In the first two decades after World War II, social scientists heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a “modernizing” nation in the Western mold. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine ...the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning.
A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central ...authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey.
Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and accommodate the various nomadic groups in the region. In the early years of the empire, maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in frontier regions, was an important source of strength. Cooperation between the imperial center and tribal leaders provided the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire, while allowing tribal leaders to perpetuate their own authority and guarantee the tribes' survival as bearers of distinct cultures and identities. This relationship changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as indigenous communities discovered new possibilities for expanding their own economic and political power by pursuing local, regional, and even global opportunities, independent of the Ottoman center.
The loose, flexible relationship between the Ottoman center and migrant communities became a liability under these changing conditions, and the Ottoman state took its first steps toward settling tribes and controlling migrations. Finally, in the early twentieth century, mobility took another form entirely as ethnicity-based notions of nationality led to forced migrations.
In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, ...healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.
Toward Settlement Kasaba, Resat
A Moveable Empire,
07/2011
Book Chapter
In 1691 a group of villagers in western Anatolia filed a petition with six judges who had jurisdiction over their region. In it they complained that seven of twenty-two tribes that had been ordered ...by the central government to settle in parts of western Anatolia had set up their tents not on the properties reserved for them but on communally held pasture land. From these sites the tribal members were letting their animals loose, causing damage to planted fields in the surrounding area. Tribal members were also raiding villages, looting property and food, and robbing travelers on public roads. The
Building Stasis Kasaba, Resat
A Moveable Empire,
07/2011
Book Chapter
On January 15, 2003, the New York Times published a front-page article on a Kurdish tribe called the Hamawand that was engaged in a war of resistance against the armies of Saddam Hussein in northern ...Iraq and also against Ansar al-Islam, a militant group connected to Al Qaeda, in the east. on these two fronts the Hamawand fighters were led, respectively, by a father and son, and most of the fighters were either related to each other or were regarded as family by their leaders. According to the Times, they were all completely dedicated to their cause, and whatever the
Several years before I began writing this book, I noticed that the sources I was reading for another project repeatedly mentioned large numbers of nomadic tribes and other unsettled peoples who ...roamed the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire. According to these sources and the accounts of contemporary travelers and other observers, such groups were not confined to frontier areas or peripheral provinces but lived across the entire empire, even in urban areas. Furthermore, rather than figuring solely as carriers of dissent, in many instances migratory and nomadic groups actually mediated and imposed the will of the imperial center. It
