Traces the roots of the Turkish Republic to the Ottoman Empire

First Published in 1956 A History of Turkey presents a comprehensive overview of Turkey’s journey from empire to republic. The book attempts to give a picture of the growth of the Turkish people, the institutions they have created and the ideas that have inspired them through the centuries. It discusses themes like how Islamic civilization came to the Middle East; the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire; the National Revolution and birth of new Turkey; Mustafa Kemal and national consolidation; labour conditions, social security, and religion in new Turkey. A humble contribution to Anglo-Turkish understanding, this book is an interesting read for scholars and researchers of Turkish history, modern European history, Middle East studies, and history in general.

This is the second book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.

In his book on constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the early twentieth century, Nader Sohrabi considers the global diffusion of institutions and ideas, their regional and local reworking and the long-term consequences of adaptations. He delves into historic reasons for greater resilience of democratic institutions in Turkey as compared to Iran. Arguing that revolutions are time-bound phenomena whose forms follow global models in vogue at particular historical junctures, he challenges the ahistoric and purely local understanding of them. Furthermore, he argues that macro-structural preconditions alone cannot explain the occurrence of revolutions, but global waves, contingent events and the intervention of agency work together to bring them about in competition with other possible outcomes. To establish these points, the book draws on a wide array of archival and primary sources that afford a minute look at revolutions' unfolding.

Traces the roots of the Turkish Republic to the Ottoman Empire

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reverberated across the Middle East and Europe and ushered in a new era for the Ottoman Empire. The initial military uprising in the Balkans triggered a constitutional revolution, in which social mobilization and the political aspirations of the Young Turks played a crucial role. The Young Turk Revolution and the Ottoman Empire provides a newanalysis of this process in the Balkans and the Anatolian provinces, outlining the transition from revolutionary euphoria to increasing tensions at local and central levels. Focusing on the compromises, successes and failures in the immediate aftermath of 1908, and based on new primary material and Ottoman-Turkish sources, this book represents an essential contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and modern Turkey.

This innovative study of modern Turkey is the result of many years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research. Michael Meeker expertly combines anthropological and historical methods to examine the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in a major region of the country, the eastern Black Sea coast. His most significant finding is that a state-oriented provincial oligarchy played a key role in successive programs of reform over the course of more than two hundred years of imperial and national history. As Meeker demonstrates, leading individuals backed by interpersonal networks determined the outcome of the modernizing process, first during the westernizing period of the Empire, then during the revolutionary period of the Republic. To understand how such a state-oriented provincial oligarchy was produced and reproduced along the eastern Black Sea coast, Meeker integrates a contemporary ethnographic study of public life in towns and villages with a historical study of official documents, consular reports, and travel narratives. A Nation of Empire provides anthropologists, historians, and students of Eastern Europe and the Middle East with a new understanding of the complexities and contradictions of modern Turkish experience.