Turks and Ottomans: Two Books on the Multi-Faceted History of an Extraordinary People

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2:1 (2015): 185-190 Svatopluk Soucek Turks and Ottomans: Two Books on the Multi-Faceted History of an Extraordinary People Findley, Carter Vaughn. The Turks in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Xvi, 300 pp., ill. Paperback $24.99: ISBN 0195177266 Çağatay, Ergun and Doğan Kuban, eds. The Turkic Speaking Peoples: 2,000 Years of Art and Culture from Inner Asia to the Balkans. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2006. 495 pp., ill. Cloth $90.00: ISBN 978-3-7913-3515-5. To most Europeans (and Americans, both English- and Spanish/Portuguese speaking), Turks are the inhabitants of Turkey who speak Turkish; those more sophisticated know that Turkey is a relatively recent state, created after World War I and the collapse of its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. If the subject is approached from this angle, there is ample literature for any interested person to choose from. A good history of Turkey or of the Ottoman Empire tells him, moreover, that neither the Turkish present nor its past is confined to this country and this empire, and that there was—and still is—a vaster Turkish world, which scholars prefer to call Turkic. Knowing this may interest him in searching for a book on this world, but to his dismay the reader searches in vain, concluding that this very vastness must have daunted even the most daring scholars. At least, that is how the matter stood until the year 2005, when Carter Findley’s The Turks in World History came to the reader’s rescue. Let me hasten to add that my statement needs an emphatic qualification: Peter B. Golden’s An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, published in 1992 (reviewed in the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 18:2 (1994): 181-83) was a trailblazer with qualities that in a special way made it unique. The fact that two books on essentially the same subject do not make each other superfluous is a tribute both to the complex richness of the subject and to the scholarly excellence of the two authors. A unique feature is that language forms the principal, perhaps the only, unifying trait and justification for including all Turks within the concept of a distinct historical phenomenon. Golden treats the linguistic dimension exhaustively and uses it as the pivot around which to weave the history of the Turkic peoples; this is why a title like An Introduction to the History and Languages of the Turkic Peoples would have done it greater justice, and why a reader less keenly attuned to the arcane complexities of Turkic languages—and of other linguistic groups, whose interaction Svatopluk Soucek, having served many institutions in different capacities, is a retired librarian at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 186 Svatopluk Soucek with the Turkic group Golden discusses with unparalleled mastery—may also welcome Findley’s different, more political and ideological, approach to the history of the Turks. Findley has chosen two additional unifying denominators: the carpet and the caravan, symbolic of the initially nomadic lifestyle and mobility of the Turks, whose multiple metamorphoses through time and space spanned the world from Mongolia to the Indian subcontinent, Southeastern Europe and North Africa. These two themes, the special nature of the Turks’ lifestyle and its effects, are interwoven with penetrating and often quite original portrayals of the polities and political systems the Turks created and of the ideologies that animated them. On the structural level, Findley’s book has a straightforward chronological form. Bracketed between an Introduction and a Conclusion are five chapters: 1) The Pre-Islamic Turks and Their Precursors, 2) Islam and Empire from the Seljuks through the Mongols, 3) Islamic Empires from Temür to the “Gunpowder Era”, 4) The Turks in the Modern World: Reform and Imperialism, and 5) The Turks and Modernity: Republican and Communist. This is a sound approach; given the multifaceted nature of the subject, a strictly thematic treatment could have confused the reader. The proper perspective and interconnectedness of the themes is assured and enriched, however, by the author’s insight, breadth of vision, originality of thought, and mastery of presentation. The comprehensiveness of the treatment...