Justin A. McCarthy (born October 19, 1945) is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey (in 1998), and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish StudiesMacDonald, David B. Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: the Holocaust and Historical Representation. London: Routledge, 2008, p. 121. . and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.Justin McCarthy. Home page of another academic with whom he served in the Peace Corps.
McCarthy's work has faced harsh criticism by many scholars who have characterized McCarthy's views defending Turkish atrocities against Armenians as genocide denial.Auron, Yair. The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 248.Charny, Israel W. Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1999, p. 163.Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Ottoman Archives and the Armenian Genocide" in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992, p. 284.Hovannisian, Richard G. "Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Comparison with Holocaust Denial" in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 210.
Background McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967 to 1969, where he taught at Middle East Technical University and Ankara University.Mustafa Aydin, Çağrı Erhan (2004) Turkish-American Relations: Past, Present, and Future, xii He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1978.Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 214. He later received an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University. McCarthy is also a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.
Studies On Ottoman Empire McCarthy's studies concentrate on the period in which the Ottoman Empire crumbled and eventually fell apart. He holds that orthodox Western histories of the declining Ottoman Empire are biased as they are based on the testimonies of biased observers: Christian missionaries, and officials of (Christian) nations who were at war with the Ottomans during World War I.McCarthy 1995
Able to read Ottoman Turkish, McCarthy has focused on changes in the ethnic composition of local populations. Thus, he has written about the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus, as well as the Armenian massacres in Anatolia.
Some scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers (19th and early 20th centuries) brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims also suffered and died during these years.Bloxham. The Great Game of Genocide, p. 210. "Some of McCarthy's work considers the great population changes of the period, including extensive examination of the expulsion of Muslims from the new Balkan states and the overall demographic catastrophes of 1912–23... McCarthy's work has something to offer in drawing attention to the oft-unheeded history of Muslim suffering and embattlement that shaped the mindset of the perpetrators of 1915. It also shows that vicious ethnic nationalism was by no means the sole preserve of the Committee of Union and Progress and its successors." Donald W. Bleacher, although acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish, nonetheless called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" to the model often posited in Western historiography, where all the victims were Christians and all the perpetrators were Muslims.Beachler, Donald W. (2011). The genocide debate: politicians, academics, and victims. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 123. . "Justin McCarthy has, along with other historians, provided a necessary corrective to much of the history produced by scholars of the Armenian genocide in the United States. McCarthy demonstrates that not all of the ethnic cleansing and ethnic killing in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed the model often posited in the West, whereby all the victims were Christian and all the perpetrators were Muslim. McCarthy has shown that there were mass killings of Muslims and deportations of millions of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. McCarthy, who is labeled (correctly in this author's estimation) as being pro-Turkish by some writers and is a denier of the so called Armenian genocide claims with Dr Ömer Turan and Prof Dr Cemalettin Taşkıran, has estimated that about 5.5 million Muslims were killed in the hundred years from 1821–1922. Several million more refugees poured out of the Balkans and Russian conquered areas, forming a large refugee (muhajir) community in Istanbul and Anatolia." However, others have accused McCarthy of exaggerating the number of Muslim victims in the Balkans.
McCarthy's current concentration is on the factors that caused the Ottoman loss in the East in World War I. According to him, the milestone events are the Battle of Sarikamish and what he terms the "Armenian Revolt" at Van.McCarthy, Justin. The Armenian Rebellion at Van. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006. Norman Stone, who denies the Armenian genocide, praised Justin McCarthy's The Ottoman Turks: "a brave scholarly attempt, not shrinking from the economic side."Norman Stone, Turkey: A Short History, London: Thames & Hudson, 2010, p. 175. Similarly, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire was recommended by The History Teacher.Richard S. Stewart, "Review", The History Teacher, vol. 36, n° 4, August 2003.
McCarthy also worked, especially in The Creation of Enduring Prejudice, with a focus on anti-Turkish prejudices disseminated between the beginning of the 19th century through 1922.
