A History of Modern Turkey.

Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808 is the first book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It describes how the Ottoman Turks, a small band of nomadic soldiers, managed to expand their dominions from a small principality in northwestern Anatolia on the borders of the Byzantine Empire into one of the great empires of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe and Asia, extending from northern Hungary to southern Arabia and from the Crimea across North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean. The volume sweeps away the accumulated prejudices of centuries and describes the empire of the sultans as a living, changing society, dominated by the small multinational Ottoman ruling class led by the sultan, but with a scope of government so narrow that the subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were left to carry on their own lives, religions, and traditions with little outside interference.

Building Modern Turkey offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey's transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Zeynep Kezer argues that the deliberate dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and the spatial practices that ensued were as integral to conjuring up a sense of national unity and facilitating the operations of a modern nation-state as were the creation of a new capital, Ankara, and other sites and services that embodied a new modern way of life. The book breaks new ground by examining both the creative and destructive forces at play in the making of modern Turkey and by addressing the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences. By considering spatial transformations at different scales—from the experience of the individual self in space to that of international geopolitical disputes—Kezer also illuminates the concrete and performative dimensions of fortifying a political ideology, one that instills in the population a sense of membership in and allegiance to the nation above all competing loyalties and ensures its longevity.

The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur Ümit Üngör demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.

Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded modern Turkey after World War I. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple, personalized representations of the past that they have recovered allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memory to generate varied narratives for the nation and its minority groups. Contributors to this volume come from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology, but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and “Republic” through acts of memory, effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance.

Textbook providing a thorough assessment of the political, social and economic processes which led to the formation of a new Turkey; socio-economic change is emphasised throughout.

The 'Tulip Age', a concept that described the beginning of the Ottoman Empire's westward inclination in the eighteenth century, was an idea proposed by Ottoman historian Ahmed Refik in 1912. In the first reassessment of the origins of this concept, Can Erimtan argues the 'Tulip Age' was an important template for various political and ideological concerns of early twentieth century Turkish governments. The concept is most reflective of the 1930s Republican leadership's attempt to disengage Turkey's population from its Islamic culture and past, stressing the virtues of progress, modernity and secularism. It was only the death of Ataturk in 1938 that precipitated a hesitant revival of Islam in Turkey's public life and a state-sponsored re-invigoration of research into Turkey's Ottoman past. In this exciting reassessment Erimtan shows us that the trope of the 'Tulip Age' corresponds more to Turkish society's desire to re-orientate itself to the Occident throughout the twentieth century rather than to early eighteenth-century Ottoman realities.