Turkey

1. For a useful summary, based on recent research, of the problems involved in estimating the population, see Donald Quataert (1994) ‘The age of reforms, 1812–1914’, in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert (eds) An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 777–98. The main problem is uncertainty about the average size of a household. Adding one person per household adds 5 million to the total.

2. Quataert, op. cit., 779.

3. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (ed.) (1982) Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, New York: Holmes, 2 vols. Research based on local court records (kadi sicilleri), which have become increasingly popular over the last 20 years, often shows that Christians and Jews took their cases to the Ottoman şeriat courts.

4. An excellent description of the structure of the Ottoman ruling elite on the eve of the nineteenth century reforms can be found in the first two chapters of Carter V. Findley (1980) Bureaucratic reform in the Ottoman Empire: the Sublime Porte 1789–1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press. This passage is largely based on Findley’s analysis.

5. This picture has been formed primarily by the statesman and scholar Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, whose historical writings became very influential. See Christoph K. Neumann (1994) Das indirekte Argument: ein Plädoyer für die Tanzimat vermittels der Historie. Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Paşas Ta’rih, Münster: Lit, 108–21.

6. Carter V. Findley (1988) Ottoman civil officialdom: a social history, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 47, gives 2000 as the total number. This seems high when compared with the official staffing numbers quoted in Findley’s Bureaucratic reform, but it probably includes the overstaffing not visible in the official numbers.

7. Malcolm E. Yapp makes a convincing case for such a low percentage in the excellent introduction to his (1987) The making of the modern Near East 1792–1923, London: Longman, 40–1.

8. Bruce McGowan (1994) ‘The age of the Ayans, 1699–1812’, in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert (eds) An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 714.

9. Dick Douwes (2000) The Ottomans in Syria: a history of justice and oppression, London: I.B. Tauris, 154–5. Douwes gives a very detailed breakdown of the tax income of the district of Hama in the province of Damascus, which was a composite of over forty different kinds of tax.

10. These realities of late eighteenth-century warfare are described in Virginia H. Aksan (1999) ‘Ottoman military recruitment strategies in the late eighteenth century’, in Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.) Arming the state: military conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia, 1775–1925, I.B. Tauris, 21–39.

11. This thesis was first developed by Willam H. MacNeill (1964) in his Europe’s steppe frontier 1500–1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

12. Bruce McGowan (1994) ‘The age of the Ayans, 1699–1812’, in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert (ed.) An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 681.

13. See for instance the contributions by Suraiya Faroqhi (for the seventeenth century) and Donald Quataert (for the nineteenth), in İnalcık with Quataert, op. cit. Quataert has dealt with the phenomenon in his several studies of Ottoman manufacturing, as has Sherry Vatter (1995) in her ‘Militant textile weavers in Damascus: waged artisans and the Ottoman labour movement 1850–1914’, in Donald Quataert and Erik-Jan Zürcher, Workers and the working class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic 1839–1950, London: I.B. Tauris, 35–57.

14. See Reşat Kasaba (1988) The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: the nineteenth century, Albany: SUNY Press, 18–23.

15. The spurious nature of the Russian claims is demonstrated in Roderick H. Davison (1990) ‘“Russian skill and Turkish imbecility”: the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji reconsidered’, in his Essays in Ottoman and Turkish history, 1774–1923: the impact of the West, Austin: University of Texas Press, 29–50.

Between Tradition and Innovation: Sultan Selim III and the ‘New Order’, 1789–1807

1. The extent of Western influence on the Ottoman elite is discussed in Stanford J. Shaw (1971) Between old and new: the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 180–99.

2. Bernard Lewis (1961) The emergence of modern Turkey, London: Oxford University Press, 57.

3. Bernard Lewis (1953) ‘The impact of the French revolution on Turkey’, Journal of world history, 1 (1), 105–25.

4. Among the many studies of nationalism, I still think that Elie Kedourie’s (1960) Nationalism (London: Hutchinson) is the most enlightening to a student of Ottoman history. It is also deeply pessimistic.

5. Reşat Kasaba (1988) The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: the nineteenth century, Albany: SUNY Press, 20–2.

6. Halil İnalcık (1964) gives an interesting analysis of the document in his ‘Sened-i ittifak ve Gülhane hatt-i humâyunu’, Belleten, 28 (112), 603–22.

1. The Kurdish emirates were suppressed gradually in the two decades following Mahmut II’s destruction of the janissaries in 1826. The last important emirate to be subjected, in 1847, was that of Botan, which had its centre at Cizre and was ruled by the Bedirhan family, who would remain important Kurdish notables until this day. Cf. Martin van Bruinessen (1992) Agha, shaikh and state: the social and political structures of Kurdistan, London: Zed Books, 175–80 (original edition 1978).

2. Bernard Lewis (1961) The emergence of modern Turkey, London: Oxford University Press, 103, even describes Halet as ‘a convinced reactionary’, who hated anything European.

3. Matthew S. Anderson (1966) The Eastern Question 1774–1923: a study in international relations, London: Macmillan, 51–2.

4. Anderson, op. cit., 54.

5. Khaled Fahmy (1997) ‘Conscription in Mehmet Ali’s Egypt’, in Erik Jan Zürcher (ed.) Arming the state: military conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia 1775–1925, 59–77. Also, by the same author, see All the pasha’s men: Mehmet Ali, his army and the making of modern Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In Mehmet Ali’s army, the officer corps consisted of ‘Turks’ (Turkish speaking Ottomans born in Anatolia or the Balkans), while the conscripts were Arabic speakers.

