Ottoman Empire §

Western Armenian homeland and genocidal state

The Ottoman Empire is central to the atlas because most Armenians before 1915 lived not in the eastern South Caucasus but in Ottoman Anatolia and Constantinople. Cities and regions such as Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Kars, Trabzon and Adana belonged to the western Armenian world, alongside Kurdish, Turkish, Greek, Assyrian and other communities.

The late Ottoman reform question turned Armenian communal rights into an international diplomatic issue. The Treaty of San Stefano and Treaty of Berlin promised reforms for Armenian-populated provinces but left enforcement weak. Abdul Hamid II's regime responded to Armenian mobilisation and imperial pressure with repression, culminating in the Hamidian massacres. The Committee of Union and Progress then converted wartime paranoia, nationalism and state capacity into the Tehcir deportation programme and the Armenian Genocide.

The empire's collapse also shaped the eastern South Caucasus. Ottoman armies and allied Azerbaijani forces entered Baku in 1918, and Ottoman defeat opened the brief possibility of Wilsonian Armenia under Sevres. That possibility was undone by Turkish nationalist victory and the Treaty of Lausanne. The Ottoman Empire is therefore not simply "Turkey before Turkey." It is the state whose destruction of its Armenian citizens created the diaspora, the recognition struggle, and the moral vocabulary through which later Armenian insecurity in Karabakh has often been interpreted. editorial