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Reviewed by:
  • Turkey: From Empire to Revolutionary Republic; The Emergence of the Turkish Nation from 1789 to Present
  • Gavin Brockett
Turkey: From Empire to Revolutionary Republic; The Emergence of the Turkish Nation from 1789 to Present Sina Akşin New York: New York University Press, 2007 335 pp., $70.00 (cloth), $22.00 (paper)

Sina Akşin is one of Turkey’s more prominent and respected historians of the late Ottoman Empire. Akşin’s Turkey: From Empire to Revolutionary Republic is a translation of a “handbook of modern Turkish history” that he published first in Turkish in 1996 and later in the Istanbul daily newspaper Cumhuriyet. The book adds to other recent works that also try to survey the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey up to the present. Interestingly, these too have been written by historians whose research concentrates primarily on the end of the Ottoman Empire and the very early stages of the modern republic. As a result, our knowledge of the years 1908 through 1926 is considerably stronger thanks to Akşin’s work as well as to Turkey: A Modern History by Erik J. Zürcher and Turkey: The Quest for Identity by Feroz Ahmad.1

In recent decades, historians have devoted considerable attention to the Ottoman Empire, the result being an increasingly rich literature addressing a long and diverse history. Unfortunately, the [End Page 567] same cannot be said regarding the history of the Republic of Turkey. Rather, that history has been dominated by a nationalist narrative initially constructed by the country’s founding president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923–38). Since that time, both the state and scholars have perpetuated the essence of this narrative, albeit with various permutations and modifications. To be sure, some academics have tried to challenge this version of “history,” conscious that there is a need for alternative perspectives —and here the work of Zürcher is particularly important—but more often than not, historians themselves have contributed to its longevity. It is a tension that is clearly evident in Turkey: From Empire to Revolutionary Republic.

Nationalist narratives do not accommodate alternative perspectives on the past; however, even historians of a nationalist bent cannot help but recognize that there are other ways to view Turkish history. Thus, while Akşin does remain faithful to the nationalist narrative of Turkey’s past, it is also important to recognize that he demonstrates the critical acumen essential to the writing of good history. At some points in his book he engages other literature and draws the reader’s attention to important current historiographic debates. For instance, he challenges a racial definition of the Turkish nation (3–4), and he even criticizes the excesses of early republican nationalism (35–36). Unfortunately, he does so in a rather halfhearted manner, and his efforts to engage in argument are inconsistent at best: typically he fails to develop the matters at hand in an adequate manner to be of much use to the reader. In an introductory chapter, he deals with the potentially stimulating topic of how the periods of Turkish history are organized with reference to European history, but he does so in only two paragraphs, which hardly does justice to the complexity of the topic (4–5). Similarly, he introduces “The Laws of Ibn Khaldun” into his discussion of the Ottoman Empire—drawing on the work of other historians in the process—but he fails to explain this important theoretical material adequately or clearly (16–17). This weakness is evident throughout the book, and it is only exacerbated by a limited “Bibliographical Note” at the end of the study that hardly enables interested readers to explore Turkish history in much greater detail.

Ottoman historians will cringe at the scant and woefully inadequate attention that Akşin devotes to the Ottoman Empire. As is typical of the nationalist narrative, the Ottoman Empire is described simply as a backdrop for the latest and greatest development in “Turkish history”—namely, the emergence of what Akşin refers to as “Turkey,” an imagined nation that began to find itself in the nineteenth century but gained full expression only with the establishment of the...

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