Removal of American Indians, destruction of Ottoman Armenians. American missionaries and demographic engineering

Abstract

This article describes and compares two distinct instances of removal of a people from its native land. The removals in question were organized at different times by two different states, one a rising, the other a crumbling power. The removals had different dimensions, but were both claimed to be unavoidable for state building. The same organization, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), was a privileged witness and an outspoken critic of both: the removal of the American Indians from Georgia and Carolina in the 1830s, and the removal of the Armenians from Asia Minor during World War I. This removal comprised nearly all Ottoman Armenians, equalled mass murder and paved the way for an exclusively Turkish nation-state in the whole of Anatolia. In both cases the ABCFM had defended an integrative, non-exclusive vision of the societies concerned.