Ottoman Armenians and the Politics of Conscription | Ohannes Kılıçdağı

E382 | The history of Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire is inevitably in the shadow of 1915. In today’s episode, we explore new approaches to this history with Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı. We speak in particular about the hopes that the empire’s Armenian citizens attached to the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, which were high indeed. On the basis of research utilizing Armenian-language periodicals from across the empire, Kılıçdağı explains how the Armenian community enthusiastically embraced military conscription, and how this phenomenon connects to the theme of citizenship in the late Ottoman Empire more generally. We conclude by considering what use there is for history in the politics of the present. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/10/armenian-conscription.html Ohannes Kılıçdağı is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has a PhD in History from Boğaziçi University, and was previously a research fellow in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. In addition to his research on non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the citizenship of Armenians in particular, Ohannes is a columnist for Agos, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. Sam Dolbee completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at New York University. His book project is an environmental history of the Jazira region in the late Ottoman period and its aftermath. CREDITS Episode No. 382 Release Date: 2 October 2018 Recording Location: Harvard University Audio editing by Sam Dolbee Music: Zé Trigueiros Images and bibliography courtesy of Ohannes Kılıçdağı available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/10/armenian-conscription.html