Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism, statism, and populism. Banu Turnao?lu challenges this view, showing how Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual dispute in Turkey over Islamic and liberal conceptions of republicanism, culminating in the victory of Kemalism in the republic's formative period. Drawing on a wealth of rare archival material, Turnao?lu presents the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. She shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. Turnao?lu demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. She reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics--including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism--arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology. A breathtaking work of scholarship, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism offers a strikingly new narrative of the evolution and shaping of modern Turkey.

About the Author
Banu Turnao?lu is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews
"One of CHOICE's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017"
"Shortlisted for the 2018 Gladstone Prize, Royal Historical Society"
"This is the best one volume interpretive history of the historical, intellectual, philosophical, and political origins of the ideal of republicanism in the late Ottoman Empire and in the Turkish Republic after its creation in 1923. It is a remarkable, erudite interpretation that contests previous interpretations by many foremost European, American, and Turkish scholars of Turkey. . . . A marvelous book." * Choice *
"A noteworthy addition to the emerging body of critiques of traditional historiography on the formation of the modern Turkish state, as it successfully constructs the continuities in political thought between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic."---A. Coskun Tuncer, English Historical Review



Book Information
ISBN 9780691172743
Author Banu Turnaog lu
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 567g