New Books In Genocide Studies

As a graduate student, I spent quite a bit of time explaining to people how we needed to pay much more attention to the history of World War One in the East.  What I didn’t realize is that we needed to see the war as it appeared from Istanbul just as much or more as we needed to see it from Vienna, Warsaw or Budapest. Hans-Lukas Kieser has played a critical role in beginning to flesh out our understanding of the war from an Ottoman perspective. His new political biography Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2018) greatly expands our sense of Talaat’s world view and his effort to his vision into place. Kieser highlights the evolution in Talaat’s imagined future in the period before the war, his attempt to use violence to achieve this vision, and the legacy this left for Turkish politics and ideas. Naturally, the Armenian genocide forms a core part of Kieser’s book. But Kieser sets this genocide into context, explaining the connection