History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975

History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey #2

by Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw

Reform, Revolution and The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 is the second book of the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. It discusses the modernization of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of nationalism among its subject peoples, and the revolutionary changes in Ottoman institutions and society that led to the Empire's demise and the rise of the democratic Republic of Turkey. Based on extensive research in the Ottoman archives as well as Western sources, this volume analyzes the external pressures, reform measures, institutional changes, and intellectual movements that affected the heterogeneous Ottoman society during the Empire's last century. It concludes with an analysis of contemporary Turkey's constitutional and political structures and principal domestic and foreign problems.

Genres: History, Middle East, Historical

518 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1977

About the author

American historian, best known for his works on the late Ottoman Empire, Turkish Jews, and the early Turkish Republic.

Shaw and his Turkish wife Ezel Kural deny that there was an genocide of Armenians, and claim that the Armenians just were removed from the war zone along the Russian border.

Shaw worked at the private Bilkent University in Turkey. Died at 2006

Reviews

[A. Sacit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Volume II covers the Tanzimat (Reformation) period of the Ottoman Empire (1808-1909), the subsequent World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Republic until 1975. It was an arduous task to get through this 518 page volume as it is a serious scholarly work providing a great deal of detail from original sources in archives. The treatment of the Republican period in the same volume following the Tanzimat and collapse of the Empire gives the reader a good perspective on how the institutions and society evolved through these periods. After reading this book one comes out with the impression that the men of Tanzimat made some serious efforts early on (till about 1876) to reform and save the Empire; but thirty-year autocratic and oppressive rule of Abdulhamit II, external interference and nationalist uprisings, palace intrigues and politics, economic mismanagement and huge external debt, Balkan wars, and finally the involvement in World War I were sufficient to put an end to the House of Osman after more than 600 years of rule following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. A most valuable source on the subject..