Customer Reviews

The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars

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I stumbled upon this book by chance in a library, opened it, skimmed through the first paragraph, and immediately set myself to the task of reading it in entirety. The writing is clear and concise - Panossian's intelligent prose illuminates the past, without pages and pages of elaboration that one might expect to find in a book that covers roughly 2500 years of history.

It is heavily researched, containing quotes from at least one hundred total sources. Moreover, towards the end of the book, which covers the period from the 1965 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in Soviet Armenia to the 1988 Nagorno-Kharabagh movement, there are good number of quotes from personal interviews that the author conducted, including several Catholicoses, politicians, and various Armenian ideologues.

The notes to the main text make up roughly one-third of the book and contain some interesting facts. For example, the title "King of Armenia," from the Cilician Kingdom that fell in 1375, eventually passed to the House of Savoy in Italy. That title was proclaimed by the Savoys until 1946, when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and replace it with a rupublic.

This is an excellent book on Armenian history, with an emphasis on nationalism and what exactly makes a nation a nation.

The book is very well written, but clearly the value of this book lies beyond its readability this is an original piece of work that is complete in the sense that it covers more of the evolution of the "Armenian identity" than meets the eye. For instance the historic fact driven discussions on the Armenian identity goes to the core of the current political issues of modern day Armenia. The book builds a useful bridge between Armenian history, politics and sociology.
If you have ever asked yourself what is an Armenian then you should read this book. I read it twice and it hit me at some point that I was in the process of discovering what it is to be an Armenian.
IMHO the author is fairly balanced and unbiased about Armenian issues.

This is a very fine book as far as its analysis of nation formation and Armenian identity are concerned. But it is shallow at a point. the author considers "nationalist radicalization " a definitely beneficial phenomenon without taking into account what in the end this brought to Armenians and Muslims in Anatolia. Obviously like many other authors he thinks that if he does not inform the reader about the crimes these nationalist radicals committed, the reader will be fooled and will applaud the "heroics" of "revolutionaries". The revolutionaries he much cherished butchered Muslim population of Anatolia during the WWI and caused the deportation of Anatolian Armenians. In all those pages he mentions these organizations(i.e Hnchak, ARF) he never states how these "liberators","saviors of the oppressed" wreaked havoc in Anatolia and killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim citizens of The Empire.

The author skips very important information and he tries to brand the authors that do mention this information as people turning the history upside down. No, we know these things, we are not fooled, we are not convinced.

On the other hand it did help me understand Armenians, and informed me on nation formation, essentials of being a nation and different theories explaining these concepts.