Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire

BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Pp. 264. $ 24.95 cloth.As there are no dates in the title the reader is not able to know when the dreams of revolution were shattered. But before the author ends his book in 1909 with the discussion of the failed counterrevolution and the massacre in Adana in April, he "tells the story of the three religious communities or milletler-Arabs, Armenians, and Jews-whose dreams were shattered in 1909." Matossian prefers to use the concept of "ethnic" rather than "national" groups (p. 3) or religious communities (milletler) which is the proper designation for the period. Such communities were not described as "minorities" as the author suggests (p. 7); the term came into use in the Republic of Turkey only with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.After presenting his thesis on why dreams were shattered by April 1909, Matossian devotes the rest of his introduction to the nineteenth-century background to the constitutional revolution of 1908. The first chapter on "The Euphoria of the Revolution" is followed by chapters about the debate on the future of the Ottoman Empire, the revolution's "impact on the ethnic groups, the 1908 elections the debates in parliament, the counterrevolution and the "second revolution" and by a conclusion.After reading Shattered Dreams, I would describe Professor Matossian as belonging to the Gradgrind school of history, named for Charles Dickens's schoolmaster in Hard Times who wants only Facts to be taught in his school. Facts are essentially what the reader is given about each community in each chapter. There is little interpretation. In a text of 178 pages, there are 49 pages of notes. There is no bibliography; that would have only added to the length of the book.Those you know the history and politics of the Second Constitutional Period will not be convinced by the Matossian thesis. The dreams of all three communities remained alive long after 1909, and the Sublime Porte did its best to meet the demands of each community.Far from being alienated from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the principal nationalist body, understood that the counterrevolution had been a Liberal conspiracy designed to destroy the CUP. The CUP had survived, and ARF realized that a working relationship with the CUP was the best way to achieve the "Armenian dream." Between 1909 and 1913, parliament allotted money to compensate Armenian peasants for lands that had been seized by the tribes. In April 1914, under Great Power pressure, the Porte appointed two European Inspectors-General of the eastern provinces. …