This book offers an in-depth overview of Turkish history and politics essential for understanding contemporary Turkey. It presents an analysis on a number of key issues from gender inequality to Islamism to urban regeneration. Based on interviews with leading intellectuals and academics from Turkey, the book’s theme follows the dramatic transformations that have occurred from the 1980 military coup to the coup attempt of 2016 and its aftermath. It further draws attention to the global flows of capital, goods, ideas, and technologies that continue to influence both mainstream and dissident politics. By doing so, the book tries to unsettle the assumption that Erdoğan and his Islamic ideology are the sole actors in contemporary Turkey. This book provides unusual insight into the Turkish society bringing various topics together, and increases the dialogue for people interested in democratic struggles in 21st century under neoliberal authoritarian regimes in general.

British–Turkish relations were transformed in the first half of the 20th century, from a state of belligerence during the First World War, through a period of heated confrontation over the fate of Mosul and trade and business access to the new Republic of Turkey, to rapprochement and financial cooperation in the 1930s, and finally a formal military alliance under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The edited collection provides a selection of important chapters by senior and early-career scholars from Britain, Turkey, and the wider world. The chapters use new sources to address issues as diverse as the Turkey–Iraq frontier, colonial governance in Cyprus, the legal rights of foreigners in Istanbul, commercial relations through the era of the Great Depression, contested neutrality in the Second World War, and the search for new alliances in the Cold War. Knowledge of this tumultuous transition and its impact on public memory is key to understanding points of tension and cohesion in present-day UK-Turkey relations. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journals Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.

As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

This study covers the socio-political, intellectual and institutional dynamics of underground resistance to the Allied occupation in Istanbul. The city was clearly not the seat of treason against the Nationalist struggle for independence, nor was collaboration with the occupiers what it was made out to be in Republican historiography. Above and beyond the international conjuncture in post-WWI Europe, factors that helped the Turkish Nationalists to succeed were: inter-Allied rivalries in the Near East that carried over to Istanbul; the British, French and Italians as major occupation forces, failing to establish a balance of strenght among themselves in their haste to promote respective national interests; the victors underestimating the defeated as they were engrossed with bureaucracy and were assailed by the influx of Russian refugees, Bolshevik propaganda, and the Turkish left.

Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen who built this empire, analysing the testimony of over 100 such military personnel sent to Alexandria, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and the towns and islands between them, as they voyaged, made camp, and explored and patrolled the city streets. Whereas histories examining soldiers' experiences in the First World War have almost exclusively focused on their lives at the frontlines, this study provides a much needed in-depth history of soldiers' experience and impact on the urban hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean, where urban planning, nightlife and entertainment, policing, and security were transformed by the presence of so many men at arms and the imperialist interventions that accompanied them.

The grand narrative of "The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building" is that of the essential continuity of the late Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey that was founded in 1923. Erik J. Zurcher shows that Kemal's 'ideological toolkit', which included positivism, militarism, nationalism and a state-centred world view, was shared by many other Young Turks. Authoritarian rule, a one-party state, a legal framework based on European principles, advanced European-style bureaucracy, financial administration, military and educational reforms and state-control of Islam, can all be found in the late Ottoman Empire, as can policies of demographic engineering. The book focuses on the attempts of the Young Turks to save their empire through forced modernization as well as on the attempts of their Kemalist successors to build a strong national state. The decade of almost continuous warfare, ethnic conflict and forced migration between 1911 and 1922 forms the background to these attempts and accordingly occupies a central position in this volume. This is a powerful history reflecting and contributing to the latest research from a leading historian of modern Turkey. It is essential for all readers interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and for an understanding of a key player in the politics of the Middle East and Europe.