ARPA57202 Tusan The British Emire and The Armenian Genocide

Abstract: The presentation explores the history of the response to the Armenian Genocide. A leading power in the region and the world at the time, Britain and its empire played a key role in determining the global response to events as they unfolded in the Ottoman Empire. Newly uncovered archival material on imperial policy dating back to the nineteenth century and war crimes trials held after WWI to punish perpetrators shows why it proved impossible to stop the violence and prosecute those responsible for the atrocities. This happened despite the emergence of the category of ‘crimes against humanity’ and one of the first ever international humanitarian campaigns. From Gladstonian idealism to Churchill’s imperial realpolitik, the British response to the Armenian Genocide reveals the high stakes and legacies of the failure of a global hegemonic power to lead the prosecution of the architects of one of the classic cases of genocide in the modern period.

Michelle Tusan is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and was a Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her research has been supported by the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund, the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Hoover Institute and by Fulbright Scholar Program. Her latest book is The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill. Other publications include: Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East; “‘Crimes against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” in the American Historical Review; “Humanitarianism, Genocide and Liberalism,” in the Journal of Genocide Research; “James Bryce’s Blue Book as Evidence,” in the Journal of Levantine Studies, and “Genocide, Famine and Refugees on Film,” in Past and Present.