British Representations of the Armenian Genocide 1915-23.

Abstract

During the First World War the authorities of the Ottoman Empire headed by the Committee of Union and Progress (hereafter the CUP) carried out a policy of genocide against its Armenian minority population. This thesis will examine the interaction between British politicians, writers and national and local newspapers as they dealt with this subject in a period of the growing acceptance of the divisions between the civilian and military spheres during ‘Total War’ being eroded at the same time as a mounting denunciation of this process. The main thrust of the argument is that a polemical and listing ‘literature of denunciation’ of carefully described acts of atrocity, often on an individual level, was supplemented with one involving criterion driven descriptions of staged and facilitating acts of the mass killing of civilians as groups rather than individuals. In short the description of a process of systematic extermination. These representations and descriptions demonstrated a growing awareness of how an ethnic or religious group could be taken to pieces and partially or completely destroyed. This was also closely linked to an apparent understanding of how geographical areas could be statistically altered in terms of population and homogenised. In turn this was often represented using bio-medical language and concepts with a rural idyll as an ideal model in mind which mirrored to an extent the language and rationales of the perpetrators themselves.

Date of Award	Feb 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Anita Rupprecht (Supervisor), Catherine Bergin (Supervisor) & Eugene Michail (Supervisor)