Justin McCarthy (American historian)


Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies. His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
McCarthy's work has faced harsh criticism by many scholars who have characterized McCarthy's views defending Turkish atrocities against Armenians as genocide denial.

Background

McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967 to 1969, where he taught at Middle East Technical University and Ankara University. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. 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. McCarthy believes that orthodox Western histories of the declining Ottoman Empire are biased, since they are based on the testimonies of biased observers: Christian missionaries, and officials of nations who were at war with the Ottomans during World War I. Able to read Ottoman Turkish, he focuses 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. Scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge that his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers has brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims and Jews also suffered and died during these years. Donald W. Bleacher, though acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish nonetheless has called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" challenging the West's model of all victims being Christians and all perpetrators as being Muslims.
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. Norman Stone praised Justin McCarthy's The Ottoman Turks: "a brave scholarly attempt, not shrinking from the economic side." Similarly, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire was recommended by The History Teacher.
McCarthy also worked on the image of the Ottoman Turks, especially in America, with a focus on the anti-Turkish prejudices disseminated by some missionaries, from the beginning of the 19th century to 1922.

Armenian Genocide

McCarthy agrees that a million Armenians died during the massacres of 1915–1923, but he argues that millions of Muslims in the region were also massacred in this period and many at the "hands of Armenian insurgents and militia". 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."
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 "is probably the most accurate we have." 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. Both Gunter and Veinstein have been accused of holding denialist positions on the Armenian Genocide.

Evaluations

McCarthy's work has been controversial. The American Historical Review states of Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 :
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.

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.

McCarthy's work has been the subject of criticism from book reviewers and a number of genocide scholars. According to Israeli historian Yair Auron, McCarthy, "with Heath Lowry, Lewis' successor in Princeton, leads the list of deniers of the Armenian Genocide." "The Encyclopedia of Genocide" writes, that Stanford Shaw and McCarthy have published shoddy and desperate books claiming there was no genocide and that "the Turkish government really treated the Armenians nicely while they were deporting and killing them", and particularly, "McCarthy revises demography to suggest that there really weren't many Armenians in historic Armenia". Among other criticisms, he has been accused by Colin Imber of following a Turkish nationalistic agenda. According to the "Encyclopedia of Human Rights", in their efforts to negate the genocidal nature of the event, Lewis, Shaw, McCarthy and Lewy, most notably, "have ignored the evidence and conclusions of the massive record of documents and decades of scholarship" as well as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention's definition, and these "denialist scholars have engaged in what is called unethical practice". The historian Mark Mazower considers McCarthy's sources and, in particular, his statistics to be "less balanced" than those of other historians working in this area. McCarthy is a member of, and has received grants from, the Institute of Turkish Studies. According to historian Richard G. Hovannisian, Stanford Shaw, Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy all use arguments similar to those found in Holocaust denial.
According to Michael Mann McCarthy is often viewed as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate over Balkan Muslim death figures. Mann however states that even if those figures were reduced "by as much as 50 percent, they still would horrify".

International Association of Genocide Scholars

The International Association of Genocide Scholars criticised both Justin McCarthy and the Political Scientist Guenter Lewy with the statement "Scholars who dispute that what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitutes genocide blatantly ignore the overwhelming historical and scholarly evidence. Most recently, this is the case with the works of Mr. Justin McCarthy and Mr. Guenter Lewy, whose books engage in severely selective scholarship that grossly distorts history". Among the members of the IAGS who voiced concerns were Donald Bloxham, a University of Edinburgh historian specializing in genocide studies, who acknowledges 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 Ottoman ruling elite. Nevertheless, he identifies McCarthy's work in this field as part of a wider project of undermining scholarship affirming the Armenian Genocide, by reducing it to something analogous to a population exchange. Bloxham writes that McCarthy's work " to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion." IAGS members Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs write that Shaw's and his adherents' publications have "striking similarities to the arguments used in the denial of the holocaust": labeling the alleged genocide as a myth by wartime propaganda, portraying the presumed victims as having been real security threats, discounting eye-witness accounts, asserting that deaths occurred were from the same causes that carried away all peoples in the region, minimizing the number of victims, and so on. Likewise, Peter Medding, Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, maintains that the number of Armenian Genocide deniers is small but "their influence is great by virtue of pernicious alliance with the official campaign of falsification by the government of Turkey", so the genocide scholars "have been required to spend much of their intellectual energy on refuting the claims of pseudo-scholarship".

Armenian Assembly of America

The Armenian Assembly of America has stated that McCarthy lent support to the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, which led an effort to defeat recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1985.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry and Australian Federal Parliament

In November 2013, three planned meetings at the Australian Federal Parliament, University of Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales were canceled on the grounds of opposition to McCarthy's academic stances and due to pressure from groups who claimed that his view that there was no systematic and deliberate effort by the Ottoman Empire to wipe out populations amounts to genocide denial.

Works

Awards