Struggling for a Constitutional Regime: Armenian-Young Turk Relations in the Era of Abdulhamid II, 1895-1909
Scholars have written extensively on Armenian revolutionary movements, but relations between Armenian political organizations and the Young Turks have received only tangential treatment, largely because the sources were inaccessible. Moumdjian sets out to document the actual relationships between Armenian leaders, parties and revolutionary movements and their Ottoman counterparts, and to explain why those collaborations occurred and why they failed. He opens with the long-promised post-1878 reforms for Armenian inhabitants of the empire and Abdulhamid II's manipulations to dilute them, including the palace's use of the Kurdish Hamidiye Regiments to sabotage reform. He engages critically with Turkish-perspective studies of the Young Turks, arguing they skirt the Armenian contributions that helped bring the Young Turks to power.