Armenian genocide
McCarthy agrees that a large number of Armenians were killed or died of unnatural causes during the massacres of 1915–1923, but he argues that millions of MuslimsMcCarthy, Justin Let the Historians Decide, Ermeni Arastirmalari, volume 1, Ankara 2001. in the region were also massacred in this period and many at the "hands of Armenian insurgents and militia."McCarthy, Justin Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922. Darwin Press, Incorporated, 1996, He has claimed that all of those deaths during World War I were the product of intercommunal warfare between Turks, Kurds and Armenians, famine and disease, and did not involve an intent or a policy to commit genocide by the Ottoman Empire. McCarthy has been active in publishing the results of his work and analysis, that Ottomans never had an official state sanctioned policy of genocide, through books, articles, conferences, and interviews. This has made him a target of much criticism from historians and organizations. He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the Armenian genocide in 2006. Aviel Roshwald describes McCarthy's "version of these events" as "defensively pro-Turkish."Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic nationalism & the fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923, Routledge, 2001, p. 91.
Michael M. Gunter congratulated Justin McCarthy for Muslim and Minorities: "His work is clearly the best available on the subject and merits the close attention of any serious, disinterested scholar"; and "his figure" of the Armenian losses (600,000) "is probably the most accurate we have."Michael M. Gunter, "Pursuing the Just Cause of their People". A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism, Westport-New York-London: Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 11 and 19. Justin McCarthy's work on the demography of Anatolian populations, especially the Armenians, was also recommended by , professor of Ottoman history at the Collège de France.Gilles Veinstein, "Trois questions sur un massacre", L'Histoire, April 1995. Both GunterJoseph A. Kéchichian. A Response to Michael Gunter's Review of "The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Aug., 2007), pp. 509-512 and VeinsteinConfusionnisme au Collège de France Catherine Coquio dans Libération du 28 December 1998 have engaged in the Armenian genocide denial.
Evaluations Muslim demographics Historian Dennis P. Hupchick writing in the American Historical Review states of Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (1996): One may pick arguments with specific interpretations of events depicted in the work, but the statistical data appear generally valid. McCarthy succeeds in providing factual material for bringing the European historiography of the later Ottoman Empire into more objective balance.Dennis P. Hupchick, "Review", American Historical Review (1997) 102#3 pp. 856-857
Historian Robert Olson writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies says of the same book: Like all of the author's other works, this one offers positions that become pivots for rebuttals, disagreements, counter-arguments, different interpretations, and probably some recriminations. Nonetheless, Justin McCarthy's solid demographic work contributes to achieving a better balance and understanding that he so ardently desires for the history of these regions and peoples.Robert Olson, "Review," International Journal of Middle East Studies (1997) 29#4 pp. 657-659
Historian and Ottoman specialist Michael Robert Hickock writing in the Review of Middle East Studies and reviewing the same book, noted its "excellent service" to scholars and general readers as a work documenting human suffering, but accused McCarthy of selectively using sources and said:
Although he succeeds in recounting the plight of Muslim communities, he is less successful in demonstrating state policy or proving intent. Moreover, McCarthy is inconsistent in assigning blame. When the Ottoman state failed to control the depredation of Armenians at the hands of Kurds and Circassians, it was due to lack of resources and authority; when Russian, Bulgarian and Greek soldiers declined to stop similar events against Muslim peasants, it was done deliberately. The question of intent underlies the book's greatest flaw.According to Michael Mann McCarthy is often viewed as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate over Balkan Muslim death figures.Mann, Michael (2005). The dark side of democracy: explaining ethnic cleansing. Cambridge University Press. p. 113. . "In the Balkans all statistics of death remain contested. Most of the following figures derive from McCarthy (1995: 1, 91, 161-4, 339), who is often viewed as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate. Yet even if we reduced his figures by as much as 50 percent, they would still horrify. He estimates that between 1811 and 1912, somewhere around 5 1/2 million Muslims were driven out of Europe and million more were killed or died of disease or starvation while fleeing. Cleansing resulted from Serbian and Greek independence in the 1820s and 1830s, from Bulgarian independence in 1877, and from the Balkan wars culminating in 1912." Mann however states that even if those figures were reduced "by as much as 50 percent, they still would horrify."
Donald Bloxham, a University of Edinburgh historian specializing in genocide studies, states that "McCarthy's work has something to offer in drawing attention to the oft-unheeded history of Muslim suffering and embattlement... It also shows that vicious nationalism was by no means the sole preserve of the CUP and its successors", but notes that:
Historian Hilmar Kaiser stated: