Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 [Hardcover]

Justin McCarthy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0878500944 | ISBN-13: 978-0878500949 | Publication Date: March 1996

This is the dramatic history of the deportation and death of millions of Muslims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from areas that have remained centres of conflict Chr(45) the Balkans, the Middle East, and what was the Soviet Union - and shows how these conflicts developed. The history of the expansion of the Russian Empire and the creation of new nations in the Balkans have traditionally been told from the standpoint of the Christian nations that were carved from the Ottoman Empire. "Death and Exile" tells the story from the standpoint of the Turks and other Muslims who suffered death and exile as a result of imperialism, nationalism, and ethnic conflict. The compelling story that unfolds deepens our perspective on the history of the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans and presents a framework for understanding modern developments in the region.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Darwin Pr (March 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878500944
• ISBN-13: 978-0878500949
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overlooked Reality, January 22, 2001

By 

David (Istanbul Turkey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Hardcover)

This is a necessary, long overdue work reminding us that the ethnic sufferings in Caucasia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Balkans during the last 200 years were not all one sided. Many thousands of Moslem families suffered the same tragedies and walked the same dreary road into exile as their Christian neighbors. The massacres and wholesale population transfers were mutual and massive. Conventional wisdom in the West about the tragic events listed in this book is sadly one-sided. McCarthy has made a valuable contribution to remind people of the complex reality of these issues.

78 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, July 26, 2001

By 

Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Hardcover)

McCarthy has unearthed a horrifying and extremely important fact: that in the course of the century between the Greek war of independence and World War I, the Ottoman Empire suffered five and a half million dead and five million refugees. He deems this Europe's largest lost of life and emigration since the Thirty Years' War. Christian suffering in this time and place is well-known; McCarthy shows the other side, that "Muslim communities in an area as large as all of western Europe had been diminished or destroyed." His study minutely reviews the regions and wars, pulling information from foreign and Ottoman sources to produce a compelling account.

Beyond the tragedy involved, this pattern of death and exile has a profound historical importance. To take just three matters that the author raises: It puts into perspective the deportation of Armenians in 1915 and turns this from an act of hatred into one motivated by fear (had the Armenians, with Russian support, rebelled, Ottoman Muslims could have expected to be slaughtered). Also, this legacy explains the modest and circumspect foreign policy pursued by Atatürk; "as a land of recent refugee in-migration and massive mortality," his country was ready not to assert itself but to reform itself. Lastly, the massive immigrations to Anatolia mean that modern Turkey is (like France) a land of migrants; McCarthy estimates that one-fifth of the population descends from nineteenth-century refugees. This helps understand the country's acute sensitivity to current problems in Bosnia and Azerbaijan.

Middle East Quarterly, June 1996

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT!!! HIghly recommended!!!, December 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Hardcover)

Finally a comprehensive account of the history of conflict between Armenians and the Ottoman state that is not written by a pseudo-Armenian scholar propped up by the Armenian diaspora community. This books tells it like it is, with plenty of factual research. It's shameful really that the Armenians tried to use their religion to persuade people in the US and Europe to believe their lies. This was particularly true of the diaspora in the US that was desperate for an ethnic identity and the Turks were easy targets as they were Muslims against whom there was a already a prejudice (due largely to the then small number of American Muslims and a general ignorance in the US at that time about Muslims). So the Armenians used this very deftly to win favor in the West, and cried on anyone they could find--and threatened, bribed or blew up the rest. They still deny the Turkish holocaust!!!