1. Enver Ziya Karal (1983) Osmanlı Tarihi. V. Cilt, Nizam-i Cedid ve tanzimat devirleri (1789–1856), Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 137 (originally published 1947).

2. The expression ‘Eastern Question’ entered diplomatic parlance at the time of the Congress of Verona in 1822. For a detailed survey of the problem, see Matthew A. Anderson (1972) The Eastern Question 1774–1923: a study in international relations, London: Macmillan (first edition 1966). For an excellent brief summary, see also Walter Alison Phillips’s (1962) ‘Eastern Question’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago/London, vol. 7, 861–8, based on the same author’s contributions to the Cambridge modern history.

3. Erik-Jan Zürcher (1999) ‘The Ottoman conscription system in theory and practice, 1844–1918’, International review of social history, 43 (3), 437–9.

4. It is very hard to obtain exact figures on inflation for this era, but the value of the main Ottoman coin, the kuruş, fell from eight to the Venetian ducat in 1800 to 45 to the ducat in 1834. The silver content of the coin went down from 5.9 to less than one gram during the three decades of Mahmut’s rule. (See Şevket Pamuk (1994) ‘Money in the Ottoman Empire, 1326–1914’, in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert, An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 967, 970 and 975.

5. Kemal H. Karpat (1985) Ottoman population 1830–1914: demographic and social characteristics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 21–2.

6. Kemal H. Karpat, op. cit., 116.

7. Şevket Pamuk (1987) The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913: trade, investment and production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19–20.

8. Pamuk, op. cit., 11.

9. Pamuk, op. cit., 149.

10. This is, in fact, the main conclusion of Reşat Kasaba’s (1987) The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: the nineteenth century, Albany: SUNY Press.

11. Pamuk, op. cit., 40.

12. Pamuk, op. cit., 26.

1. For the term Tanzimat, see Roderic H. Davison (1973) Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856–1876, New York: Gordian, 42 (originally published by Princeton University Press in 1963); for the High Council, see Davison, op. cit., 28.

2. Literally, what the sultan said was that: ‘the objects of our favours are without exception the people of Islam and the other peoples (millets) among the subjects of our imperial sultanate.’ In the French version of the text distributed by the Porte, the Muslims were not mentioned separately (Davison, op. cit., 40).

3. The Druze, or Muwahhidun (Unitarians) as they call themselves, were (and are) an isolated Arabic-speaking community living in the Shuf mountains of Lebanon and in the Hawran region in Syria (to use the modern terms). They are adherents of a ‘secret’ religion, which split off from Ismaili Shi’ism in eleventh-century Egypt.

4. Davison, op. cit., Appendix A, 413.

5. The introduction of conscription took some time. It had been discussed towards the end of Mahmut’s reign and it was one of the promises of the Gülhane edict. New army regulations incorporating a system of conscription were promulgated in September 1843 and the system of conscription by drawing of lots was established in 1848. Cf. Erik-Jan Zürcher (1999) ‘The Ottoman conscription system in theory and practice 1844–1918’, in Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.) Arming the state: military conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia 1775–1925, I.B. Tauris, 82.

6. A clear description and a chart of the chequered history of the meclis can be found in Mehmet Seyitdanlıoğlu (1991) Tanzimat devrinde Meclis-i Vâlâ (1838–1868), Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 64.

7. Donald Quataert (1994) ‘The age of reforms, 1812–1914’, in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert, An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 855.

8. Quataert, op. cit., 856–60 describes the conflicting evidence on the question of whether the land law was used by large landowners and tribal chiefs to expropriate small cultivators.

9. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw (1977) History of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. Volume 2, Reform, revolution and republic: the rise of modern Turkey 1808–1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86–7.

10. Davison, op. cit., 144–7, 160–3.

11. Davison, op. cit., 132–3.

12. We have very little information about literacy rates at this time, but this can be inferred from the fact that the first census of the Turkish Republic, in 1927, showed that even then only 10.6 per cent of the population was literate. While it is true that literacy was much higher among the Christian minorities (who by 1927 had all but disappeared), literacy among Muslims was probably lower in the mid-nineteenth century. Cf. Orhan Cavit Tütengil (1980) ‘1927 yılında Türkiye’, in Atatürk’ün büyük söylevinin 50: yılı semineri. Bildiriler ve tartışmalar, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 56.

13. Şevket Pamuk (1987) The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913: trade, investment and production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 28–9.

14. A comprehensive overview of issue prices, costs to the government and rates of interest is given in Christopher Clay’s exhaustive study (2000) Gold for the sultan: Western bankers and Ottoman finance 1856–1881, London: I.B. Tauris, Appendix 1.

15. Clay, op. cit., 409.

16. Clay, op. cit., 69.

17. Davison, op. cit., 100–2.

18. The theme has been treated in depth in Albert Hourani’s famous (1962) Arabic thought in the liberal age, London: Oxford University Press.

19. By far the best study of the Young Ottomans is still Şerif Mardin’s (1962) The genesis of Young Ottoman thought: a study in the modernization of Turkish political ideas, Princeton: Princeton University Press, on which this account is based.

