Studies on Turkish Politics and Society

Studies on Turkish Politics and Society
Author: Kemal H. Karpat
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 757
Release: 2003-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9047402715

This book comprises a collection of articles and essays published in a variety of journals during the past decades, which seek to identify and analyze the main factors in Turkish politics. Political parties, military interventions, international relations and cultural developments are given wide coverage alongside studies on literature.

Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774-1923

Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774-1923
Author: Roderic H. Davison
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292758944

The effect of Western influence on the later Ottoman Empire and on the development of the modern Turkish nation-state links these twelve essays by a prominent American scholar. Roderic Davison draws from his extensive knowledge of Western diplomatic history and Turkish history to describe a period in which the actions of the Great Powers, incipient and rising nationalisms, and Westernizing reforms shaped the destiny of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the new Turkish Republic. Eleven of the essays were previously published in widely scattered journals and multi-authored volumes. The first of these provides a general survey of Turkish and Ottoman history, from early Turkish times to the end of the Empire. The following essays continue chronologically from 1774, detailing some of the changes in the nineteenth-century Empire. Several themes recur. One is the impact of Western ideas and institutions and the resistance to that influence by some elements in the Empire. Another concerns the diplomatic pressure exerted by the Great Powers of Europe on the Empire, which amounted at times to direct intervention in Ottoman domestic affairs. Taken together, the essays portray a confluence of civilizations as well as a clash of cultures. Professor Davison has written an interpretive introduction that sets out the historical trends running throughout the book. In addition, he includes a previously unpublished article on the advent of the electric telegraph in the Ottoman Empire to show how the adoption of a Western technological advance could affect many areas of life. Of particular interest to students of Ottoman and Middle East history, these essays will also be valuable for everyone concerned with modernization in developing nations. Davison's interpretations and keen methodological sense also shed new light on several aspects of European diplomatic history.

Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey

Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey
Author: Sevket Pamuk
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-07-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004492275

For the first time, the continuity of Ottoman culture in contemporary Turkey is discussed, by a group of well-known scholars of Ottoman-Turkish history and society. The insightful essays provide not only original knowledge, but also new interpretations concerning ethnicity and state involvement in identity creation.

Essays on Turkish Literature and History

Essays on Turkish Literature and History
Author: Barbara Flemming
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004355766

In Essays on Turkish Literature and History Barbara Flemming makes available essays partly previously published in German. They offer insights gained through decades of scholarship. Although the Ottoman period is central, a wide range is covered, including an early Turkish principality, Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt, and contemporary southeastern Turkey. The essays look into historical and political factors involved in the preoccupation with the world’s ending, into Muslim-Christian dialogue, the sultan’s prayer before battle, and the bilingualism of poets. Of particular interest are the sections on female participation in mysticism, on an anti-Sufi movement in Cairo, on the Ottoman capital’s appeal to collectors and emigrants (Diez, Süssheim, Böhlau), and on the far-reaching effects of alphabet change.

The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey

The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey
Author: Esra Özyürek
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2007-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815631316

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.

The Formation of Turkish Republicanism

The Formation of Turkish Republicanism
Author: Banu Turnaog lu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691210136

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.

From Empire to Republic

From Empire to Republic
Author: Taner Akçam
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848136773

Taner Akçam is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman-Turkish government in 1915. This book discusses western political policies towards the region generally, and represents the first serious scholarly attempt to understand the Genocide from a perpetrator rather than victim perspective, and to contextualize those events within Turkey's political history. By refusing to acknowledge the fact of genocide, successive Turkish governments not only perpetuate massive historical injustice, but also pose a fundamental obstacle to Turkey's democratization today.

Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey

Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey
Author: Serif Mardin
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2006-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815628101

This book collects Serif Mardin’s seminal essays written throughout the span of his prolific career. Comprising some of the author’s finest and most incisive writings, these essays deal with the historical background, political travails, and socioeconomic metamorphosis of Turkey during a century of modernization. With his characteristic sophistication and breadth of vision, Mardin provides readers with a remarkably objective analysis of ideology, civil society, religion, urban life, and violence in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Mardin moves easily from sociological topics on violence and class-consciousness to the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the philosophy and culture of modern Turkey within the greater Middle East. These influential pieces—collected for the first time in one volume—represent an invaluable addition to the field of Middle East studies.