Kemal Karpat Publications

Once the undisputed leader in the Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire never hesitated to engage in mutually beneficial relationships with non-Muslim cultures. The Ottoman Mosaic is a collection of readable essays that explores how the greatness of the Ottoman Empire could be attributed to its policy of religious and ethnic tolerance that allowed a diverse population to peacefully coexist within the borders of a Muslim Empire.

Professor Karpat, one of the most prominent names in the field of Political History, explores the social structure of Ottoman Empire through different eras and looks at Turkey’s multi-party democracy culture from a historical perspective. His articles interpret the Ottoman history for broader audience and lay a vivid picture of events of recent history in front of our eyes. Professor Karpat’s remarkable articles take us back to 18th century Ottoman days and examine change and modernization on those days, his work also looks into the independence and interaction of various social groups within a muslim state. The Ottoman social structure produced a unique way of practicing “secularism” where spiritual issues regarding faith and administrative issues regarding everyday state politics were kept completely independent from each other; one was dealing with earthly matters of day to day life of subjects of the Ottoman sultan, the other was to aid the followers of specific faith in their practice.

This is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of immigration to the United States from the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, consisting of historical overviews, case studies of recent Turkish immigrants’ adaptation to contemporary American life and their attitudes towards Islam, and essays on sources.

This book comprises a collection of articles and essays published in a variety of journals during the past decades, which seek to identify and analyze the main factors in Turkish politics. Political parties, military interventions, international relations and cultural developments are given wide coverage alongside studies on literature.

The studies of Bosnia in this volume encompass more than four hundred years of history and offer a broad, multidimensional view of this vital Ottoman territory. Written by native and foreign specialists, these studies evaluate and seek also to rescue and preserve the legacy of the extraordinarily important buildings, manuscripts, and other cultural artifacts destroyed during the war of 1992–1995.

Ottoman Borderlands brings together articles by prominent scholars to fill a large gap in Ottoman studies—the study of the borderlands. Despite the pressing power of the central government, the frontier provinces and the semiautonomous borderlands were cultural-social units with their own identities and their own internal dynamics. While the core provinces were more Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkish-speaking, the borderlands were culturally, religiously, and linguistically more heterogeneous, as well as more politically autonomous.

The book deals with Islamic revivalism as part of the general process of socioeconomic and cultural transformation; it is not meant as a calculated effort to join the current heated discussion about Muslim fundamentalism. The work is also an effort to present as complete as possible a holistic picture of the Ottoman state—with all its political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions so that the course of Ottoman-Turkish Islamic modernization may be properly understood.

This is the first time the continuity of Ottoman culture in contemporary Turkey is discussed by a group of well-known scholars of Ottoman-Turkish history and society. This is done through a series of research essays on Ottoman culture, its organizations, its modes of thought, and its identities (and their changes). Also, they point out the confused view of republican Turks towards their Ottoman past.

The book should prove indispensable to any scholar or library specializing in Turkish, Ottoman, Islamic and Middle East studies.

This is a collection of scholarly contributions brought together to discuss Turkey’s role between the Middle East and Western Europe, its relation to the new independent states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and its prospects for membership in the European Union.

The articles in this book explore the history, culture and condition of Turks in Bulgaria. The articles show that the modern Turks of Bulgaria are the descendants of people of genuine Turkish stock. Some of their ancestors had settled in the area before the Bulgars arrived, while the majority were immigrants from the Anatolian peninsula during the Ottoman era.

This is a very interesting study, offering many important insights into the changing ethno-religious mix of the late Ottoman Empire. It is especially valuable for its treatment of migration and the role of population movements in the formation of nation states. The seedbed of the Turkish republic, Karpat argues, was sown by the vast Muslim migrations of the post-1850 era that molded the various Islamic-Ottoman communities, including the Turks, into a new form of political organization – the national state.

The gecekondu are the shantytowns of Turkey. This study by Kemal Karpat investigates within a broad historical, conceptual and comparative framework the migration and urbanization of the people of these settlements. It is based on personal interviews with people living in three gecekondu in the northern hills of Istanbul, along the Bosporus. The gecekondu are considered here as a part of the entire process of rural migration and urbanization – and so of the transformation of the economic, political, social and cultural order in the Third World nations. Special emphasis has been placed on the historical factors that undermined the traditional social structure in the third world and freed a large number of people for migration and resettlement, and also on the impact of the gecekondu upon the home villages. The author draws on several academic points of view – economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, history – and, himself a native Turk, brings a long acquaintance with that land and its people to this study of an institution whose importance has been largely unrecognized.

The purpose of this book is to study the foreign policy of Turkey after WW II, and especially after the 1960’s, when the country began to improve its relations with the Soviet Union and the non-aligned bloc while maintaining its affiliation with NATO and other Western international organizations. The Turkish foreign policy, and especially the debates about it in 1960-74, reflect rather accurately state of mind, the currents of thought which prevailed in the country at the time, and could forecast the possible direction of Turkey’s domestic policies and international relations.

This book deals with one basic issue: the correlation between economic and social development and politics, and the role of social groups in this process which we define as modernization. Also, this book contains repeated references to the political struggle in Turkey between the statist elites and the economic entrepreneurial groups, as well as to the term “middle classes”.

This book discusses in full the economic, social, and cultural background of modern Turkey’s political system. Beginning with a historical sketch of the problems of the Ottoman Empire that gave rise to the early reform movement, Professor Karpat describes the eventual formation of the Republic and the consequent economic and social changes and the international political developments conditioned by the Second World War. In the central portion of the book, he focuses attention on postwar political developments, with special emphasis on the critical period from 1945 to 1950.