A landmark history that redefines our understanding of the Armenian Genocide and the causes of ethnic violence

During the First World War, the Ottoman Turks carried out the systematic destruction of the Armenians and their culture, with around one million people killed through starvation, death marches, and mob violence. Empire of Violence goes beyond conventional accounts of the Armenian Genocide as a single event, reconceptualizing it as a decades-long process within a broader pattern of anti-Christian violence against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in the late Ottoman Empire.

Drawing on newly uncovered sources, Taner Akçam traces the interconnectedness of earlier episodes of violence with the genocide carried out during the war, locating this continuity not in fixed actors or enduring identities but in a structural dynamic shaped by the long crisis of imperial reform, in which different agents emerge, recede, and replace one another over time. From massacres in the 1890s to the Adana massacre of 1909, in which Ottoman Muslims killed and tortured thousands of Armenians, he shows how radicalization and annihilation practices at the peripheries of empire culminated in centrally coordinated decisions. Yet the genocidal process was not purely top-down. While central directives were crucial, mass participation by ordinary Muslims—including Turks, Kurds, and Circassians—played a decisive role. Akçam demonstrates how the weakness of the Ottoman state and the accumulated experience of the nineteenth century produced a political culture that normalized large-scale violence, and in doing so expands the conceptual boundaries of genocide studies more broadly.

By examining the culture of denial surrounding this tragedy, Empire of Violence also offers new perspectives on the political realities of contemporary Turkey while reframing critical debates about memory, justice, and recognition in the aftermath of genocide.