This is a very timely edited volume that will fill a very significant gap in the study of Greek, Assyrian, Armenian, and Turkish history on the one hand, and, on the other, provide an analysis of the collective violence these non-Muslim minorities had been subjected to in the Ottoman Empire and later on.

Two aspects of the book make it highly original: one, the time span covered and two, the framework within which collective violence is analyzed. First, the usual historical focus on World War I, namely 1914–18, misses very significant violent events before and after the Great War. The volume's starting point of 1913 brings into focus the Ottoman violence exercised against the Greek Rum residing in western Anatolia before the War, a violence which was later replicated in the Armenian Genocide. Likewise, the endpoint of 1923 includes the crucial 1919–23 period after the War when the Ottoman Empire was occupied, yet before the official establishment of the Turkish Republic in October 1923. During this time, the Turkish independence struggle leading to the Republic was fought. Two competing governments coexisted in Anatolia during this time: the Ottoman government with Constantinople as its capital, and the burgeoning Turkish government with Ankara as its capital. Since telegraphic communication between the Ottoman capital and Anatolia was interrupted by the Turkish forces early on, there are not many reliable studies relating to the collective violence committed by the Turks against local non-Muslims during the independence struggle. For the first time, then, this volume provides valuable information on the nature and extent of this collective violence by introducing novel primary sources, especially on the 1922 genocide of the Pontus Greeks.

The collective violence analyzed in the volume expands beyond the particular violence committed separately against the Armenians, Assyrians, and the Greek Rum. Instead, it combines all into the “late Ottoman genocides” brought collectively upon the non-Muslim communities of Asia Minor, especially in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. For a very long time, probably predicated on the Ottoman non-Muslim inter-communal strife fostered during imperial times, these non-Muslim communities wrote their own particular histories of violence without referencing each other. Some even engaged in debates regarding who suffered the most violence. With this volume, however, the field now moves to a most welcome new, higher level of analysis, one that is able to overcome the particularities of Ottoman and later Turkish collective violence to instead see the genocidal patterns uniting these cases. The common perpetrator is ably depicted as a Turkish state and society striving to establish a nation-state through the violent exclusion of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians that, along with Kurds, regarded Anatolia as their ancestral lands.

The volume is divided into three parts. After a very good and thorough introduction by George N. Shirinian, Part I, entitled “Contexts,” sets the stage. All three articles articulate the new multi-ethnic approach to genocide. First, George Shirinian provides the analytical framework for what he terms “late Ottoman genocides” (of Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians). Then, Dikran M. Kaligian presents a spatial analysis of Thrace, Asia Minor, and the Aegean, thereby commenting on the Christian populations of the empire. Finally, Anahit Khosroeva specifically analyzes the Assyrians. It would have been beneficial to include here a scholar of Greek history as well, since the coverage of the Greek Rum is less than that of the Armenians and Assyrians.

Part II, titled “Documentation and Eyewitness Accounts,” forms the core of the volume with five scholars providing ample contemporaneous historical sources, with an eye on the continuities among the three cases of collective violence. Paul R. Bartrop's comparative critical discussion of the survivor testimonies of an Armenian, an Assyrian, and a Pontic Greek truly makes the idea behind the volume of analyzing the three cases simultaneously come to life, revealing how much more one learns from employing such a framework than simple case studies. Stavros T. Stavridis focuses on the Assyrian issue between 1914–35 as covered by the Australian press, revealing fascinating insight into their inability to ultimately establish a national home on their ancestral lands. Robert Shenk brings in the most valuable insights of another social group, contemporaneous American missionary women who witnessed the violence against the non-Muslims, but could not get Admiral Bristol, the head American official in the region, to acknowledge it due to his pro-Turkish stand (in hopes of establishing commercial ties with a future Turkish state). Next, while Ellene S. Phufas ponders the eyewitness accounts of the massacres in Nicomedia, Tehmine Martoyan focuses on the destruction of Smyrna by Turkish forces in 1922. The last three articles in this part by Shenk, Phufas, and Martoyan all suffer from a lack of references to recent critical works by Turkish scholars. Had they included such sources, their interpretations would have been much richer, finer, and nuanced.

Part III on “Legacies and Interpretations” contains six chapters that attempt to reflect on the consequences of employing the new framework of late Ottoman genocides. These chapters, however, do not cohere well. To start with, Steven Leonard Jacobs very ably compares Raphael Lemkin's writings on the three genocides, ensuring that his article will become an instant classic in genocide studies. Gevorg Vardanyan's article comparing the Greek and Armenian genocides as well as Thea Halo's work on the genocide of the Ottoman Greeks both suffer, once again, from a lack of references regarding the recent literature produced by scholars of Turkey and, as such, fail to bring forth novel ideas and interpretations.

The final three articles in this part do not seem to belong here. Georgia Kouta's interesting and valuable study on the contemporaneous Anglo-Hellenic League's campaign for the Greeks in Asia Minor shares more with the earlier Part II on documentation and eyewitness accounts. Likewise, Hannibal Travis's long discussion of deportation as a genocidal act, where he compares the late Ottoman genocides to those that followed in Nazi Germany, Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosova, Rwanda, and Darfur fits more in Part I on contexts. As for the final study by Suren Manukyan on the socio-psychological dimension of the Armenian Genocide, this article does not seem to be in conversation with any of the articles in the volume—it would have been much better not to include it in this volume.

In summary, then, I heartily recommend this book to scholars interested in the histories of these communities as well as the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic; genocide scholars would also benefit from the novel framework of studying the collective violence against Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians together, from a single comparative vantage point as late Ottoman genocides.