The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 is a book by Uğur Ümit Üngör, published by Oxford University Press in 2011.[1] The book focuses on population politics in the transition between the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, especially in the Diyarbekir region.
. . . The Making of Modern Turkey . . .
The book’s cover is a ruined Armenian church,[2]Arakelots Monastery near Muş. Following Erik-Jan Zürcher, Üngör considers that the “Young Turk era” spans the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey after its 1923 founding, “due to compelling continuities in power structure, ideology, cadre, and population policy”.[3][4] The book focuses on the history of the Ottoman administrative region of Diyarbekir Vilayet[5] and contains five chapters: “Nationalism and Population Politics in the late Ottoman Empire”, “Genocide of Christians, 1915–16”, “Deportations of Kurds, 1916–34”, “Culture and Education in the Eastern Provinces”, and “The Calm after the Storm: The Politics of Memory”.[6][4] Üngör’s central argument is “that from 1913 to 1950, the Young Turk regime subjected Eastern Turkey, an ethnically heterogeneous area, to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and including it in the Turkish nation state”.[3] He states that “The genocide heralded the coming of a new era and stipulated the parameters of a formative Turkish nation state, or an empire with a dominant Sunni Turkish core and a marginalized periphery.”[7]
. . . The Making of Modern Turkey . . .