1. Roderic H. Davison (1991) ‘Mahmud Nedim Pasha’, in C. E. Bosworth et al. (eds) Encyclopaedia of Islam: new edition, Leiden: E. J. Brill, vol., VI, 68–9.

2. Şevket Pamuk (1987) The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14.

3. Christopher Clay (2000) Gold for the sultan: Western bankers and Ottoman finance 1856–1881, London: I.B. Tauris, 574.

4. Matthew S. Anderson (1966) The Eastern Question 1774–1923: a study in international relations, London: Macmillan, 184.

5. Robert Devereux (1963) The first Ottoman constitutional period: a study of the Midhat constitution and parliament, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 39.

Reactionary Despotism or Culmination of the Reforms? The Reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II

1. Robert Devereux (1963) The first Ottoman constitutional period: a study of the Midhat constitution and parliament, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 126–7.

2. Devereux, op. cit., 248–9.

3. This point of view is taken in Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw (1977) History of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. Volume 2: Reform, revolution and republic: the rise of modern Turkey 1808–1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–272.

4. Donald Quataert (1983) Social disintegration and popular resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: reactions to European economic penetration, New York: New York University Press, 96, describes how sailing vessels carried about 50 per cent of the total tonnage shipped to Istanbul in the 1860s and how that share dropped to 10 per cent by the end of the 1870s. In İzmir, the share of steamships, which was already as high as 80 per cent in 1872 went up to 95 per cent ten years later.

5. Orhan Koloğlu (n.d.) ‘Osmanlı basını: içeriği ve rejimi’, in Murat Belge (ed.) Tanzimat’tan cumhuriyet’e Türkiye ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: İletişim, vol. 1, 87. The volume contains a series of ten articles and essays, which represent the state of the art in this field.

6. Selim Deringil (1998) The well-protected domains: ideology and the legitimation of power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909, London: I.B. Tauris, gives a fascinating picture of how Abdülhamit used Islam to reinforce the ideological basis of the regime.

7. About half of the total expense was met from contributions, not only from within the empire but also from India, where the Hyderabad-based ‘Central Committee for the Hijaz Railway’ waged an effective fund-raising campaign. See Azmi Özcan (1997) Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain (1877–1924), Leiden: E. J. Brill, 108–10.

8. Justin McCarthy (1995) Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922, Princeton: Darwin Press, 15–18, 32–5.

9. McCarthy, op. cit., 91.

10. İlber Ortaylı (1983) Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Alman nüfuzu, Istanbul: Kaynak, 67.

11. Şevket Pamuk (1987) The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913: trade, investment and production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14–17.

12. Pamuk, op. cit., 66.

13. Donald Quataert describes the process of restructuring undergone by the Ottoman manufacturing industry in his ground-breaking chapter on manufacturing in Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert (1994) An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 888–933.

14. Justin McCarthy (1983) Muslims and minorities: the population of Ottoman Anatolia and the end of the empire, New York: New York University Press, 2.

15. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (1995) The Young Turks in opposition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 74.

16. Hanioğlu, op. cit., 86.

17. Hanioğlu, op. cit., 32. For LeBon’s ideas, which were very popular among the younger officers of countries as far apart as Romania and Tunisia, see Robert A. Nye (1975) The origins of crowd psychology: Gustave LeBon and the crisis of mass democracy in the Third Republic, London: Sage.

18. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (2001) Preparation for a revolution: the Young Turks, 1902–1908, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 136–41.

1. Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın (1976) Siyasal anılar, Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 3.

2. Yavuz Selim Karakışla describes the strike wave and its subsequent suppression by the Unionists in his ‘The emergence of the Ottoman industrial working class, 1839–1923’, in Donald Quataert and Erik Jan Zürcher (eds) Workers and working class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic 1839–1950, 19–34. As he shows in the article, the strikes were motivated by wage demands and demands for better working conditions. With one exception they were apolitical.

3. The episode is described in detail in Aykut Kansu (1997) The revolution of 1908 in Turkey, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 120–3.

4. There were 153 Turks, 53 Arabs, 27 Albanians and 40 Christians according to Kansu (op. cit., 239–40). Feroz Ahmad and Dankwart Rustow (1976) ‘İkinci meşrutiyet döneminde meclisler 1908–1918’, Güneydoğu Avrupa araştırmaları dergisi, 4–5, 247 gives a slightly different distribution: 142 Turks, 60 Arabs, 25 Albanians, 23 Greeks, 12 Armenians, 5 Jews and 5 Slavs.

5. Sina Akşin reaches these conclusions in his authoritative 1967 Ph.D. thesis, (1970) 31 Mart olayı, Ankara: Sevinç, but, influenced perhaps by Islamist activities in the Turkey of the 1990s (in particular the Sivas arson attack) in his recent publications he interprets the 1909 events as an instance of fundamentalism.

6. Taner Akçam (1999) İnsan hakları ve Ermeni sorunu: İttihat ve Terakki’den kurtuluş savaşına, Ankara: İmge, 122.

7. M. Naim Turfan (2000) The rise of the Young Turks: politics, the military and Ottoman collapse, London: I.B. Tauris, 243 (figures calculated by S. Karatumu in his Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri tarihi).

8. Feroz Ahmad (1969) The Young Turks: the Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish politics 1908–1914, Oxford: Clarendon, 107.

9. Donald Quataert (1983) Social disintegration and popular resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: reactions to European economic penetration, New York: New York University Press, 121–45.

10. Erik Jan Zürcher (1999) ‘Kosovo revisited: Sultan Reşad’s Macedonian journey of 1911’, Middle Eastern studies, 35 (4), 26–39. The number of Albanians was far fewer (less than one-tenth in fact) than the 300,000 mentioned in the Unionist press of the period.

11. Karl Klinghardt (translator and editor) (1927) Denkwürdigkeiten des Marschalls İzzet Pascha: ein kritischer Beitrag zur Kriegsschuldfrage, Leipzig: Koehler, 179.

12. Feroz Ahmad, op. cit., 120.

13. In his The rise of the Young Turks (368–70), M. Naim Turfan propounds the thesis that two officers, Ali Fethi (Okyar) and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), had originally proposed the amphibious operation. His argument relies on a report, dated 4 February, written by these two on the landings. According to Turfan they must have used Gregorian instead of Julian (Mali, confused by Turfan with Hicri) dating by mistake; 4 February 1913 (Gregorian) would be equivalent to 22 January (Julian). This, however, is quite inconceivable for Ottoman officers (there are no other known examples). The argument must, therefore, be rejected, especially as the report also talks about the fleet being in the harbour of Gallipoli, where it went only after the landings had miscarried. In fact, the report was part of the recriminations among those responsible for the fiasco (Cf. Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor, 58–9).

14. Justin McCarthy (1995) Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922, Princeton: Darwin, 159–61 gives a total of over 400,000 refugees.

15. The emergence of the Teşkilât out of a more amorphous band of irregulars in 1913–14 is described in Philip Stoddard (1963) The Ottoman government and the Arabs 1911–1918: a preliminary study of the Teşkilât-I Masusa, Princeton: unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 52 ff.

16. The treaty text in translation is given in Ulrich Trumpener (1968) Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 28. Trumpener emphasizes the makeshift character of the agreement (p. 16).

17. Trumpener, op. cit., 54.

18. Justin McCarthy (1983) Muslims and minorities: the population of Ottoman Anatolia and the end of empire, New York: New York University Press, 30, gives 600,000 as the most likely number. While McCarthy’s interpretation of the Armenian problem is highly contentious, his estimates of the number of victims seem well founded.

19. For this overview of the Armenian question I have largely followed Taner Akçam’s İnsan hakları ve Ermeni sorunu, which represents the state of the art at the time of writing.

20. Kuşçubaşızade Eşref Bey, a leading member of the ‘Special Organization’, described the Ottoman Greeks as ‘internal tumours’ that had to be removed (Celâl Bayar (1967) Ben de yazdım: Millî mücadeleye giriş, vol. 5, Istanbul: Baha, 1572–82). The infamous governor of Diyarbakır, Dr Mehmet Reşit, saw the problem as a choice ‘between killing the disease and the patients or seeing the destruction of the Turkish nation at the hands of madmen’. Cf. Mithat Şükrü Bleda (1979) İmparatorluğun çöküşü, Istanbul: Remzi, 61. (Former CUP secretary General Mithat Bey seems to agree fully with this assessment.)

21. The number is based on Robert Rhodes James (1965) Gallipoli, London: Batsford, 348, but computing casualty figures for the Ottoman Empire in the First World War is a hazardous business. The official Turkish figure is 251,000 casualties for the Gallipoli campaign (Alan Moorehead (1989) Gallipoli, London: Andre Deutsch, (first edition 1956), 300). Edward J. Erickson (2001) in Ordered to die: a history of the Ottoman army in the First World War, Westport: Greenwood, 237, gives a lower figure of 165,000. This may, however, exclude the sick. The Australian War Memorial (1988) gives Turkish dead as 86,692, while Dickinson gives a total of 56,643.

22. Ahmed Emin [Yalman] (1930) Turkey in the world war, New Haven: Yale University Press, 262.

23. Jehuda L. Wallach (1976) Anatomie einer Militärhilfe: die preussisch–deutschen Militärmissionen in der Türkei 1835–1919, Düsseldorf: Droste, 246.

24. Zafer Toprak (1988) ‘Osmanlı Kadınları Çalıştırma Cemiyeti: Kadın askerler ve Millî Aile’, Tarih ve Toplum, 9 (51), 34–8.

25. Celâl Bayar, op. cit., 1572–82; Erkan Şenşekerci (2000) Türk devriminde Celâl Bayar (1918–1960), Istanbul: Alfa, 35–6.

26. Zafer Toprak lists them in his Türkiye’de “Millî İktisat” (1908–1918), Ankara: Yurt, 1982, 363–4.

27. Yalman, op. cit., 151. The figures that Yalman gives (and that modern historians like Zafer Toprak have used) are based on the cost-of-living index drawn up by the Public Debt Administration to estimate what bonuses should be paid to its employees.

1. Erik Jan Zürcher (1998) ‘The Ottoman Empire and the armistice of Moudros’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds) At the eleventh hour: reflections, hopes and anxieties at the closing of the Great War, 1918, London: Leo Cooper.

2. Erik Jan Zürcher (1984) The Unionist factor: the role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish national movement 1905–1926, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 104–5.

3. N. Bilge Criss (1999) Istanbul under allied occupation 1918–1923, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 94–114. Criss builds on, but significantly expands, the story related in Zürcher, Unionist factor, 80 ff.

4. Tevfik Bıyıklıoğlu (1956) Trakya’da millî mücadele, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 128.

5. The text of the National Pact presents several problems. First, some authors speak about ‘within and without the armistice lines’, while others give ‘within the armistice lines’. This is, of course, a fundamental difference and the specific demands of the National Pact would seem to indicate that the maximalist version is the correct one (as demands are formulated for western Thrace, Batumi and the Arab lands as well). Second, there is confusion about what binds the Ottoman Muslims together. Is it ‘origin’ (asıl) or aim (emel)? Both versions have coexisted in the literature since the 1920s. The confusion must go back to the handwritten text (in the Arabic script), as a printed text would have been unequivocal. (Cf. Erik Jan Zürcher (2000) ‘Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish nationalists’, in Kemal H. Karpat (ed.), Ottoman past and today’s Turkey, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 170.

6. Ahmed Emin [Yalman] (1930) Turkey in the world war, New Haven: Yale University Press, 151.

7. Criss, op. cit., 29 ff.

8. Hüseyin Dağtekin (1955) ‘İstiklâl savaşında Anadolu’ya kaçırılan mühimmat ve askerî eşya hakkında tanzim edilmiş mühim bir vesika’, Tarih vesikaları (Yeni seri), (1) 9–15.

9. Criss, op. cit., 100–1.

10. Kâzım Karabekir (1960) İstiklâl harbimiz, Istanbul: Türkiye, 391.

11. Harold Nicolson (1934) Curzon: the last phase 1919–1925: a study in postwar diplomacy, London: Constable, 95–7 for an analysis of Lloyd-George’s attitude towards Venizelos and the Greeks.

12. Paul C. Helmreich (1974) From Paris to Sèvres: the partition of the Ottoman Empire at the peace conference of 1919–1920, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 218

13. Western-style family names were not made compulsory in Turkey until 1934. For ease of identification, in the following pages the surname later adopted is given in brackets after the name by which that person was generally known before then.

14. Ali Fuat Cebesoy (1953) Millî mücadele hatıraları, Istanbul: Vatan, 72.

15. Mahmut Goloğlu (1969) Sivas kongresi, Ankara: Başnur, 73–4. Goloğlu also points out that the much higher numbers (up to 99) mentioned in some later studies are entirely baseless.

16. Law 7 of 7 June 1920. See Gothard Jaeschke (1970) Türk kurtuluş savaşının kronolojisi: Mondros’tan Mudanya‘ya kadar 30 ekim 1918–11 ekim 1922, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 106.

17. Law 2 of 29 April 1920. See Jaeschke, op. cit., 101.

18. The future status of the Straits was left to a separate conference of littoral states, but it was stipulated that the decisions of the conference would not endanger Turkish sovereignty. Cf. Reha Parla (1985) Belgelerle Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin uluslararası temelleri, Lefkoşe (Nicosia): Tezel, 187.

19. Because of his legendary status among the Turkish left, the responsibility for the murder of Mustafa Suphi has always been a very contentious issue in Turkey. There is little doubt that the local Trabzon strongman Yahya Kahya was the man immediately responsible for the murder, but there is controversy over the question of on whose orders he acted (if we accept that it is unlikely that he acted on his own): the Ankara government, the supporters of Enver Pasha or the Bolsheviks. Ankara certainly had the strongest motive for eliminating him, however. The Bolsheviks could easily have prevented his crossing the border (together with the Bolshevik envoy Mdivani) in the first place.

20. Halide Edib [Adıvar] (1928) The Turkish ordeal, New York: Century, 91.

21. Michael M. Finefrock (1976) ‘From sultanate to republic: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the structure of Turkish politics, 1922–1924’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, Appendix E.

22. Numbers taken from Justin McCarthy (1983) Muslims and minorities: the population of Ottoman Anatolia and the end of empire, New York: New York University Press, Chapter 7.

23. William Hale (1981) The political and economic development of modern Turkey, London: Croom Helm.

24. Ahmed Emin [Yalman], op. cit., 162–3.

25. Ahmed Emin [Yalman], op. cit., Appendix 2.

1. In his conversations with journalists in İzmit, Mustafa Kemal promised the Kurds local autonomy and the free use of their own language. Cf: Mustafa Kemal Eskişehir – İzmit konuşmaları (1923): İlk sansürsüz tam metin, Kaynak, 1993, 104.

2. Erik-Jan Zürcher (1991) Political opposition in the early Turkish republic: the Progressive Republican Party 1924–1925, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 83. Mustafa Kemal gave an hour-long speech in which he advocated more drastic action.

3. Robert Olson (1989) The emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the Sheikh Sait rebellion, 1880–1925, Austin: University of Texas, 125.

4. Mete Tunçay (1989) T.C.’de tek parti yönetiminin kurulması (1923–1931), Istanbul: Cem, 169. This figure does not include the (much higher) number of executed deserters.

1. Mete Tunçay (1981) Türkiye Cumhuriyetinde tek parti yönetiminin kurulması (1923–1931), Ankara: Yurt, 308. Tunçay sees the 1931 party congress as a turning point because now a totalitarian model replaced the earlier efforts to work with a tame opposition. The 1931 congress was also the first to produce a more or less coherent ideological framework (the six principles of Kemalism). As in 1927, the party embraced the principle of unification, rather than separation, of powers.

2. An overview of the most important groups and figures can be found in Hakkı Uyar (1998) Tek parti dönemi ve Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Istanbul: Boyut, 99 ff.

3. Çetin Yetkin (1982) Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası olayı, Istanbul: Karacan, 208. Mustafa Kemal did this in reply to an open letter addressed to him by Yunus Nadi the editor of the newspaper Cumhuriyet.

4. Walter F. Weiker (1973) Political tutelage and democracy in Turkey: the Free Party and its aftermath, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 115.

5. The fact that many people who had supported him in 1930 later denounced him was especially galling. Osman Okyar and Mehmet Seitdanlioğlu (1997) Fethi Okyar’ın anıları: Atatürk, Okyar ve çok partili Türkiye, Istanbul: İş Bankası, contains a memoir on the episode written by Fethi Bey, which clearly demonstrates his anger and disappointment. Nevertheless, he and Mustafa Kemal remained on speaking terms until the latter’s death in 1938.

6. Murat Belge (ed.) (n.d.) Cumhuriyet dönemi Türkiye ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: İletişim, vol. 2, 573 gives an excellent synopsis of the ‘Menemen event’, which is still part of secularist discourse in Turkey in the early twenty-first century. A very interesting analysis is also given by Hamit Bozarslan in his article ‘Le mahdisme en Turquie: l’incident de Menemen en 1930’, REMMM, 91–4, 297–320. According to Bozarslan there is no proof that the dervishes actually were Nakşibendis.

7. Walter Weiker, op. cit., 160–3.

8. Füsun Üstel (1997) İmparatorluktan ulus-devlete Türk milliyetçiliği: Türk Ocakları (1912–1931), Istanbul: İletişim, 358–9. Üstel bases herself on François Georgeon’s earlier work on the Turkish Hearths during the republic for this passage.

9. For a description and analysis of the German expatriate colony in Turkey during the Hitler era, see Sabine Hillebrecht (2000) Haymatloz: Exil in der Türkei 1933–1945, Berlin: Verein Aktives Museum.

10. Cemil Koçak (1986) Türkiye’de millî şef dönemi (1938–1945), Ankara: Yurt, 17–19.

11. Andrew Mango (1999) Atatürk, London: John Murray, 524, basing himself on the memoirs of Hasan Rıza Soyak.

12. Selim Deringil (1989) Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War: an ‘active’ neutrality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–7.

13. The question whether Atatürk was a dictator was always a sensitive one in Kemalist Turkey. Former party secretary Recep Peker touches briefly on the position of the ‘leader’ (şef) in his famous (1935) İnkılap dersleri notları (Ankara: Ulus, 65–6), but he avoids any discussion of dictatorship there. That the discussion remained on the agenda is shown by a curious booklet published at Güven (Istanbul) in 1949; this was A. Muhtar Kumral, Atatürk diktatör müdür? which consists of a selection of anecdotes and texts from Atatürk’s life, purporting to demonstrate that he was not, in fact, a dictator. The booklet clearly forms part of the defensive reaction of the Kemalists when faced with the growing Democrat Party opposition in the immediate postwar era.

14. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that Islam only became the state religion with the 1924 constitution. The old Ottoman constitution made no reference to a state religion.

15. For an overview of all the attempts to change the Ottoman alphabet, see Hüseyin Yorulmaz (1995) Tanzimattan cumhuriyete alfabe tartışmaları, Istanbul: Kitabevi.

16. The most famous instance of a speech in new ‘real’ Turkish (öztürkçe) was Atatürk’s dinner speech to the visiting Crown Prince of Sweden on 3 October 1934, which contained sentences such as ‘Genlik baysal içinde erk surmenin gücü işte bundadır’, largely made up of newly invented words. (Cf. Atatürk’ün söylev ve demeçleri II (1906–1938), Ankara: TTK, 1959, 277–8.

17. Büşra Ersanlı Behar (1992) İktidar ve tarih: Türkiye’de “resmi tarih” tezinin oluşumu (1929–1937), Istanbul: AFA, 203.

18. Gotthard Jaeschke (1951) ‘Der Islam in der neuen Türkei: Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, Welt des Islams Neue Serie, 1, 74–6.

19. Michael Finefrock (1976) ‘From sultanate to republic: Mustafa Kemal and the structure of Turkish politics 1922–1924’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton, 313.

20. Uygur Kocabaşoğlu (ed.) (2001) Türkiye İş Bankası tarihi, Istanbul: İş Bankası, 112 ff.

21. William Hale (1981) The political and economic development of modern Turkey, London: Croom Helm, 43.

22. Hale, op. cit., 62. The index recovered slightly in the years that followed.

23. Hale, op. cit., 56.

24. Hale, op. cit., 69.

25. For a good recent discussion of the wealth tax, based on all the extant literature, see Rıfat N. Bali (1999) Bir Türkleştirme serüveni (1923–1945): Cumhuriyet yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, Istanbul: İletişim, 424 ff.

26. Deringil, op. cit., 191 (text of the second protocol added to the ‘treaty of mutual assistance’).

27. Deringil, op. cit., 149.

1. Hakkı Devrim, et al. (ed.) (1974) Türkiye 1923–1973 ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: Kaynak, vol. 2, 583. Ten years later the number was 216 (ibid., vol. 3, 962).

2. Max Weston Thornburg (1949) Turkey: an economic appraisal, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 133.

3. The 1950 census of industry gives a total of 353,994 people working in 98,828 industrial establishments, but of these 96,626 were small and used less than ten mechanical horsepower (the equivalent of a light motorbike). Richard D. Robinson (1963) The first Turkish republic: a case study in national development, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 136.

4. An interesting analysis of the tensions creating disaffection with the CUP is given in Taner Timur (1991) Türkiye’de çok partili hayata geçiş, Istanbul: İletişim, 20 ff.

5. Baskın Oran (ed.) (2002) Türk dış politikası: Kurtuluş savaşından bugüne olgular, belgeler, yorumlar, Istanbul: İletişim, vol. 1 (1919–1980), 502.

6. These numbers are mentioned in Kemal Karpat (1959) Turkey’s politics: the transition to a multi-party system, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 99. Thornburg, op. cit. gives slightly different percentages: 97 per cent smaller than 125 dönüm and 2.3 per cent between 125 and 1250 dönüm.

7. Karpat, op. cit., 164–5.

8. Timur, op. cit., 96 ff.

1. Frederick W. Frey (1965) The Turkish political elite, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 356 ff.

2. Feroz Ahmad (1977) The Turkish experiment in democracy 1950–1975, London: Hurst, 37.

3. Max Weston Thornburg (1949) Turkey: an economic appraisal, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 149; James S. Barker et al. (1951) The economy of Turkey: an analysis and recommendations for a development program, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

4. Ahmad, op. cit. 122–46; William Hale (1981) The political and economic development of modern Turkey, London: Croom Helm, 86–113.

5. Alpaslan Işıklı (n.d.) ‘Cumhuriyet döneminde Türk sendikacılı[ğ]ı’, in Murat Belge (ed.) Cumhuriyet dönemi Türkiye ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: İletişim, vol. 7, 1828.

6. Hale, op. cit., 102.

7. Ali Gevgilili (1987) Yükseliş ve düşüş, Yassı Ada, 134 (with thanks to Socrates Petmezas and Vangelis Kechriotis).

8. Melek Fırat (2002) ‘Yunanıstan’la ilişkiler’, in Baskın Oran (ed.) Türk dış politikası: cilt 1 1919–1980, Istanbul: İletişim, 601.

9. A. Yücekök (1971) Türkiye’de din ve siyaset, Istanbul: Gerçek, 90.

10. In defending his decision to allow the prayer call to be recited in Arabic, Menderes made a distinction between the Kemalist reforms, which had taken hold (and should thus remain) and the ones that had been thought necessary in Atatürk’s day, but had not taken hold. These could now be reversed without damage to the secular character of Turkey.

11. There were 717 dead, 167 missing and 5247 wounded. Figures from Türkiye 1923–1973 ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: Kaynak, 1974, vol. 3, 950.

12. William Hale (1996) Türkiye’de ordu ve siyaset: 1789’dan günümüze, Istanbul: Hil (translation of Turkish military and politics, London: Routledge, 1994), 95.

13. Uygur Kocabaşoğlu (n.d.) ‘Radyo’, in Murat Belge (ed.) Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: İletişim, vol. 10, 2743.

1. Translation of the full text of the proclamation in Walter F. Weiker (1963) The Turkish revolution 1960–1961, Washington: Brookings Institution, 20–1.

2. Weiker, op. cit. is fairly positive, but for instance Richard D. Robinson (1963) The first Turkish republic, Cambridge MA: Harvard, 268–70 is far more critical.

3. Mehmet Ali Birand (1987) The generals coup in Turkey: an inside story of 12 September 1980, London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 42–4.

4. The state security courts were reinstituted after the military coup of 1980 and they would play an important part in the suppression of Kurdish and Islamist movements in the 1990s.

5. Mehmet Ali Birand, op. cit, 84 ff.

6. Clement H. Dodd (1983) The crisis of Turkish democracy, Beverley: Eothen, 20.

7. Suzanne Paine (1974) Exporting workers: the Turkish case, London: Cambridge University Press.

8. The text of Mehmet Akif’s rousing nationalist poem, which bore the title İstiklâl Marşı (Independence March) and the subtitle Kahraman ordumuza (to our heroic army), exudes strong religious feeling and a violent anti-Western sentiment. This is best expressed in these lines from the third stanza: ‘My frontier is like my heart filled with belief. Don’t be afraid, my nation!/How can this one-toothed monster you call civilization ever strangle such a faith?’ It is ironic that the fiercely secularist Turkish republic has had an anti-Western, Islamic poem for its national anthem for eighty years.

9. Alpaslan Işıklı (1836) ‘Cumhuriyet döneminde Türk sendikacılığı’, in Murat Belge (ed.) Cumhuriyet dönemi Türkiye ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: İletişim, n.d., vol. 7. Turkish unions often wildly exaggerated their membership and exact numbers are impossible to find.

10. For a discussion of these bilateral agreements, see Çağrı Erhan (2002) ‘Türkiye ile ABD arasındaki ikili anlaşmalar’, in Baskın Oran (ed.) Türk dış politikası: cilt 1 1919–1980, Istanbul: İletişim, 556. According to Erhan, the exact number of agreements is unknown even today.

