The Armenian massacres of 1894-97 in the Ottoman Empire, now mostly known as the Hamidian Massacres (after Sultan Abdülhamid II, 1876-1909), claimed the lives of many tens of thousands of Armenians and provoked an unprecedented public outcry in Europe and the United States, as well as a severe crisis in Ottoman-Western relations.

Despite the enormous contemporary interest it aroused and the availability of thousands of primary sources, it has until recently been a severely understudied subject, overshadowed by the genocide of the First World War. Like the latter, it is also approached from very different angles in Western/Armenian and mainstream Turkish historiography.
This book is a systematic, comprehensive and comparative description and analysis of the Hamidian massacres. Based on decades of research using Armenian, British, French and Ottoman state sources, as well as contemporary press records and personal documents, it uncovers the full extent of the violence of 1894-97. Compiling an exhaustive inventory and description of all incidents of mass violence, both urban and rural, Jelle Verheij establishes a proper chronology of the massacres to detect links and mutual influences, identifying and determining the motivation of the perpetrators. Examining the policies and roles of Sultan Abdülhamid II, the Ottoman government and local authorities in relation to the traditional narrative of their premeditation and organisation of the massacres, this major study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of anti-Armenian mass violence in the late Ottoman Empire.