Turkey and Ottoman Empire
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The President of the United States has declared that the Ottoman Empire committed Genocide against the Armenians. In his statement chastising Turkey, President Biden chose not to mention the millions of Ottoman Muslims killed by the actions of the invading Imperialist Powers and their Armenian allies from 1914-22. According to the US demographer, Justin McCarthy,…
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“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring… Today, as we mourn what was lost, let us also turn our eyes to the future – toward the world that we wish to…
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Presentation made to Conference on the Events of 1915 organised by the Turkish Republic Directorate of Communications on 20th April 2021. Today I’d like to talk about 1915 in the light of recent events in Karabakh. I will ask the question: What do events in Karabakh and the Southern Caucasus tell us about 1915? I…
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There are four maps from the early 20th Century of the South Caucasus region contained within the British archives. The first from 3rd April 1907; a second undated but presumably from 1919 or 1920; a third from 17th July 1922; and a final one from 25th May 1923. They show the national boundaries in the…
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Five years ago, in 2016, President of Ireland Mary McAleese visited Gallipoli as part of her remembrance escapade. I was approached to write an article marking this event because I had written a book a few years earlier on Britain’s Great War on Ottoman Turkey. It seemed a good opportunity to explain what Gallipoli was…
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Now that the war is over and most of the Armenian occupation is being dismantled in favour of an Azeri reconstruction of the region some afterthoughts are in order in the aftermath. One thing that has dominated reports from Karabakh over the last week has been the revelations of the Armenian vandalism inflicted on the…
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Despite the ceasefire of last weekend the Karabakh war has continued much as it did over the previous fortnight. The Azerbaijani army has maintained its steady advance, but now out of the plain and into the settlements of Nagorno-Karabakh proper (i.e. the highlands). It has secured Hadrut, whose fall was a great moral blow to…
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This week I gave an Interview with CBC Azerbaijan on the present Karabakh conflict. I stated my position clearly: “I believe the current outbreak of hostilities to be entirely the responsibility of the Armenian Government of Mr Pashinyan. It has resulted from a series of provocations that have given Azerbaijan little option but to remove…
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‘Great Britain against Russia in the Caucasus’ is about how the geopolitical relationship between Imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia had a transformative effect on the destinies of Ottoman Turks, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. From the Great War of August 1914, the course of history for these empires and peoples of Transcaucasia, was irrevocably altered and set…
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For most of the 19th Century Great Britain and Tsarist Russia confronted each other in a geopolitical struggle known as the Great Game. During this period Britain supported the Ottoman Empire as a giant buffer state against Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean. But in 1907 the Great Game against Russia was suddenly suspended in the…
