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In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the protracted transition from empire to nation-state was accompanied by a brutal tide of ethnoreligious homogenisation. One of the more dramatic examples was the destruction of the Arab world’s millennia-old Jewish communities.While this destruction is often discussed only in reference to the creation of the State of Israel, this article proposes a complementary model for understanding it, a model predicated on these Jews’ status as ordinary, not exceptional, inhabitants of the Ottoman world, and the disruption caused by the end of the Ottoman empire and its replacement with European colonial rule.Using interwar Aleppo as a case study, this article demonstrates how the end of the Ottoman system of religious communities led to an extended period of dysfunction for Aleppo’s Jewish communal institutions. Under the French Mandate, this dysfunction left Aleppo’s Jews unable to contend with a succession of crises, including a three-way competition for the community’s loyalty between French administrators, Arab nationalists and the Zionist movement. This dysfunction set the stage for the community’s terminal crisis – the 1947 pogroms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized orientalist stereotypes of 'the villainous Turk'. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining representations of Albania in the travel writing and political commentary of Mary Edith Durham and Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, Britain's most notable supporters of Albania's national movement in the early twentieth century, who came to sympathize with the country because of their own peripheral position in relation to the British cultural and political mainstream, by virtue of gender and an unfashionably conservative worldview. Focusing on their published travel writing and political commentary between the 1904 publication of Durham's first narrative, Through the Lands of the Serb, and Herbert's untimely death in 1923, this article proposes that they articulated a counter-discourse to liberal writing on south-eastern Europe and that their representations of Albania foregrounded the capacity for self-governance, in contrast to the cultural chaos attributed to the country by liberals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakültesi Dergisi DTCF Dergisi is the property of Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakultesi (DTCF Dergisi) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The mainstream literature on Turanism defines the term as an essentially expansionist and irredentist movement that aims at unifying all Turkic populations. This article challenges this presupposition, arguing that the Turanist imagination has multiple usages. A considerable number of Turkish nationalist intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact, approached it as a modern political concept within the confines of solidarity and sovereignty. They regarded the general idea of nationalism as a universal concept to which everyone could make an equal claim, including non-Turks in the Ottoman Empire. This translates to mean that Turanism is not necessarily territorial expansionism, nor must it go hand in hand with racist/expansionist claims. Neither should it be understood as the hegemony of Turkey's Turks over other Turks. It rather strives for a Turkist internationalism in which Turks negotiate with each other to maximize their sovereign interests. Seen in that light, Turanism is not a mystical idea, and it refers to modern practical/political concepts such as independence, territorial integrity, national sovereignty, and self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ataturk Yolu Journal / Atatürk Yolu Dergisi is the property of Ataturk Yolu Journal / Ataturk Yolu Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Two features are attributed to modern state censuses: measurement and classification. Yet the real contribution of the modern census is tabulation, one of the most important and yet ignored part of statistics. The literature on censuses ignores tabulation, probably because it is not possible to separate it from statistics. Tabulation is not just a geometrical drawing, rather a tool for ordering, hierarchizing, simplification and exposing of data. Its most important function is to provide comparable data, both classifications and numbers. This study demonstrates the contribution of tabulation, by comparing premodern surveys (tahrir) to modern censuses (sayım) of the Ottoman Empire. The ethno-religious identities were listed in surveys but tabulated in censuses. This study argues that the emergence and use of tabulation emanates from the change in state-subject and state-minorities relations. In other words, it originates from the politicization of population and identity. The tabulation became a tool in the hands of the modernized empire to expose social boundaries and make comparable the ethno-religious identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the instrumental role of Dashnaktsutyun, also known as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, in the geopolitical strategies of the British Empire during the early 20th century. Initially emerging as a nationalist movement within the Ottoman Empire, Dashnaktsutyun was co-opted by external powers, particularly Britain, to serve broader imperial interests in the Eurasian region. The study delves into the organization’s activities in the Ottoman, Russian, and Iranian territories, highlighting how its operations, under the guise of Armenian nationalism, were significantly influenced by British geopolitical objectives. The paper also explores the complex interplay between nationalist movements and international power politics, particularly in the context of the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires. A critical analysis of Dashnaktsutyun’s role during key historical events, such as the Soviet invasion of Armenia in 1920, reveals a prioritization of foreign directives over national resistance, impacting the trajectory of Armenian history and reflecting the broader dynamics of early 20th-century imperialism. This study serves as a cautionary tale of how nationalist movements can be redirected by external influences, often at the expense of their foundational principles and the welfare of their people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]