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Abstract
This article argues that the terrible Armenian human tragedy of 1915 does not represent an act of genocidal intention on the part of the Ottoman government, for the historical record does not substantiate a premeditated plan by the Ottoman leadership to destroy because of ethnicity, religion, or nationality, as opposed to relocate for political-military reasons, the Armenian population. By putting together and presenting in a new way materials that have not been combined and analyzed before, the overarching theme of the piece is discussion of the Ottoman Armenian demographics during the First World War. The major source for the treatment of this subject is the Prime Minister's Office Ottoman Archive in Istanbul. Still unresolved are questions about Armenian population figures, some which date back as far as Treaty of Berlin of 13 July 1878. Some forty years later, no accurate count was made of the Ottoman Armenian deaths in the First World War. The Ottoman censuses, well known to historians, hold the promise of unlocking information about the size of the Armenian population and nature of its demographic change over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Introduction
Ottoman history is certainly one of the richest areas of research open to modern historians. The Ottomans, and their successors in the Republic of Turkey, preserved a wealth of manuscript and archival materials that render the history of the empire, in those diverse facets of its political, economic, and cultural life, accessible to scholars of many disciplines. Since the full opening of the T. C. Baçbakanlik Osmanli Arçivi, BOA (Turkish Republic Prime Minister's Office Ottoman Archive) to research in May 1989, a growing number of Ottoman specialists have focused their attention on the insight into political and economic institutions and the demographic issues provided by these materials.1
The historiography of the Ottoman Empire has turned a comer. The BOA has custody of scores of collections relating to the creation and disposition of the documents discussed in this article. The online digital archive provides access to rare historical data not usually available outside archives and is reassuringly easy to use. Because this database allows full-text searches through tens of thousands of pages of documents, a search for some specific detail that might otherwise have taken an inordinate...