ABSTRACT
The reader will not get far before discovering that this book is not a general history of the Armenians in the nineteenth or any other century. It is not intended to be. Certainly it is ‘about’ the Armenians but it is also about the diplomats, missionaries and politicians whose interests and involvement helped to create the Armenian question in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also about public opinion, and particularly the religious and racial biases that were usually carried into any discussion of Ottoman affairs. Although I hope the specialist will find some value in this work, I have written it with one eye on a more general audience. I believe that anyone interested in history could not fail to find the subject matter compelling, particularly as so much has been written about the tragic fate of the Armenians during the First World War but very little about this earlier period of ‘their’ history.
