The Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS) convened its first meeting at the University of Chicago in March 2000. Since then, the historical literature on not only the Armenian Genocide, but also Ottoman Armenians more generally, has grown ever more sophisticated. This essay takes stock of the growing visibility of Armenians in Ottoman historiography over the last two decades, and other developments. In particular, it asks why historical scholarship on Armenians has yet to have a transformative effect on the frameworks used to study the Ottoman Empire's history? The essay first identifies a series of obstacles that have prevented Armenian and Ottoman studies scholarship from developing a shared set of questions. It then offers suggestions for more carefully addressing the underlying problematics of empire that can bridge this divide without inadvertently reproducing national or regional paradigms that have long left an imprint on Ottoman historiography.

This article argues that non-Muslim engagement with 19th-century Ottoman reform should be understood in the context of a confessionalized politics that originally fostered partnerships of governance in the 18th century. The confessionalization of non-Muslim communities in the 18th century, which resulted in the political empowerment of Istanbul-based ethnarchs, promoted the establishment of robust communal boundaries that were more legible to the central state. These arrangements also made non-Muslim communities such as the Armenians partners in governance, responsible for supporting the state's effort to maintain its place atop a contentious imperial politics. The Tanzimat reforms, which reorganized non-Muslim communities and devolved some power from the clergy to the laity, were not a novelty, but instead a renegotiation of non-Muslims’ roles in the centralization of state. Rather than embrace secularized identities, non-Muslims enthusiastically used their own religious institutions to promote state centralization. In the process, they reconfigured relations of power in the region that left non-Muslims structurally marginalized.