The Cambridge History of Turkey represents a monumental enterprise. The History, comprising four volumes, covers the period from the end of the eleventh century, with the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia, through the emergence of the early Ottoman state, and its development into a powerful empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, encompassing a massive territory from the borders of Iran in the east, to Hungary in the west, and North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in the south. The last volume covers its destruction in the aftermath of the First World War, and the history of the modern state of Turkey which arose from the ashes of empire. Chapters from an international team of contributors reflect the very significant advances that have taken place in Ottoman history and Turkish studies in recent years.

Turkey's modern history has been shaped by its society and its institutions. In this fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Turkey a team of some of the most distinguished scholars of modern Turkey have come together to explore the interaction between these two aspects of Turkish modernization. The volume begins in the nineteenth century and traces the historical background through the reforms of the late Ottoman Empire, the period of the Young Turks, the War of Independence and the founding of the Ataturk's Republic. Thereafter, the volume focuses on the Republican period to consider a range of themes including political ideology, economic development, the military, migration, Kurdish nationalism, the rise of Islamism, and women's struggle for empowerment. The volume concludes with chapters on art and architecture, literature, and a brief history of Istanbul.

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey. Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and accommodate the various nomadic groups in the region. In the early years of the empire, maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in frontier regions, was an important source of strength. Cooperation between the imperial center and tribal leaders provided the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire, while allowing tribal leaders to perpetuate their own authority and guarantee the tribes' survival as bearers of distinct cultures and identities. This relationship changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as indigenous communities discovered new possibilities for expanding their own economic and political power by pursuing local, regional, and even global opportunities, independent of the Ottoman center. The loose, flexible relationship between the Ottoman center and migrant communities became a liability under these changing conditions, and the Ottoman state took its first steps toward settling tribes and controlling migrations. Finally, in the early twentieth century, mobility took another form entirely as ethnicity-based notions of nationality led to forced migrations.

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. As United States imperialism becomes a popular focus of debate, we must understand how empire, the nineteenth century's dominant form of large-scale political organization, had disappeared by the end of the twentieth century. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. Questioning the sharpness of the break implied by the empire/nation binary, the contributors explore the many ways in which empires were often nation-like and nations behaved imperially. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself. Understanding this transition allows us to better interpret the contemporary political order and new forms of global hegemony.

In the first two decades after World War II, social scientists heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a "modernizing" nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Atat)rk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven "project of modernity" that took its inspiration exclusively from the West.

The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.

In a series of essays by an international group of scholars and policy makers, this book provides the first sustained look at democracy and democratic movements in the Middle East. Moving beyond a concern with the growth of Islamicist movements and nationalist states, the authors probe the historical experiences of the last hundred years and the social conflict over the past decade centering on democratic structures and processes from North Africa to Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The essays explore from theoretical, descriptive, and political perspectives questions of democracy, freedom, and rule of law in a region that is usually thought of as lacking in all these respects. In recent years there has been a marked growth in the number and influences of social movements and organizations working to expand social, political, and civil rights, and to constrain the power of the states in many countries in the Middle East. At the same time many of the regimes in the area have introduced practices and institutions designed to make their rule more democratic in order to enhance their domestic and international standing and legitimacy, as well as to spur economic growth.

The contributors to this collection question the boundaries and limitations that are imposed on the study of cities by urban sociology. They do not disagree that during most of their history, the regions and peoples of the world have been organized hierarchically and that there are differences that need to be explained. But they see the processes and relations that link regions and people together as the main factor that explains these differences. It is the differentiation and not the differences per se that constitute this volume's focus and, in its respective accounts, taking care not to privilege any one region or time period on the basis of its presumed special characteristics. Against this background the book is divided into three parts. Part one deals with places outside of western Europe and with times that preceded the establishment of the European-based capitalist world-economy. The articles in part two discuss the different aspects of the concept of hegemony and the establishment of domination as these apply to cities in the world-system. In part three the focus shifts back to extra-European zones where the patterns of transformation around cities under the aegis of capitalist world-economy are examined. This book constitutes an important addition to the literature on cities. By approaching cities from a large-scale and a long-term perspective, the contributors develop a historical explanation of some of the different patterns of development that affected particular cities in their interaction with the world-economy. This historical and holistic perspective represents an improvement over most of urban sociology, where cities or aspects of cities are studied in isolation from all contingent and contextual factors. This book can be used by scholars, graduate, and upper-division undergraduate students of urban history and sociology.