The Making of Modern Turkey translated into Turkish

The book The Making of Modern Turkey. Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Dr Ugur Ümit Üngör (International and Political History) recently appeared in Turkish as Modern Türkiye'nin İnşası. Doğu Anadolu’da Ulus, Devlet ve Şiddet (1913-1950) (İletişim, 2016).

homogeneity in the nation state

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 Turkey highlights 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.

About the author

Ugur Ümit Üngör gained his Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008-09, he was Lecturer in International History at the Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009-10, he was Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin. Currently he is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Utrecht University and Research Fellow at the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. His main areas of interest are state formation and nation formation, with a particular focus on mass violence.

• Title: Modern Türkiye'nin İnşası. Doğu Anadolu’da Ulus, Devlet ve Şiddet (1913-1950) (Turkish translation, 2016)
• Author: Ugur Ümit Üngör
• Publisher: İletişim
• ISBN: 9789750519260