Ottomans Imagining Japan East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

by Worringer, Renée

• ISBN13: 9781137384591
• ISBN10: 113738459X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-01-29
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The roots of today's "clash of civilizations" between the Islamic world and the West are not solely anchored in the legacy of the crusades or the early Islamic conquests: in many ways, it is a more contemporary story rooted in the nineteenth-century history of resistance to Western hegemony. And as this compellingly argued and carefully researched transnational study shows, the Ottoman Middle East believed it had found an ally and exemplar for this resistance in Meiji Japan. Here, author Renee Worringer details the ways in which Japan loomed in Ottoman consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring the role of the Japanese nation as a model for Ottomans in attaining "non-Western" modernity in a global order dominated by the West. Japan's domestic and international achievements kindled a century-long fascination with the nation in Ottoman lands, one that arguably reached its ironic culmination with the arrival of Japanese troops in Iraq in 2004.

Author Biography

Renée Worringer teaches Islamic and Middle East History at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She previously taught at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research explores how perceptions can alter historical outcomes, and she has published several articles and translations of texts relating to the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

PART I: SEEKING OUT "MODERN" IN THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA

2. Framing Power and the Need to Reverse

3. The Ottoman Empire between Europe and Asia

4. Asia in Danger: Ottoman-Japanese Diplomacy and Failures

PART II: DEFINING "MODERN" IN THE OTTOMAN MICROCOSM

5. Ottoman Politics and the Japanese Model to 1908

6. The Young Turk Regime and the Japanese Model after 1908

7. Politics, Cultural Identity and the Japanese Example

8. Ottoman Egypt Demands Independence: East and West, Christian and Muslim

9. Competing Ottoman Narratives, Successor States, and "Non-Western" Modernity