ABSTRACT
The pattern of a small total war held true on a larger scale for the widespread massacres of Armenians in the Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s. Tens of thousands of Armenians lost their lives, and nearly all Armenian communities suffered enormous individual and collective material losses. The important difference notwithstanding, the entire period from the 1890s to the 1920s constituted a continuum of ethnic cleansing, forced religious conversion, and de-Armenianization of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The escalation of the massacres of the 1890s into the genocide of 1915 is accepted by almost all serious scholars. Most scholars in Armenia have maintained that the destruction of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire began long before World War I and that the specific blueprint for the 1915 genocide was drawn up prior to the outbreak of hostilities.
