The Economics of the Armenian Genocide in Aintab

with Ümit Kurt

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received.   

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What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received.   

Contributor Bios

Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industry, and Social Sciences (History) and an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of award-winning book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021) and the co-author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2017). He is now working on his third book manuscript project on the global patterns of mass violence in the Ottoman borderlands in the 1860s-1920s.

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

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Credits

Episode No. 561

Release Date: 26 February 2024
Recording location: Clovis, California

Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Sombra," "Big Road of Burravoe" 

Images, bibliography, and captions courtesy of Ümit Kurt

Further Listening

	Sato Moughalian	471 8/13/2020	David Ohannessian: Art, Exile, and the Legacies of Genocide
	Ronald Grigor Suny	356 4/7/18	"They Can Live in the Desert"
	Heghnar Watenpaugh	407 3/25/19	Survivor Objects and the Lost World of Ottoman Armenians
	Ohannes Kılıçdağı	382 10/2/18	Ottoman Armenians and the Politics of Conscription
	Sylvia Alajaji	461 4/23/20	Music and Silence in the Armenian Diaspora

Images

Nazaretian family, 1880s. Standing on the left is Nigoghos Agha, seated left to right are Nazaretian Nazar Agha (Kara Nazar), Garabed Agha, and mother Zmrout Khatun, and standing on the right is Haroutioun Agha. Courtesy of Mihran Minassian Collection.

Ali Cenani Bey, CUP deputy of Aintab, orchestrator of the deportation and genocide in the city. Courtesy of Mihran Minassian Collection.

Ransacked and plundered houses in the Armenian quarter of Aintab. Courtesy of Gaziantep Kent Arşivi, Gaziantep Photograph and Postcard Collection.

The Jebejian family, Aintab. Standing from left: Roza, Krikor, Avedis, Negib, Salihe; sitting on the left: Hovhannes and Azniv (children of Krikor), Sultan (the wife of Krikor), Mennoush Hanum, and Hovhannes Agha Jebejian. Courtesy of Mihran Minassian Collection.

Aintab of the Gulesarian family, Courtesy of Alec Apelian.

Ransacked and plundered houses in the Armenian quarter of Aintab. Courtesy of Gaziantep Kent Arşivi, Gaziantep Photograph and Postcard Collection.

The inn known as Kürkçü Hanı (Kurkchuian Inn), founded by Hanna Kurkchuian in 1890, was sold to Mustafa Humanızlı, a local entrepreneur, by the Treasury in the early 1950s. Courtesy of SALT Archive

A list of Sarkis Yacoubian family’s properties registered by the Ottoman Bank in order to be submitted to the Aintab Liquidation Commission immediately following the family’s deportation on 19 October 1915.

Select Bibliography

Kevork A. Sarafian (ed.), Badmo’wt’iwn Ah’nt’abi Hah’o’c [History of the Aintab Armenians], vols. I and II (Los Angeles: Union of the Armenians of Aintab, 1953).

Yervant Babaian (ed.), Badmo’wt’iwn Ah’nt’abi Hah’o’c, vol. III (Los Angeles: Union of the Armenians of Aintab / Abril Publishers, 1994).

Hrayr S. Karagueuzian and Yair Auron, A Perfect Injustice: Genocide and Theft of Armenian Wealth (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009).

Kevork K. Baghdjian, La Confiscation, par le Gouvernement Turc, des Biens Arméniens—Dits “Abandonnes” (Montreal: K. K. Baghdjian, 1987).

Levon Vartan, Hah’gagan Dasnhinky ew Hah’ero’w Lqeal Ko’h’qery: Qnnagan Agnarg ysd T’rqagan Vawerakreri [The Armenian 1915 and the Aban- doned Properties of the Armenians: Critical Commentary According to Turkish Documents] (Beirut: Atlas, 1970).

Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015)

Kevork Yeghia Suakjian, Genocide in Trebizond: A Case Study of Armeno-Turkish Relations during the First World War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).

Ümit Kurt, “Legal and Official Plunder of Armenian and Jewish Properties in Comparative Perspective: the Armenian Genocide and the Holo- caust,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 305–326.

Hilmar Kaiser, The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2014)

Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).