Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-pkt8n Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T23:30:52.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The writing of modern Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Nicholas Danforth*
Affiliation:
History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, Email: nick.danforth@gmail.com

Abstract

In its title, Uğrur Ümit Üngör's Making of Modern Turkey (2011) offers an elegant indication of how much has changed in the academic literature on Turkey since Bernard Lewis's 1961 Emergence of Modern Turkey. Lewis believed modern Turkey emerged; Üngör reminds us it was made. The cover pictures tell the rest of the story: where my copy of Lewis's book shows a bustling street scene, Üngör's boldly offers the ruins of an abandoned Armenian church. If it is an exaggeration to say that modern Turkey no longer represents the triumph of progress, but instead a systematic act of destruction, it is increasingly clear that younger historians, both Turkish and non-Turkish, have shifted their focus from what was gained with the advent of the republic to what was lost.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Çağraptay, Soner. 2006. Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kasaba, Resat. 2009. A Moveable Empire. Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Michael. 2011. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor, Müge Göcek, Fatma, and Naimark, Norman. 2011. A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zürcher, Erik Jan. 1992. “The Ottoman Legacy of the Turkish Republic: An Attempt at a New Periodization.” Die Welt des Islams 32 (2): 237–225.Google Scholar