LONDON/NY — I. B.Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, has announced the publication of Prof. Bedross Der Matossian’s edited volume The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History as part of the series Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World edited by Der Matossian himself.
The book, based on new research, sheds light on the history of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, a major Armenian revolutionary party that operated in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and throughout the global Armenian diaspora.
Divided into sections which cover the origins, ideology, and regional history of the SDHP, the book situates the history of the Hnchaks within debates around socialism, populism, and nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The SDHP was not only an Armenian party but had a global Marxist outlook, and scholars in this volume bring to bear expertise in a wide range of histories and languages including Russian, Turkish, Persian and Latin American to trace the emergence and role this influential party played from their split with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the events of the Armenian genocide to the formation of the first Armenian Republic and then Soviet Armenia. Putting the Hnchaks in context as one of many nationalist radical groups to emerge in Eurasia in the late 19th century, the book is an important contribution to Armenian historiography as well as that of transnational revolutionary movements in general.
“This is the first edited volume in English language that discusses the multidimensional and rich history of the of the Social Democrat Hnchakian party in the Ottoman, Russian, and the Persian empires and beyond. It is based on archival material in multiple languages including but not limited to the Ottoman, Armenian, British, and French archives,” said Der Matossian. “The volume is unique in that it brings together leading senior and junior scholars to assess the role of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The volume is divided into three sections: From Inception to the First Republic of Armenia (1918-1920); Regional and Local Histories; and Ideology,” stated Der Matossian.
Reviews
Houri Berberian, Professor, University of California Berkeley, wrote, “This first-ever edited collection on the Hnchakian Party is a very welcome intervention in a historiography that includes few scholarly contributions on the party. Especially noteworthy and compelling is the volume’s reexamination of the party’s history in light of new sources in multiple languages and approaches that-just to name a few examples-consider the party’s local and regional operations in the eastern Ottoman provinces, its relationships with non-Armenian neighbors, and its exclusion from the collective memory of Turkish socialism.”
