New Books In Middle Eastern Studies

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, suspended earlier by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and initiated a new period of parliamentary politics in the Empire. Likewise, the revolution was a watershed moment for the Empire’s ethnic communities, raising expectations for their full inclusion into the Ottoman political system as modern citizens and bringing to the fore competitions for power within and between groups. In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014), Bedross Der Matossian examines how Ottoman ethnic communities understood and reacted to the revolution. Focusing on the Arab, Armenian and Jewish communities, and using sources in multiple languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Ladino and Ottoman Turkish, Der Matossian highlights the contradictions and ambiguities in interpretations of  Ottomanism and its reification as political structure. How, for example, could these groups express loyalty to the