The Making of Modern Turkey Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950

by Ungor, Ugur Umit

• ISBN13: 9780199603602
• ISBN10: 019960360X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkeyhighlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur Umit Ungor demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.

Author Biography

Ugur Umit Ungor studied Sociology and History and defended his Ph.D. in 2009 (summa cum laude). He worked at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence and nationalism.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. xvii
List of Illustrations	p. xix
List of Maps	p. xx
List of Abbreviations	p. xxi
Introduction	p. 1
Nationalism and Population Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire	p. 8
An introduction to Diyarbekir	p. 8
The advent of nationalism	p. 25
The discovery of society and population policies	p. 33
Violence, victimization, and vengeance	p. 42
Discussion	p. 51
Genocide of Christians, 1915-16	p. 55
War and persecution	p. 55
'Burn, destroy, kill': the persecution becomes genocidal	p. 71
Centre and periphery: widening and narrowing scopes of persecution	p. 86
Discussion	p. 100
Deportations of Kurds, 1916-34	p. 107
1916: phase one	p. 108
1925: phase two	p. 122
1934: phase three	p. 148
Discussion	p. 166
Culture and Education in the Eastern Provinces	p. 170
The Young Turk cultural revolution	p. 170
The nation in the province: culture and education in Diyarbekir	p. 186
The boarding school for Kurdish girls	p. 204
Discussion	p. 212
The Calm after the Storm: The Politics of Memory	p. 218
Silencing the violence: the organization of oblivion	p. 218
Damnatio memoriae: destruction and construction of memory	p. 224
Memory politics in Diyarbekir	p. 232
Toponymical changes	p. 240
Discussion	p. 245
Conclusion	p. 251
Bibliography	p. 265
Index	p. 297
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