Reviews for East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

The average rating for East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-10 00:00:00 Oscar Santos Prerequisites For Mass Murder Interesting book. Melson draws a number of parallels between Turkish and German societies in the years leading up to the respective genocides. Both societies contained a risng entrepreneurial middle class that was selectively demonized and treated as an external threat - the Armenians because half the population lived across the border of Turkey in Russia, and the Jews who also had a significant Russian population and were labeled as Bolshevik conspirators. Yet this perception ran counter to reality as German Jews considered themselves as German loyalists and non-German Jews saw liberal German values as symbolic of the Enlightenment; Armenian Turks were more favourable towards Turkey than Russia as were Armenians on the Russian side of the border. The other major factor was that the NSDAP (National Socialist) and CUP (Turkish Committe of Union and Progress) were both revolutionary parties. Melson contends that the revolutionary aspect of both regimes enabled their societies to throw off the previous moral constraints of their past - for the Nazis it was Christianity's use of the Jews as a "Witness People", for the Turks it was the Pact that gave dhimmi minorities protected status. He characterizes previous attempts to realize political parties during Bismark's rule as fragmented and ultimately failing in the public imagination because these parties were in opposition to the State whereas Hitler purported to defend it. He juxtaposes this with attacks on Armenians during the reign of the last Sultan Hamid II during the years 1894-96, which, though terrible, did not lead to to mass murder. I don't agree with the author on this point. However he is convincing that until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Armenians were just another millet, but with a reduced size in empire the Armenians were numerous enough inside Turkey to be seen as a threat to the survival of the State. Professor Melson's writing style is straightforward. He tells you what he's about to say, he says it and then he summarizes it again - possibly effective in the classroom but not quite as satisfying in a book. Melson's command of the history of the Nazi ascent is quite impressive but more time could have been used to tell about the details of the Armenian history. As a note to where I am coming from and going to on this subject, about 3 years ago I went to a book launch of Barbara Coloroso's Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide, which I also recommend. Attending the launch was a representative group from the Armenian community. I knew very little about the subject but I talked to them and promised that I would find out more. I was side tracked in my reading but I saw Melson's book and saw it as a way to fulfill my promise, almost 3 years later. I'm now reading Dadrian's Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict. Thus far I am favorably impressed. I'm also interested in following up what happened to a particular group of Armenians afterwards. Melson made the intriguing comment that whereas Hitler would have pursued the Jews to the ends of the Earth, the Armenians who made it as far as Syria and Lebanon (admittedly few survived the forced marches through the desert) were not marked for extinction by the Turks. He also remarked that another difference is that whereas a Jew was always a Jew, a Turk was a Muslim who spoke Turkish so that Armenian Christians could convert and escape their fate. I'd like to examine that statement in more detail as well as find out about the fate and actions of others who were neither Muslim nor Armenian during that period.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-11 00:00:00 Ernest Lai I read Melson's excellent comparative analysis of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust for one of my Holocaust & Genocide Studies courses, and it offers a clear and eye-opening conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between genocide and revolution. Something to note: Not every revolution leads to genocide AND not every genocide is a product only of revolution. However, Melson points out that genocide can, many times, result when an old regime unravels and a regime with a new ideology attempts to recreate society with a vision that excludes certain groups and casts them as the "enemy." There are significant similarities between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, including the fact that the Jews and the Armenians were ethnoreligious minorities under old regimes in Germany and the Ottoman Empire that held inferior status but had experienced rapid social progress. This led to the regimes considering how to deal with them for they represented a "problem" to the regime. Though each group suffered persecution under the old regimes, genocide was not activated until after a revolution had occurred in each place. Ideologies and political myths in both cases contributed to the policy of genocide that the state sanctioned. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, Turkish nationalism drove them to recognize the Armenian as a "mortal enemy" that could never be a part of the empire and had to be eliminated. Nazi racial and antisemitic ideology served to fuel a genocidal plan that saw the Jew as a global danger that also must be eliminated. Melson additionally highlights differences between the genocides in terms of the statuses of the Armenians and the Jews, the ideologies of the Turks and the Nazis, and the methods of destruction in each case. As illuminating as Melson's book is, it's a grim and difficult topic, but an important one. I appreciated Melson's points in his conclusion: "Revolutions fought in the name of justice must not abandon justice as the principle of governance." There's an interesting quote by Camus that I think the reader can reflect on further: "Nothing is given to men [and women] and the little they can conquer is paid with unjust deaths. But man's greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself."