Bibliographical survey
The following description of literature on the modern history of Turkey is intended to serve both as a survey of the sources that have been used in the writing of this volume and as a practical guide to further reading. It is largely confined to monographic material, which represents the ‘state of the art’ in this field. The titles have been arranged roughly according to the sequence of the subjects dealt with in the book, but many of the titles listed here are relevant to more than one period or subject. There are, of course, many more titles available, and the reader who wants to delve deeper into a particular subject is advised to consult the bibliographies of the books listed here. Works that have not been included are biographies (except for those of Atatürk), memoirs and novels, though it goes without saying that they, too, are often important to the historian. Books dealing exclusively with the Balkans or the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire have also been omitted.
Any student of Turkey who wants to get a systematic overview of recent publications can do no better than to consult the yearly Türkologische Anzeiger (Turkology Annual), which has been published in Vienna since 1975 (originally as part of the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes) and covers books and articles in many languages.
General histories of modern Turkey
If the author and publishers of this book thought existing general histories of modern Turkey entirely satisfactory, this book would obviously not have been written. The situation is far from satisfactory; the supply of modern general histories dealing with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the last two centuries is meagre indeed. The classic work in this category undoubtedly is Bernard Lewis’s The emergence of modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). Originally published in 1961 and revised in 1968, Lewis’s book is a masterful and elegant treatment of the gradual intrusion of Western ideas into the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onwards and of Ottoman/Turkish reactions. The strengths of the book are the author’s breadth of vision and his extensive use of Ottoman and Turkish sources. His eye for the telling anecdote enlivens the story he tells. The main weakness of the book is that it is almost entirely a history of culture and ideas, with very little attention paid either to politics (as opposed to policies) or to socio-economic developments. Conceived in the late 1950s, even in its revised form the book is of necessity out of date and it bears traces of the strong belief in progress through modernization according to a universally applicable Western model prevalent in those years. Nevertheless, Emergence is a classic that every serious student of modern Turkey should read.
The other history of comparable size, Stanford and Ezel Shaw’s History of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, vol. II: Reform, revolution and republic: the rise of modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) has stood the test of time less well. The treatment of Stanford Shaw’s recognized areas of specialization, the reigns of Selim III and of Abdülhamit II, is the strongest part. The book is a mine of data (which, however, are not always accurate) and its bibliographical essays are extremely useful as guides for further reading, but the text lacks coherence and the parts dealing with the last hundred years suffer from a marked Turkish-nationalist bias, which shows in the treatment of the Armenian and Kurdish questions, for instance. Like Lewis, the Shaws see the basic theme of modern Turkish history as a struggle between light and dark: modernizers and pro-Westerners on the one hand, religious reactionaries on the other.
Among smaller-scale general histories, Geoffrey Lewis’s (1974) Modern Turkey (London and Tonbridge: Ernest Benn), first published in 1955 and thoroughly revised several times, should be mentioned. It is well written and dependable, with a strong emphasis on the republic’s political history. Comparable in size is Roderic Davison’s Turkey: a short history, 2nd edition, Huntingdon: Eothen, 1988 (first published by Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1968). It covers the whole of Ottoman and Turkish history and is therefore much less detailed on the republican period than Lewis, while giving more information on the nineteenth century. For the second edition of 1988, a new chapter covering Turkey in the 1970s and 1980s was added, but the older chapters were left untouched and are thus out of date. The useful bibliography at the back has been added to rather than updated. Feroz Ahmad’s (1993) The making of modern Turkey (London: Routledge) grew out of an essay on the role of the military in Turkish politics. Written by an acknowledged specialist on the twentieth-century history of Turkey, it is rich in detail and insights, but its perspective is staunchly Kemalist and in this sense it resembles that of Lewis and Shaw.
A very interesting and thought-provoking book is Cağlar Keyder’s (1987) State and class in Turkey: a study in capitalist development (London and New York: Verso). A historical essay rather than a textbook, it proposes an interpretation of modern Turkish history from the perspective of the incorporation of Turkey into the capitalist world system (the dependency school). Hard to read in places for non-sociologists, the book is useful for the contrast it provides to the work of ‘modernists’ like Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw and Roderic Davison.
In Turkey, the nationalist, secularist and modernist views of the Kemalist historians have long dominated the historiography of modern Turkey, as they have official historiography as expressed in textbooks for schools and universities. Attempts to write textbooks on the basis of revisionist historical research, often with a Marxist approach, have blossomed since the 1970s. The most notable example is the four-volume Türkiye tarihi (History of Turkey), edited by Sina Akşin, especially the last two volumes, Türkiye tarihi 3: Osmanlı devleti 1600–1908 (History of Turkey 3: the Ottoman State) (Istanbul: Cem, 1988) and Türkiye tarihi 4: Çağdaş Türkiye 1908–1980 (History of Turkey 4: modern Turkey) (Istanbul: Cem, 1989). They take Turkish history to 1980. The series is a little lacking in coherence and the quality of the contributions by the many authors is a bit uneven, though on the whole quite good. A strong point is the inclusion of chapters on art and education, making it a really comprehensive history. A weak point is the lack of foreign source materials.
Readers able to read Turkish should certainly consult the two excellent historical encyclopaedias by Murat Belge (ed.) Tanzimat’tan cumhuriyet’e Türkiye ansiklopedisi (Encyclopaedia of Turkey from the Tanzimat to the republic) (Istanbul: İletişim, 1986, 6 vols); and Murat Belge (ed.) Cumhuriyet dönemi Türkiye ansiklopedisi (Encyclopaedia of Turkey during the republic) (Istanbul: İletişim, 1983, 10 vols). Written largely from a left wing or socialist perspective, they undoubtedly represent the state of the art of modern history writing in Turkey.
Two works, which are not strictly speaking general histories, should be mentioned as indispensable tools in their respective fields. Tarık Zafer Tunaya’s (1952) Türkiye’de siyasî partiler 1859–1952 (Political parties in Turkey) (Istanbul: n.p.) is a survey of political parties in Turkey and gives details of their personnel, programmes and history. It is still a standard reference work. A second edition, published in three volumes in the 1980s has more material but also more mistakes. Niyazi Berkes’s The development of secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964) is a rich intellectual history of Turkey, covering the last two centuries.
Incorporation and early attempts at modernization (1792–1908)
There are very few monographs on the condition of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of reform and incorporation in the late eighteenth century. For a long time H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic society and the West: a study of the impact of Western civilization on Moslem culture in the Near East (London: Oxford University Press, 1951–1957, vol. 1, parts 1 and 2 – the only parts published) was the classic account of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, but it has been severely criticized by younger generations of historians. For an example of this critique, see Roger Owen (1975) ‘The Middle East in the eighteenth century – an “Islamic” society in decline: a critique of Gibb and Bowen’s Islamic society and the West’, Review of Middle Eastern studies, 1, pp. 101–12. Recently, the eighteenth century and especially the question of how far the changes of the nineteenth century were a continuation of an indigenous process rather than an effect of the impact of the West, have begun to receive the attention of historians. A trend-setting work in this respect was Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (eds) (1977) Studies in eighteenth century Islamic history (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press) but much of the best revisionist work in this field consists of regional histories, based on local archival material.
I found the introductory chapters of Carter Findley’s (1980) Bureaucratic reform in the Ottoman Empire: the Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press) and his (1989) Ottoman civil officialdom: a social history (Princeton: Princeton University Press) particularly useful as guides in this field. Incorporating the relevant modern literature, these books devote attention to the reality of Ottoman society, thus avoiding one of the two most common pitfalls of the older historiography of the Ottoman Empire: over-reliance on central government documents, which leads to an emphasis on norms rather than on realities and on the state rather than on society.
A textbook on the eighteenth and nineteenth century history of the empire that incorporates many of the results of modern social and cultural history and emphasizes these rather than political developments is Donald Quataert’s (2000) The Ottoman Empire 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
The classic study of the Ottoman Empire at the time of Sultan Selim III (and the French Revolution) is still Stanford Shaw’s (1971) Between old and new: the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1781–1807 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), the gist of which is also included in the above-mentioned general history by the same author. Discussions on the extent to which the ideas of the French revolution had an impact among the Ottomans go back to Bernard Lewis’s famous but controversial (1953) article, ‘The impact of the French Revolution in Turkey’, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 105–25.
For the reform policies of Sultan Mahmut II and the Tanzimat the above-mentioned books by Carter Findley are indispensable. The first volume contains institutional history of the changing bureaucracy, while the second is a social history of the members of that institution. In addition, Davison’s Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1851–1876 (2nd edition, New York: Gordian, 1973) is a thorough treatment of the second period of Tanzimat reforms, from the Reform Edict of 1856 to the constitution of 1876, concentrating on policy and administration. Davison was the greatest expert of his day on the nineteenth century modernization of the empire and a collection of his immaculately researched articles has been published as Essays in Ottoman and Turkish history 1744–1923: the impact of the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Halil İnalcık’s (1976) Application of the Tanzimat and its social effects (Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 33-page pamphlet, reprint from Archivum Ottomanicum V (1973) pp. 97–128) was a pioneering effort in trying to gauge the actual impact of the reforms in the provinces (as distinct from the policy statements of Istanbul). This line has since been followed in a number of articles by different authors concentrating mainly on the Arab provinces and Arabic sources. Christoph Neumann’s (1994) Das indirekte Argument: Ein Plädoyer für die Tanzimat vermittels der Historie. Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Paşas Ta’rih (Münster: Lit) is a very interesting analysis of how a leading Tanzimat statesman wrote the history of the preceding era to bolster the case for reform. It is illustrative of the reformists’ way of thinking.
On the religious situation in the empire Frederick W. Hasluck (1929) Christianity and Islam under the sultans (Oxford: Clarendon, 2 vols) is still worth reading despite its age because of the extent to which it is based on the author’s personal experiences. The most important Islamic minority within the empire, the Alevis and the related dervish order of the Bektaşiya form the subject of another old, but still unsurpassed book, John Kingsley Birge’s (1937) The Bektashi order of dervishes (London: Luzac, reprinted in 1994). Birge describes the Bektaşi beliefs and rituals in great detail. The role traditionally ascribed to the millets has been questioned in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds) (1982) Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Holmes). Two more recent studies on Ottoman and Turkish Jewry are Stanford Shaw’s (1991) overview, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press) and a particularly rich collection of articles, the results of a conference at Brandeis University in 1987, published by Avigdor Levy (1994) The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Darwin). This volume has much on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the Jewish communities of the empire numbered 400,000 souls.
The important educational reforms of the nineteenth century (and indeed of the early twentieth century) form the subject of Osman Ergin’s monumental but not entirely reliable (1977) Türkiye maarif tarihi (History of education in Turkey) (vols 1–5, Istanbul: Eser; originally published in 1943). Recently there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in the educational reforms of the Tanzimat and the Hamidian era. An overview in English of the ‘state of the art’ can be found in Mehmet Alkan’s (2000) article ‘Modernization from empire to republic and education in the process of nationalism’, in Kemal H. Karpat (ed.) Ottoman past and today’s Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill). An attractive recent overview of the development of modern education in Turkey (empire and republic) is to be found in Necdet Sakaoğlu (2003) Osmanlı’dan günümüze eğitim tarihi (History of education from Ottoman times to the present day) (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press).
The modernization of the army, which was the original impetus behind the whole reform movement, is treated in Erik Jan Zürcher (ed.) (1999) Arming the state: military conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia 1775–1925 (London: I.B. Tauris). This is a collection of articles on the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Iran. Unfortunately, there is as yet no equivalent for the Ottoman Empire to Khaled Fahmy’s (1997) path-breaking study of Mehmet Ali Pasha’s ‘new model army’, All the Pasha’s men: Mehmed Ali, his army and the making of modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
A stimulating discussion of the history of the reforms is found in İmparatorluğun en uzun yüzyılı (The empire’s longest century) (2nd edition, Istanbul: Hil, 1987) by Turkey’s maverick intellectual historian İlber Ortaylı.
The importance of the Young Ottoman opposition movement is generally recognized by those interested in the cultural history of the Middle East and Şerif Mardin’s (1962) analysis of the ideas of the leaders of the movement in his The genesis of Young Ottoman thought: a study in the modernization of Turkish political ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press) is still the best treatment of this subject.
The short-lived constitutional regime of 1876, which seemed to fulfil the wishes of the Young Ottomans, is studied in detail in Robert Devereux’s (1964) The first Ottoman constitutional period: a study of the Midhat constitution and parliament (2nd edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins).
The best survey of the extremely complex ‘Eastern Question’, which played such a large part both in the European chanceries in the nineteenth century and in the thinking of the Tanzimat politicians, is Matthew S. Anderson’s (1972) The Eastern Question 1774–1923: a study in international relations (4th edition, London: Macmillan). A very well researched and innovative case study, telling the story of how the Ottomans eventually managed to defuse one of the most threatening aspects of the Eastern Question, the crisis in the Lebanon, is Engin Akarlı’s (1993) The long peace: Ottoman Lebanon 1861–1920 (London: I.B. Tauris).
The general tendency among historians to look away from the history of the central state and from politics and policies has led to a surge in the writing of economic and social history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The standard reference work for the period up to the First World War is An economic history of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), edited by Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert. Despite its title, the book does not deal with the period up to 1450 or the urban manufacturing sector before 1600, but for the other subjects and periods it represents the state of the art. Halil İnalcık covers the period up to 1600; Suraiya Faroqhi the seventeenth century; Bruce McGowan the eighteenth; and Donald Quataert the nineteenth century. Şevket Pamuk has added a chapter on the history of Ottoman money. The last named author has also written The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820–1913: trade, investment and production (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), which is required reading. Charles Issawi’s (1980) The economic history of Turkey 1800–1914 (Chicago: Chicago University Press) consists of a selection of primary texts with introductions, representing a fairly ‘classical’ approach, while Roger Owen’s (1982) The Middle East in the world economy 1800–1914 (New York: Methuen) represents a more recent current of historical thinking. Reşat Kasaba in his (1988) The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: the nineteenth century (Albany: State University of New York Press) redefines the role of the local Christian bourgeoisie. The same author also contributed to the collection of 17 papers (seven of which had appeared earlier) edited by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan (1987) The Ottoman Empire and the world economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), which addresses a number of important questions on the basis of case studies and from the perspective of Wallerstein’s ‘modern world system’.
While on the subject of collections of congress proceedings, two others very much worth consulting are Jean-Louis Bacqué Grammont and Paul Dumont (eds) (1983) Economies et sociétés dans l’Empire ottoman (fin du XVIIIe-debut du XXe siècle) (Paris: CNRS) and Halil İnalcık and Osman Okyar (1980) Social and economic history of Turkey (1071–1920) (Ankara: Meteksan), which also contains valuable material on different aspects of late Ottoman economic history. Some good examples of critical reappraisals of the old picture of uniform Ottoman economic decline in the nineteenth century are to be found in Çağlar Keyder (ed.) (1988) ‘Ottoman Empire: nineteenth century transformations’, Review, vol. XI, no. 2, Spring, Binghamton: Fernand Braudel Center, pp. 169–78), and particularly in Donald Quataert’s (1993) Ottoman manufacturing in the age of the industrial revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) in which he convincingly demonstrates the adaptability of Ottoman manufacturing in the late nineteenth century. Quataert (1994) also edited Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey 1500–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press), which covers some of the same ground.
Jacques Thobie’s (1977) Interêts et imperialisme français dans I’Empire ottoman (1895–1919) (Paris: Sorbonne), although dealing only with the later period, is an exemplary study. One older work, A. du Velay’s (1903) Essai sur l’histoire financière de la Turquie depuis le règne du Sultan Mahmoud II jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Arthur Rousseau) remains a standard work of reference for the financial history of the empire. The history of the Ottoman debt, the debt crisis and its solution is studied exhaustively in Christopher Clay’s (2000) Gold for the Sultan: Western bankers and Ottoman finance 1856–1881 (London: I.B. Tauris). In this story the Franco–British Imperial Ottoman Bank plays a pivotal role. Ethem Eldem has written up the history of the bank in his (1999) A history of the Ottoman Bank (Istanbul: Osmanlı Bankası).
Social history, in the sense of the history of the living and working conditions of the working class has only recently begun to receive attention. Donald Quataert, whom we have already met several times, is the pioneer in this field. His (1983) Social disintegration and popular resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: reactions to European economic penetration (New York and London: New York University Press) consists of a number of case studies of industrial and commercial development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the social aspects. Donald Quataert and Erik Jan Zürcher (eds) (1995) Workers and working class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic 1840–1950 (London: I.B. Tauris) focuses on industrial workers and their organizations. The lowest rung on the ladder of Ottoman society, that of the slaves, is the subject of Ehud Toledano’s (1994) Osmanlı köle ticareti 1840–1890 (Slave trade in the Ottoman Empire) (Istanbul: Yurt, a translation of a Princeton University Ph.D. of 1980).
Demographic history is another relatively young field. The works used most widely for demographic data are Kemal Karpat’s (1985) Ottoman population 1830–1914: demographic and social characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), which essentially just lists numbers and gives little in the way of analysis, but is very useful for all that, and Justin McCarthy’s (1982) The Arab world, Turkey and the Balkans (1878–1914): a handbook of historical statistics (Boston: G. K. Hall). The latter’s (1983) Muslims and minorities: the population of Ottoman Anatolia and the end of the empire (New York: New York University Press) is the only attempt to reconstruct the population of Ottoman Anatolia from the Ottoman records. Armenian critics have fiercely attacked it. The same author’s (1995) Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin), although admittedly a one-sided story, focuses on an aspect of Ottoman history that is too often overlooked despite its vital importance (of the inhabitants of Turkey in 1923 almost a third had forced migration in their family background).
Sultan Abdülhamit’s reign, which lasted from 1876 to 1909, has been inadequately documented. For a long time it was seen as a time of reactionary despotism and stagnation. Lewis was the first to call for a revaluation and to see it as the culmination of the Tanzimat. Shaw later took up this theme in articles and in the part of his above-mentioned history dealing with the period. A survey of the existing literature is given at the back of Shaw’s book (pages 453–4) and in Jean Deny’s (1954) article, ‘Abd al-Hamid II (Ghazi) (Abdülhamid)’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, Leiden: E. J. Brill, vol. 1, pp. 63–5 (reprinted 1960). A very interesting recent study of the ideological bases of the regime and the way it tried to project its image at home and abroad is Selim Deringil’s (1998) The well-protected domains: ideology and the legitimation of power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris).
The Young Turk opposition to Abdülhamit is much better catered for. Ernest Ramsaur’s (1957) The Young Turks: prelude to the revolution of 1908 (New York: Russell & Russell) has long been a classic, although it has now been superseded by Şükrü Hanioğlu’s two-volume (1995 and 2001) history of the Young Turk movement in opposition: The Young Turks in opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and Preparing for a revolution: the Young Turks 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Based on absolutely exhaustive archival research in many countries, these will surely remain the definitive studies of the subject.
The growth of Turkish nationalism during Abdülhamit’s reign is treated in David Kushner’s (1977) The rise of Turkish nationalism 1876–1908 (London: Frank Cass).
The Young Turk era (1908–50)
The Young Turk revolution and the second constitutional period have been the subject of a number of excellent studies. The revolutionary events themselves are studied in Aykut Kansu’s (1997) The revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill), which should be read alongside Feroz Ahmad’s older (1969) The Young Turks: the Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish politics 1908–14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). The latter is a detailed, but exclusively political, history of the years 1908 to 1913, while his (1985) İttihatçılıktan Kemalizme (From unionism to Kemalism) (Istanbul: Kaynak), a collection of articles, contains valuable material on the later period (1913 to 1918). Sina Akşin’s (1987) Jön Türkler ve İttihat ve Terakki (The Young Turks and the Union and Progress) (Istanbul: Remzi), first published in 1980, is still the best all-round history of the second constitutional period, while his (1970) Ph.D. thesis, 31 Mart olayı (The 31 March incident) (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi), covers the crucial episode of the counter revolution of 1909 and gives valuable insights into the character of the Young Turk movement. Though suffering from an anti-Unionist bias, Hikmet Bayur’s ten-volume Türk inkılâbı tarihi (History of the Turkish revolution) (three parts in ten volumes, 2nd edition Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983), first published in the 1940s, is still and no doubt will remain unsurpassed as a mine of information on the period. An important lacuna in the historiography of the second constitutional period has been filled with the appearance of Ali Birinci’s (1990) study of the Liberal opposition, Hürriyet ve İtilâf Fırkası (Istanbul: Dergah).
The attempts of the Young Turks to establish a ‘national economy’ during the First World War have been studied by Zafer Toprak (1982) in Türkiye’de ‘Millî İktisat’ 1908–1918 (The ‘National Economy’ in Turkey) (Ankara: Yurt). The prominent Turkish journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman covered the political and social developments of the war years, the events of which he was an eyewitness, in his (1930) Turkey in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press).
As a result of the continuing identity crisis of Turkish society, the intellectual debates of the Young Turk era (which to an extent are still going on) are the subject of countless books and articles. Niyazi Berkes’s Development of secularism mentioned above is one of the most important introductions. Other works that should be consulted are Hilmi Ziya Ülken’s (1979) Türkiye’de çağdaş düşünce tarihi (A history of modern thinking in Turkey) (2nd edition, Istanbul: Ülken), which gives separate introductions on all the more prominent thinkers; Taha Parla’s (1985) study of the leading Young Turk ideologue, The social and political thought of Ziya Gökalp, 1871–1924 (Leiden: E. J. Brill); Masami Arai’s (1992) study, Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk era (Leiden: E. J. Brill), which consists mainly of a contents analysis of nationalist reviews of the Young Turk era; and Füsun Üstel’s (1997) İmparatorluktan ulus-devlete Türk milliyetçiliği: Türk Ocakları 1912–1931 (Turkish nationalism from the empire to the nation-state: the Turkish Hearths) (Istanbul: İletişim), which is a study of the main nationalist organization, should be mentioned, as should be François Georgeon’s (1980) Aux origines du nationalisme turc: Yusuf Akçura (1871–1935) (Paris); and Şerif Mardin’s (1969) excellent Continuity and change in the ideas of the Young Turks (Robert College, School of Business Administration and Economics Occasional Papers) and his (1964) Jön Türklerin siyasi fikirleri 1895–1908 (The political thinking of the Young Turks) (Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankasi). Of the older works, Uriel Heyd’s (1950) Turkish nationalism and Western civilization (London: Luzac), also about Ziya Gökalp and his ideas, is still useful. It contains a short but excellent biography of Gökalp. Heyd’s former student David Kushner has given us a concise but solid overview of the beginnings of the nationalist movement in its primarily cultural phase in his (1977) The rise of Turkish nationalism 1876–1908 (London: Frank Cass). The Islamist current is studied in Esther Debus’s (1991) Sebilürreşad: eine vergleichende Untersuchung zur islamischen Opposition der vor- und nachkemalistischen Ära (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang). As is apparent from the title, this study is not limited to the Young Turk era.
As far as the military history of the First World War is concerned, Turkey has its official war history, Fahri Belen (1963–1967) Birinci Harbinde Türk Harbi (The Turkish war in the First World War) (Ankara: Genelkurmay Harb Tarihi ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı, 5 vols). Largely based on this and other Turkish military sources is Edward Erickson’s (2001) Ordered to die: a history of the Ottoman army in the First World War (Westport: Greenwood). As a purely military history it replaces the much older but still interesting book by Maurice Larcher (1926) La guerre turque dans la guerre mondiale (Paris), which also gives the essential data. One important aspect of the war effort, the role of the German officers, is highlighted in Jehuda L. Wallach’s (1976) Anatomic einer Militärhilfe: die preussisch-deutschen Militärmissionen in der Türkei 1835—1919 (Düsseldorf: Droste) and in Ulrich Trumpener’s (1968) Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University).
The Armenian question has been the subject of a heated debate for three-quarters of a century. A survey of the controversy is given in Gwynne Dyer’s (1976) ‘Turkish “falsifiers” and Armenian “deceivers”: historiography and the Armenian massacres’, Middle Eastern Studies, 12, pp. 99–107. Since 1976 the partisan efforts have not ceased and dozens of Turkish or Armenian sponsored publications have been produced. The most important work on the Armenian side, and the one that makes use of hitherto unused material, is that of Vahakn N. Dadrian. He has published the results of his research on the postwar Ottoman court martial’s proceedings and findings in several places, but most comprehensively (in 1995) in The history of the Armenian genocide: ethnic conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia (Providence/Oxford: Berghahn). Dadrian at times seems to explain the violence of 1915 as being somehow inherent in Islam or in Turkish culture. A Turkish-speaking public has been made familiar with Dadrian’s approach by Taner Akçam, primarily in his (1999) İnsan hakları ve Ermeni sorunu: İttihat ve Terakki’den kurtuluş savaşına (Human rights and the Armenian question: from the Union and Progress to the liberation struggle) (Ankara: İmge), but Akçam has added original research of his own in German archives.
The postwar situation in Istanbul is the subject of Sina Akşin’s (1983) İstanbul hükümetleri ve millî mücadele (The Istanbul governments and the national struggle) (Istanbul: Cem), which is a study of the policies of the sultan’s government, and of Nur Bilge Criss’s (1999) Istanbul during the allied occupation 1918–1923 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), which focuses on the policies of the occupying powers.
The diplomacy of the postwar years, which led first to the Treaty of Sèvres and then to that of Lausanne, is the subject of Paul C. Helmreich’s (1974) From Paris to Sèvres: the partition of the Ottoman Empire at the peace conference of 1919–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), which looks at great power diplomacy, and of Salahi Ramsdan Sonyel (1974) Turkish diplomacy 1918–1923: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish national movement (London and Beverley Hills: Sage Publications), which emphasizes the diplomacy of the Turkish nationalists. Stefanos Yerasimos (1979) Türk–Sovyet ilişkileri Ekim Devriminden millî mücadeleye (Turkish–Soviet relations from the October revolution to the national struggle) (Istanbul: Gözlem) highlights the crucial relationship between the nationalists and the Bolsheviks.
The ‘national struggle’, the history of the nationalist resistance movement in Anatolia, is the subject of a vast literature. Among these Stanford Shaw’s (2000) monumental six volume From empire to republic: the Turkish war of liberation 1918–1923: a documentary study (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu) is by far the most comprehensive English-language one. Other useful introductions are M. Tayyib Gökbilgin’s two-volume (1959 and 1965) Millî mücadele başlarken (At the start of the national struggle) (Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankası), which is based on archival material from the Ottoman government, newspapers and memoirs; and Selahattin Tansel’s four-volume (1973–75) Mondros’tan Mudanya ‘ya kadar (From Moudros to Mudanya) (Ankara: Başbakanlık Kültür Müsteşarlığı), which uses material from the archives of the Institute for the Study of the Turkish Revolution in Ankara. Sabahettin Selek’s (1976) Anadolu ihtilâli (The Anatolian revolution) (6th edition, Istanbul: Cem) is an interesting attempt at revisionist historiography by a leading left-wing journalist, while Paul Dumont’s (1983) short but excellent 1919–1924 Mustafa Kemal invente la Turquie moderne (Brussels: Complexe) is also well worth reading. The transitional period of the regional ‘Defence of Rights’ movements is covered by Bülent Tanör’s (1992) Türkiye’de yerel kongre iktidarları (1918–1920) (The local congress administrations in Turkey) (Istanbul: AFA). Erik J. 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) is a study of the internal politics of the nationalist movement, concentrating on the continuity between the empire and the republic. L. Carl Brown’s (1996) Imperial legacy: the Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia) is an interesting and innovative collection of articles because it puts the Turkish postwar experience in a comparative perspective, something we need more of.
The purely military aspects of the independence war are the subject of a multi-volume history by the War History section of the general staff, like the one on the First World War.
Thankfully, there is now at last a scholarly biography of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk. This is Andrew Mango’s (1999) Atatürk (London: John Murray), which is based on all the available published sources and is exceptionally well written. It supersedes both Şevket Süreyya Aydemir’s three-volume (1976) Tek adam: Mustafa Kemal 1881–1919 (The only man: Mustafa Kemal) (6th edition, Istanbul: Remzi) and Lord Kinross’s [Patrick Balfour] (1964) Atatürk: the rebirth of a nation (2nd edition, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Aydemir had access to a number of collections of private papers while Kinross talked to many of Atatürk’s surviving contemporaries. A. L. Macfie (1994) Atatürk (London: Longman) is much shorter – more a biographical essay than a complete biography – but its treatment of the subject is refreshingly critical.
Ali Kazancıgil and Ergun Özbudun (eds) (1981) Atatürk: founder of a modern state (London: C. Hurst & Company) is not a biography of Atatürk but a highly recommended collection of articles on his ideas and legacy. The same is true of Jacob Landau (ed) (1984) Atatürk and the modernization of Turkey (Boulder: Westview). For those especially interested in Atatürkiana, Muzaffer Gökman’s three-volume bibliography (1963–77) Atatürk ve devrimleri tarihi bibliografyası (Bibliography of the history of Atatürk and his reforms) (Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Bakanliığı) lists some 10,000 titles in many different languages.
The internal opposition to Mustafa Kemal during the struggle for independence forms the subject of a thorough study based mainly on the minutes of the assembly, Ahmet Demirel’s (1994) Birinci meclis’te muhalefet: ikinci grup (Opposition in the first assembly: the second group) (Istanbul: İletişim).
For the political developments of the early republic, the work to consult is Mete Tuncay’s (1989) T. C. ‘nde tek-parti yönetimi’nin kurulması (1923–1931) (The founding of the one-party regime in the Turkish republic) (2nd edition, Istanbul: Cem), while the same author’s (1991) Türkiye’de sol akımlar (1908–1925) (Left-wing currents in Turkey) (4th edition, Istanbul: BDS, 2 vols), which has been thoroughly revised and expanded since its first edition of 1967, is the standard reference work on the history of the political left (both before and during the republic). It can be contrasted with a well-known work by extreme right-wing author, Fethi Tevetoğlu (1967) Türkiye’de sosyalist ve komünist faaliyetler (1910–1960) (The activities of the socialists and communists in Turkey) (Ankara: Komünizmle Mücadele). Erik J. Zürcher (1991) Political opposition in the early Turkish republic: the Progressive Republican Party 1924–1925 (Leiden: E. J. Brill) deals with the split in the nationalist movement and the suppression of political rivals to Atatürk after the Kurdish rebellion of 1925. On this insurrection and on the Kurdish problem in general the reader should consult the anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen’s (1992) Agha, shaikh and state: the social and political structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books). The book is a revised edition of his dissertation of 1978. The other English-language book on the subject, Robert Olson (1989) The emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the Sheikh Said rebellion, 1880–1925 (Austin: University of Texas Press) is interesting as a blow-by-blow account of the rebellion and for the insight it gives into British policy-making, but it is unreliable where Turkish history is concerned. For the history of the ruling Kemalist party in power one can look at Hakkı Uyar’s (1998) Tek parti dönemi ve Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (The single party era and the Republican People’s Party) (Istanbul: Boyut). The Islamic current that developed into the most tenacious challenger of Kemalism is analysed in Şerif Mardin’s (1989) Religion and social change in modern Turkey: the case of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (New York: State University of New York Press), which is rich in new insights once one gets past the sociological jargon of the first chapter.
Many books were written in the 1920s and 1930s on Turkey’s social, ideological and political transformation. Of these, some have retained their value as eyewitness accounts or as sources of information that have since been lost sight of. The following are particularly worthwhile: Elliot Grinnell Mears (ed.) (1924) Modern Turkey: a politico–economic interpretation 1908–1923 (New York: Macmillan); Henry Elisha Allen (1935) The Turkish transformation: a study in social and religious development (Chicago: University of Chicago, reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); August Ritter von Kral (1937) Das Land Kamal Atatürks: Der Werdegang der modernen Türkei (2nd edition, Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller); and Kurt Ziemke (1930) Die neue Turkei: politische Entwicklung 1914–1929 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt).
The experiment with a tame opposition (which proved not to be so tame after all) in 1930 is described in Walter F. Weiker’s (1973) Political tutelage and democracy in Turkey: the Free Party and its aftermath (Leiden: E. J. Brill), very much the work of a political scientist rather than a historian, but nonetheless useful for that. The period of one-party rule under Atatürk and İnönü has been ably described by Cemil Koçak in his (1986) Türkiye’de millî şef dönemi (1938–1945) (The national leader period in Turkey) (Ankara: Yurt) and Turkey’s neutrality during the Second World War is the subject of Selim Deringil’s well-researched (1989) Turkish foreign policy during the Second World War: an ‘active’ neutrality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), which takes a very sympathetic view of İnönü’s policies. A less savoury aspect of the İnönü period, the discriminatory wealth tax of 1942 is put into context by Rıfat N. Bali in his (1999) Bir Türkleşme serüveni (1923–1945): cumhuriyet yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri (A story of Turkification (1923–1945): the Jews of Turkey in the republican era) (Istanbul: İletişim), the best treatment to date of the way the nationalist homogenization of the republic affected the minorities. The pan-Turkist movement, which for some time during the Second World War and again during the cold war threatened to become a serious political force, is described, with its leading figures and publications in Jacob M. Landau (1981) Pan-Turkism in Turkey: a study of irredentism (London: C. Hurst & Company). A second (1995) edition, incorporating the changes brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union is now available under the new title of Pan-Turkism: from irredentism to cooperation (London: Hurst). Mahmut Goloğlu’s five-volume (1968–71) Millî mücadele tarihi (History of the national struggle) (Ankara: private) and its sequel Mahmut Goloğlu (1972) Türkiye cumhuriyeti tarihi (History of the Turkish republic) (Ankara: private, 3 vols) form a history of the entire period from 1919 to 1945; they are based on Turkish sources, notably the minutes of the national assembly.
An interesting and critical discussion of Kemalist ideology and its relationship with modernization and democracy is found in Levent Köker (1990) Modernleşme, Kemalizm ve demokrasi (Modernization, Kemalism and democracy) (Istanbul: İletişim).
The postwar transition to multi-party politics and to economic liberalism is the subject of Kemal Karpat’s (1959) Turkey’s politics: the transition to a multi-party system (Princeton: Princeton University Press), the first serious historical study of the republic by a Turkish author in a Western language, written when the Democrats were still in power. Interestingly, at the end of his book Karpat recommends a number of reforms, which were implemented after the military coup of 1960 (which he did not foresee). On the same subject Taner Timur (1991) Türkiye’de çok partili hayata geçiş (The transition to multi-party life in Turkey) (Istanbul: İletişim) is a short but stimulating analysis of the transition period as seen from the political left.
A troubled democracy (1950–92)
Feroz Ahmad’s (1977) The Turkish experiment in democracy 1950–1975 (London: C. Hurst & Company) is a well-documented overview of the postwar period, using the Turkish media of the period and interviews with those concerned. It shows the signs of having been written at a time when Ecevit and his policies were still seen as Turkey’s great hope for the future.
The blossoming of the relationship between Turkey and the United States in the 1950s reawakened interest in Turkey in America and gave rise to a spate of new publications. Some are still worthwhile for their first-hand descriptions of Turkish society. The following should, I think, be mentioned: Richard D. Robinson (1963) The first Turkish republic: a case study in national development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Eleanor Bisbee (1956) The New Turks: pioneers of the republic, 1920–1950 (3rd edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania); and Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow (eds) (1964) Political modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press), one of the very few comparative studies of modern Turkey. Although not limited to the immediate postwar period, Frederick W. Frey (1965) The Turkish political elite (Cambridge, MA: MİT), an analysis of the background and the behaviour of the representatives in the Turkish national assemblies, devotes a lot of attention to the contrasts between the Kemalist and post-Kemalist assemblies.
The coup d’état that ended the decade of Democratic Party rule is described in Walter F. Weiker (1963) The Turkish revolution 1960–1961: aspects of military politics (Washington DC: Brookings Institution). It is a fairly mild treatment, which can usefully be contrasted with that of Robinson.
The ‘second Turkish republic’, the years between the two military coups of 1960 and 1980, is of course dealt with in several of the general histories mentioned above. This period of industrialization, rapid social change and increasing political instability is also treated in Kemal Karpat (ed.) (1973) Social change and politics in Turkey: a structural historical analysis (Leiden: E. J. Brill) and the almost identically named, but very different, Ergun Özbudun (1984) Social change and political participation in Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press). The first is a collection of articles, the second a monograph by a political scientist. Jacob Landau’s (1974) Radical politics in modern Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill) is a useful but rather dry catalogue of the right- and left-wing radical groups active in Turkey in this period. These are also the subject of Otmar Oehring (1984) Die Türkei im Spannungsfeld extremer Ideologien (1973–1980): eine Untersuchung der politischen Verhältnisse (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz), which, however, deals only with legal groups, not with the illegal ones. Igor Lipovski’s (1992) The socialist movement in Turkey 1960–1980 (Leiden: E. J. Brill) is a useful study focusing on the Workers’ Party of Turkey, but should be contrasted with the published memoirs of the protagonists of the movement, such as Mehmet Ali Aybar, Sadun Aren or Kemal Sülker.
The role of Islam in Turkish politics, perhaps the most hotly debated issue of all, is the subject of an insightful study by Binnaz Toprak (1981) Islam and political development in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill) and of a collection edited by Richard Tapper (1991) Islam in modern Turkey: religion, politics and literature in a secular state (London: I.B. Tauris), which presents the results of a workshop held at London University’s SOAS in 1988 and contains interesting articles on contemporary matters, largely from a social scientist’s point of view. H. Wedel (1991) Die türkische Weg zwischen Laizismus und Islam (Opladen: Institut fur Türkeistudien) is a short but interesting analysis of the social and political role of Islam. A study that breaks new ground in its anthropologically inspired analysis of the relationship between modernization and the growth of Islamic movements is the highly recommended book by Günter Seufert (1997) Politischer Islam in der Türkei: Islamismus als symbolische Repräsentation einer sich modernisierenden muslimischen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner). The growing self-awareness of the Alevi community has led to a plethora of publications over the last few years, mainly in Turkey, but one particularly interesting study by a foreign observer is Karin Vorhoff (1995) Alevitische Identität (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz).
Irving Schick and Ahmet E. Tonak (1986) Turkey in transition: new perspectives, 1923 to the present (London: Oxford University Press) is an interesting collection of articles by leftist Turkish intellectuals who were banned from academic life after the 1980 coup. Another volume of articles well worth reading with reference to the period 1960–71 is William Hale (ed) (1976) Aspects of modern Turkey (London: Bowker), which contains the results of a conference in Durham in 1973 and in which a number of prominent British Turkey watchers deal with a variety of topics.
The ‘coup by memorandum’ of 1971 is the subject of an excellent piece of investigative reporting by the later foreign minister İsmail Cem (İpekçi) (1972), 12 Mart (12 March) (Istanbul: Cem). Turkey’s political troubles in the late 1970s and the coup of 1980 are treated in George S. Harris (1985) Turkey, coping with crisis (Boulder: Westview Press), which also contains a useful selected bibliography. Clement Dodd’s (1979) Democracy and development in Turkey (London: Eothen) examines the same period. As a purely political history (and analysis of the political system) it is rather one-dimensional in its treatment.
The 1970s saw a great outburst of anthropological studies by scholars such as Nermin Abadan-Unat, Fatma Mansur and Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı (among others), which fall outside the scope of this survey, but which are nevertheless very interesting for their focus on things like the Turkish village, the squatter districts, family life and the role of sex and gender in society.
Area Studies handbooks, which seemed to have gone out of fashion somewhat in the USA, flourished in Germany, with good examples being published by Werner Kündig-Steiner and, especially, Wolf Dietrich Hütteroth.
The economic history of the second republic is the main item in William Hale (1981) The political and economic development of modern Turkey (London: Croom Helm), which is stronger on the post-1960 era than on the earlier periods. The most authoritative treatment of the economy is Zvi Yehuda Hershlag (1988) The contemporary Turkish economy (London, Routledge), which takes the story beyond the coup of 1980 and the establishment of the ‘third Turkish republic’, while the same author’s (1968) Turkey, the challenge of growth (Leiden: E. J. Brill) is still useful for the earlier period. The reports of the American investigatory teams, which visited Turkey in the immediate postwar era, are a mine of information on the then state of Turkey’s economy: Max Weston Thornburg (1949) Turkey: an economic appraisal (New York: Twentieth Century Fund) and James S. Barker (ed.) (1951) The economy of Turkey: an analysis and recommendations for a development program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). A critical view of Turkish economic policies and of the IMF-induced stabilization programmes is taken in Berch Berberoglu (1982) Turkey in crisis: from state capitalism to neocolonialism (London: Zed Books).
The 1960s and 1970s were also the years in which the labour movement came of age in Turkey. The best sources on the labour and trade union movements are the still unpublished Ph.D. thesis and a great number of articles in Turkish and French by Mehmet Şehmus Güzel, and Kemal Sülker’s (1976) Yüz soruda Türkiye’de işçi hareketleri (The workers’ movements in Turkey in a hundred questions) (3rd edition, Istanbul: Gerçek). Oya Sencer’s (1969) Türkiye’de işçi sınıfı (The working class in Turkey) (Istanbul: Habora) has been very influential, but the data it gives should be treated with circumspection.
The phenomenon of large-scale labour migration of Turkish workers to Western Europe since the early 1960s has given rise to a plethora of books and articles in the host countries, but there is little in the way of a general survey of the problem. The best-known book is Suzanne Paine (1974) Exporting workers: the Turkish case (London: Cambridge University Press), but it is now of course almost thirty years old and the character of the migration has changed radically since that period. The same problem of obsolescence applies to the best-known of Nermin Abadan-Unat’s books on the subject, her (1976) Turkish workers in Europe 1960–1975: a socio-economic reappraisal (Leiden: E. J. Brill). However, Abadan-Unat has continued to publish on labour migration for the last 25 years and her books and articles are well worth consulting. Two more recent articles that give an informed discussion of the field are Rinus Penninx (1982) ‘A critical review of theory and practice: the case of Turkey’, International Migration Review, 16 (4), pp. 819–36, and Ercan Uygur (1990) ‘Policy, productivity, growth and employment in Turkey, 1960–1989 and prospects for the 1990s’, Mediterranean Information Exchange System on International Migration and Employment (MIES), 90 (4), a publication of the ILO in Geneva. Also from Geneva is Philip Martin’s (1991) The unfinished story: Turkish labour migration to Western Europe (ILO). Amazingly, I have been unable to find a single study of the social and cultural effects of labour migration (and remigration) on Turkey itself.
The important role of the military in Turkish politics has been studied in two seminal articles, Dankwart A. Rustow (1959) ‘The army and the founding of the Turkish republic’, World Politics, 7, pp. 513–52, which gives the historical background but does not foresee the military takeover less than a year away; and George S. Harris (1965) ‘The role of the military in Turkish politics’, Middle East Journal, 1, pp. 54–66 and 169–76. Both articles are of course relatively old and should be supplemented with newer material. A recent effort is a study by one of Turkey’s leading journalists, Mehmet Ali Birand (1991) Shirts of steel: an anatomy of the Turkish armed forces (London: I.B. Tauris), which is based on interviews and is especially strong on the mentality and Weltanschauung of the officer corps. William Hale’s (1994) Turkish politics and the military (London: Routledge) is both a historical overview and an attempt to put the Turkish experience with its military into a comparative perspective.
The foreign policy and foreign relations of the postwar republic have long received relatively scant attention for so strategic an area. The best introduction is probably Kemal Karpat (ed.) (1975) Turkey’s foreign policy in transition 1950–1974 (Leiden: E. J. Brill), which is a collection of articles. The crucial alliance with the United States is the subject of George S. Harris (1972) Troubled alliance: Turkish-American problems in historical perspective (Washington: American Enterprise Institute), while the relations with other Middle Eastern countries are treated in the rather superficial but useful Philip Robins (1991) Turkey and the Middle East (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs), for which no Turkish sources were used. Clement H. Dodd (ed.) (1992) Turkish foreign policy: new prospects (Huntingdon: Eothen) is a very slim volume of essays that provide a good introduction to the problems and possibilities of Turkey’s foreign relations today, but there are now many other collections of articles dealing with Turkey’s new geopolitical situation and the challenges it poses in French, German, English and Turkish. A comprehensive overview of the foreign policy of the republic is offered in the two volumes edited by Baskın Oran (2002) Türk diş politikası: kurtuluş savaşından bugüne olgular, belgeler, yorumlar (Turkish foreign policy: facts, documents and opinions from the war of liberation until the present day) (Istanbul: İletişim).
There is a lack of good monographic material on the period since the military takeover of September 1980, which itself is analysed in great detail in Mehmet Ali Birand (1987) The generals’ coup in Turkey: an inside story of 12 September 1980 (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers).
A few of the works mentioned above (such as those by Keyder, Schick and Harris, and Hershlag on the economy) continue their story into the 1980s. Clement Dodd has written an extension to his Democracy and development, called The crisis of Turkish democracy (Beverley: Eothen, 1983), which was revised again in 1990. Frank Tachau (1984) Turkey: authority, democracy and development (New York: Praeger) is an analysis of the structures the military put in place after 1980. Short descriptions of the parties that came into being with the gradual political thaw after 1983 are given in Metin Heper and Jacob M. Landau (eds) (1991) Political parties and democracy in Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris). The prolific Metin Heper has also specialized in analyses of one of the most vexing problems of contemporary Turkey: the role of the state in society, witness his (1985) The state tradition in Turkey (Huntingdon: Eothen) and his (1988) book edited together with Ahmet Evin, State, democracy and the military: Turkey in the nineteen eighties (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter).
The liberalization since 1989 has enabled writers in Turkey to write on the Kurds and their problems for the first time in more than 70 years. The result has been a number of publications, many of them highly partisan. An overview of recent developments, and especially of the role of the PKK, can be found in Michael M. Gunter (1990) The Kurds in Turkey: a political dilemma (Boulder: Westview). İsmet İmset’s (1992) The PKK: a report on separatist violence in Turkey 1973–1992 (Ankara: Turkish Daily News) is indispensable for factual information on the Kurdish guerrilla movement. Recently, an excellent and detailed overview of the problems the Kurds faced not only in Turkey but also in the neighbouring countries of Iraq and Iran has been published: David McDowell (1996) A modern history of the Kurds (London: I.B. Tauris).
Two books on the ideological developments of the most recent period in Turkish history that well deserve to be read are Hugh Poulton’s (1997) Top hat, grey wolf and crescent: Turkish nationalism and the Turkish republic (London: Hurst), which also has much on the preceding periods; and Stefane Yerasimos (ed.) (2000) Civil society in the grip of nationalism: studies on political culture in contemporary Turkey (Würzburg: Ergon), which caused a furore in nationalist circles in Turkey.
Apart from the above-mentioned books, the reader will find, as I have found, that he or she is dependent on Turkish publications about current affairs that usually express strongly partisan views, or news digests and periodicals. Two very useful periodicals are the English-language weeklies from Ankara: Turkish Probe (published by the daily Turkish Daily News), which has traditionally been close to Demirel’s wing of the PTP, and the slightly more left-wing Briefing published by EBA (Ekonomik Basin Ajansı). The digests I found most useful in writing this book, were Keesing’s Historisch Archief (Amsterdam: Keesing, from 34/1980 onwards), which also exists in an English-language version and gives two to three surveys a year of events in Turkey on the basis of leading European newspapers; Facts on File Yearbook (New York: Facts on File; from 40/1980 onwards), which gives compressed versions of major press reports; the chronological surveys published at the end of each volume of the Middle East Journal (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 34/1, from 1980 onwards); and Aktueller Informationsdienst Moderner Orient (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient Institut, 6/1980 onwards), a monthly collection of clippings from the foreign language press in Turkey (mostly the Turkish Daily News and the government propaganda sheet Newsspot). For purely economic reporting, the publications (newsletters and surveys) of the Ekonomik Basın Ajansı (Economic Press Agency) in Ankara are indispensable. Of the journals that focus more generally on the contemporary Middle East, the publications of the Middle East Research Project (MERP) and the Middle East Economic Digest deserve to be mentioned.
The modern reader who really wants to stay up-to-date of course also consults the internet sites that concentrate on Turkey, both the scholarly ones and the sites of government agencies and, indeed, opposition groups, for the propaganda war between Turkey and its enemies has definitely spilled over into the electronic media. Membership of the H/Turk discussion list, one of the many H (for history) lists can also be very rewarding for those seriously interested in Ottoman and modern Turkish history.