involvement and cooperation” (p. 91). But in the program of the Young Turks, capital accumulation was accompanied by an ambition to Turkify the empire. Plunder accomplished both aims. As I wrote in my history of the Genocide, “while some Muslims benefited from the seizure of property and goods from Armenians – a most ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ – many others suffered from the removal of productive farmers and craftsmen, pharmacists, doctors, and merchants” (“They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015], pp. 316–17). I centered my analysis on the formation of a pathological “affective disposition” among the perpetrators, who constructed the Armenians as an existential threat to the survival of the empire and the sociocultural status of the Turks. Harootunian more forcefully focuses on the centrality of capital formation as cause: “The whole campaign for Turkification, as it was called, was a thinly veiled explanation for theft and murder, primitive accumulation, that would transform the Turks overnight into a bourgeoisie, the Committee of Union and Progress into a bourgeois rulership, and Armenians into the forgotten rubble of everyday Ani” (p. 145). Ani, of course, is the remains in northeastern Turkey of the once flourishing metropolis of a medieval Armenian kingdom.

In my work I have proposed that the aim of the Committee of Union and Progress was not to create a homogeneous ethnonational state like the Kemalist Republic but to preserve the empire. In their imaginary future Turks would be the Herrenvolk in a more Islamic and Turkic but still multiethnic empire, which would continue to extend into Arab lands and perhaps even into the Caucasus. Harootunian suggests intriguingly that “the modern Turkish state was probably a mistake or an accident of history. It originated in the extermination of the Armenians with the unintended or ‘collateral’ effect of dismembering the empire the murders and theft were supposed to rescue” (p. 102). Born in the killing fields, the Turkish state has presided through the last century over a process of modernizing from the top down, bereft of the Christian originators of its civil society and market economy, and by the use of violence and militarization of society as recurring patterns of governance. In the aftermath of wanton and unrestrained murder, Harootunian argues, “some form of criminality became the basis of modern Turkish leadership” (p. 145).

While the actual launching of the Genocide was determined by myriad longue durée factors (among them conflicts over land intensified by Muslim migration from the Caucasus and the Balkans; Armenian resistance movements; resentment toward the social advantages enjoyed by Christians; international support for reforms favoring Armenians; and the growth of Turkic nationalism with its racist overtones) as well as eventful contingencies (among them the seizure of power by the most radical Young Turks in January 1913; the imposition by the Great Powers of the 1914 reform program; and the outbreak of the Great War), the deep structuring of imperial rule allowed the shift from everyday oppression to pogrom or massacre to genocide to proceed with few obstacles. Ruling elites with few ties or little identification with their subjects have minimal tolerance for resistance or requests from subordinated populations when demands from below challenge the traditional order and elite property and privilege. In an authoritarian order, despotic rulers unchecked by institutional or traditional restraints use violence to keep those they rule in their place or if existentially threatened to eliminate them altogether. Not accidentally, as Harootunian and others have argued, such excessive coercion extending to genocide has characterized regimes from European overseas colonial powers to European empires – and, I would add, to present-day nationalizing states.

Genocide scholars argue over continuity and contingency in their assessment of the causes of the mass killings of 1915. Was there a plan for genocide before the war? Can it be denied that the series of massacres – 1894–6, 1909 – that preceded the Genocide were merely an incomplete prelude to what was to come? Or are the series of mass killings to be disaggregated – the Hamidian massacres of 1894–6 as state-sanctioned, perhaps even initiated, certainly encouraged, brutalities aimed at repression of a rebellious population (as seen by the state), exemplary repression to keep Armenians in their customary place; the 1909 pogrom in Adana as a relatively spontaneous local event of fearful Muslims expecting Armenians to threaten the prevailing order – both fundamentally different in cause and scale and degree of state organization from the Genocide of 1915? Are Turks and Kurds fundamentally killers of Armenians once stirred up by religious and secular concerns? Is the “Terrible Turk,” who is always spoken of in the singular, essentially a savage, a barbarian, the antithesis to European Christians, into whose fold Armenians are embraced? Harootunian appears to fall on the continuity side of the debate. “While the genocide’s program of dispossession – theft – and expropriation began earlier,” he tells us,

Nations promiscuously, deliberately forget the human horrors of their origins in a way that is similar to the erasure of the memory of the costs to ordinary people of the original accumulation of capital. Turks, Kurds, and Armenians are all in different ways defined by the Genocide, some as perpetrators, others as victims, still others as bystanders. Harootunian notes that given the fact of genocide, “there is an unwanted symmetry between the Armenian obsession to never forget and the Turkish endeavor to never remember” (p. 141). Armenians cannot forget that they were nearly obliterated. Think of Czech writer Milan Kundera’s words: “a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.” Turks, even though they are part of a powerful nation, are also remarkably fearful. They remember the Treaty of Sèvres of a century ago when they were to be eliminated by the Great Powers, Greeks, and Armenians, and how they fought a Kurtuluş Savaşı (War of Liberation, 1918–23) to preserve their last “homeland,” Anatolia. And on much of that land live the Kurds, who peer into a nationless future and lament to the Armenians that the Turks “had you for breakfast and will have us for dinner.” All three peoples see themselves as victims, and none recognize that they too have committed crimes against humanity, albeit at different scales. Reflecting on the ongoing tragedies that have fashioned these three peoples, Harootunian’s parents could not help but recall “what they and we had lost.” From my comfortable leather chair in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I concur with his judgment about those who sought life in a new land after death in the old country: “America is an environment that banished memory and, in its own way, was as harsh and relentlessly uncertain and insecure (in an economic and social sense) as what they had faced in Anatolia” (p. 153).