ABSTRACT
Throughout the reign of Sultan Abdulhamit II (1876–1908), Armenian clergymen in the Ottoman Empire found themselves regular targets of violence. The principal perpetrators of this violence, the Ottoman state and Armenian revolutionaries, suggest a rupture between the Armenian community and imperial politics. This chapter focuses on two reinterpretations of nineteenth-century Ottoman history to suggest that continuity, rather than rupture, marked Armenian engagement with imperial governance. The Tanzimat, which formally commenced in 1839, was a watershed for the histories of the Middle East and the Balkans. Reframing the contours of non-Muslim engagement with the Tanzimat calls into question another feature of the historiography: Ottomanism. Clandestine groups appeared at the very heart of Ottoman Armenian society in the 1880s; they cautiously walked a fine line between participation in formal spheres of community while trying to avoid the increasingly intense policing of the imperial state.
