Turkey and the United States after World War I: National Memory, Local Categories, and Provincializing the Transnational

This essay focuses on the tumultuous period between 1918 and 1923, from the end of World War I to the declaration of the Turkish republic, when the United States became seriously engaged with the fate of the Near East because of calls for a US mandate over Ottoman Turkey. At its center is the history and historiography of a short-lived Turkish Wilsonian Principles League (WPL), founded by the feminist intellectual Halide Edib, which called for the United States to assume a mandate over Turkey. The way that the WPL is overremembered in modern Turkey and forgotten in the United States shows how ideas about gender and sexuality continue to infuse national memory in both countries. Examining Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to think of Turks as wards and the vilification of Edib by the first Turkish republican regime, the essay complicates the causal links we might be tempted to draw between racism and empire and asks us to consider the complex role that the local deployments of westernization play in the absence of actual US intervention.