11. On the face of it, it seems surprising that 60 years after the event, a young generation of Armenians, born after the Second World War, should turn into militants and take up the cause of their grandparents. There are two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanations for this. The first is that the civil war in Lebanon, with its important Armenian community, fuelled Muslim–Christian antagonism. The second, more profound, one is that the survivors of 1915 and their children had devoted all their energies to building a new life and integrating in their host countries, mostly France and the United States. They had succeeded so well that for the ‘third generation’ the memory of 1915 was about the only thing that still defined their Armenian identity. The process of rediscovery of this past by an American–Armenian adolescent is described graphically in Peter Balakian’s (1998) Black dog of fate, New York: Broadway.

1. In its ‘Proclamation number one’, the junta legitimized its action by referring to the duty the armed forces had under the Law on Internal Service (İç Hizmet Kanunu) to protect the republic. The key term in the proclamation is ‘national unity and cohesion’ (millî birlik ve berbaberlik), which was to remain the army’s key political concept in the 1980s and 1990s.

2. Clement H. Dodd (1983) The crisis of Turkish democracy, Beverley: Eothen, 47.

3. Dodd, op. cit., 45.

4. Formally, even the rectors were appointed directly by the president of the republic.

5. Dodd, op. cit., 45.

6. In the polarized climate of the later 1970s the Hearths of the Enlightened became closely associated with the NAP of Alpaslan Türkeş and they agitated primarily against Ecevit and his RPP. Both Turgut and Korkut Özal were members of the organization in this period. Cf. Hugh Poulton (1997) Top hat, grey wolf and crescent: Turkish nationalism and the Turkish republic, London: Hurst, 179–81.

7. Poulton, op. cit, 184–5. After the 1980 coup, the leading members of the boards overseeing the media and higher education as well as the university rectors and education ministers were all members of the Hearths of the Enlightened. The influence of the synthesis in Turkish schoolbooks is shown convincingly in Etienne Copeaux (1998) Türk tarih tezinden Türk–Islam sentezine, Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı/Yurt.

8. Over the last ten years this has been a recurrent phenomenon. The Turkish legal system has been modernized and liberalized considerably, but there has often been a lack of synchronization between the changes to the different laws in force at the same time.

9. That she could gain more seats with a slightly lower percentage of the popular vote is due to the peculiar election system in force in Turkey. Parties need to cross a 10 per cent threshold in the electoral district. Then they also need to cross a national threshold of 10 per cent. This can lead to strange results in areas with a polarized political landscape. Let us assume that there is a southeastern district where the Kurdish party HEP (later HaDeP, still later DeHaP) gains 60 per cent of the popular vote and the Turkish ultra-nationalists (NAP) come in second with 25 per cent. All other parties poll less than 10 per cent. If the Kurdish party has regional, but not national support, it will not cross the national threshold. Its votes will be lost and the ultra-nationalists will take all seats (assuming it does cross the national threshold). In other words, the Kurdish nationalists will be ‘represented’ by Turkish nationalists in Ankara. If the NAP does not cross the national threshold, all the seats of the district will be allocated proportionally to those parties that do.

10. Turkish Probe, 10 October 1997, 248.

11. Increasing compulsory education by 60 per cent overnight created enormous problems with insufficient teachers, overcrowded classrooms and lack of teaching materials. Critics pointed out that this was also because Turkey still only spent 2.1 per cent of its GDP on education, a third of what Egypt, Tunisia or Jordan spent (Turkish Probe, 12 September 1997, 244).

12. Turkish Probe, 3 January 1999, 312.

13. AK in Turkish also means white, clean or transparent.

14. See Turkish Probe, 30 January 2000, 368 for an analysis of the movement and its history.

15. Mehmet Emin Yıldırım (forthcoming) ‘The Turkish economy between 1950 and 2000: policy and performance’, Philologiae et Historiae Turcicae Fundamenta V, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz.

16. İsmet İmset (1992) The PKK: a report on separatist violence in Turkey 1973–1992, Ankara: TDN, 107 ff.

17. These 11 provinces together formed the ‘Extraordinary Zone’, known by its acronym OHAL in Turkey. From 2000 onwards the number of provinces in the OHAL was gradually reduced until it was finally abolished completely in November 2002.

18. Mane pulite (clean hands) was the name of a campaign conducted by Milan-based magistrates in Italy against corrupt links between the state and business. It had been triggered by the discovery of a rightist political–industrial network, which had been hatched inside the Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P–2) and in which financial officials of the Vatican had also been involved.

19. ‘Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and, protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.’ (www.mfa.gov.tr/grupa/ad/adab/copenhagen.htm)

20. Turkey bought the two words ‘without delay’ by agreeing as a NATO member to the use of NATO facilities for the new European rapid intervention force (in which, as a non-EU country, it did not participate).

21. This is demonstrated clearly in the memoirs of Celâl Bayar. He was one of the first Muslims to enter the modern banking profession. His initiative to start a school for railway personnel in İzmir during the First World War was laughed at by local Christians and foreigners alike (Celâl Bayar (1967) Ben de yazdım, Istanbul: Baha, vol. 5, 1555–8). Ethem Eldem (1999, A history of the Ottoman Bank, Istanbul: Ottoman Bank, 515) has shown that 53 per cent of the bank’s staff consisted of Ottoman nationals and that Muslims made up only 19 per cent of the bank’s Ottoman staff (as opposed to 72.5 per cent Christians and 8 per cent Jews). The Muslims were the lowest paid group by far, receiving only 39 per cent of the average salary. They almost never rose above menial jobs.

Notes