The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation. Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region. Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organised at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.

The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation. Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region. Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organised at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.

Esref Kusçubasi remains controversial in Turkey over fifty years after his death. Elsewhere the man sometimes called the Turkish Lawrence of Arabia is far less known but his life offers fascinating insights into the traumatic, increasingly violent struggles that ended the Ottoman Empire and ushered in the modern Middle East. Drawing on Esref's private papers for the first time, these pages tell the story of the making of a headstrong self-sacrificing officer committed to defending the empire's shrinking borders. Esref took on a string of special assignments for Enver Pasha, the rapidly rising star of the Ottoman military, first in Libya against the Italians, then in the Balkan Wars and World War I, before being captured by the forces of the Arab Revolt and turned over to the British and imprisoned on Malta. Released in 1920, he joined the national resistance movement in Anatolia but fell out with Mustafa Kemal's leadership and switched sides, earning him banishment from the Turkish Republic at its founding and exile until the 1950s. Never far from the action or controversy, Esref's dynamic story provides an important counterpoint to the standard narrative of the transition from empire to nation state.

Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the centre of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the 'Turkish mafia', from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the 'deep state' revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past.

Explores the political and social life of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire during the post-war period.

Across the Middle East in the post–World War I era, European strategic moves converged with late Ottoman political practice and a newly emboldened Zionist movement to create an unprecedented push to physically divide ethnic and religious minorities from Arab Muslim majorities. States of Separation tells how the interwar Middle East became a site for internationally sanctioned experiments in ethnic separation enacted through violent strategies of population transfer and ethnic partition. During Britain’s and France’s interwar occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, the British and French mandate governments and the League of Nations undertook a series of varied but linked campaigns of ethnic removal and separation targeting the Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish communities within these countries. Such schemes served simultaneously as a practical method of controlling colonial subjects and as a rationale for imposing a neo-imperial international governance, with long-standing consequences for the region. Placing the histories of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria within a global context of emerging state systems intent on creating new forms of international authority, in States of Separation Laura Robson sheds new light on the emergence of ethnic separatism in the modern Middle East.

Reveals how international 'relief' and 'development' became intertwined in humanitarian programs in the Near East from 1918 to 1930.