Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism, statism, and populism. Banu Turnaoğlu challenges this view, showing how Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual dispute in Turkey over Islamic and liberal conceptions of republicanism, culminating in the victory of Kemalism in the republic's formative period. Drawing on a wealth of rare archival material, Turnaoğlu presents the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. She shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. Turnaoğlu demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. She reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics—including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism—arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology. A breathtaking work of scholarship, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism offers a strikingly new narrative of the evolution and shaping of modern Turkey.

The subject of my dissertation is the formation of the Turkish national movement in the period between the end of World War I and the founding of the Republic of Turkey as a new nation state in October 1923. It focuses on Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was under the British, French and Italian occupation during this crucial period. My dissertation analyzes the power struggles between various social and political forces involved in the resistance movement against the Allied occupation.

The founding of the Progressive Republican Party in November 1924 marked the end of a power struggle within the Turkish nationalist movement. This struggle had been going on ever since the start of that movement in 1919 and had become acute after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in October 1923. The suppression of the party in 1925 marked the beginning of the period of one-party dictatorship which lasted until after the Second World War. This book describes the power struggles within the nationalist movement which gave birth to the party, its history, organization, power base, and ideological significance. A large number of important political documents from the period are presented in translation.

Seeing the critical phase in the construction of a Turkish historical imagination between 1860 to 1950 disregarding the political disruptions, this book demonstrates how history and historical imagery had been instrumental in the nation-building process.

This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.