Biography
Kemal Haşim Karpat (1923-2019): A Short Biography
Kemal H. Karpat, born in Armutlu, Romania on 15 February 1923, a towering figure in Ottoman and Turkish History, passed away in Madison, WI on February 20, 2019, at the age of 96. His journey from studying law at Istanbul University to establishing himself as a preeminent scholar in history is a testament to his dedication and contribution to academia. Known as an esteemed social scientist and historian on an international level, Karpat’s works have been published in different languages.
After completing his education in Istanbul, Karpat moved to the United States, obtaining an MA in Political Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, followed by a PhD in History from New York University in 1957. After his early-career positions at Montana State University and New York University, his move to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967, was the result of an invitation by Dean David Cronon to establish the Middle Eastern Studies Program (MESP), which Karpat founded in 1974. Karpat’s career at the UW continued with being bestowed the title of Distinguished Professor of History in 1979. Professor Karpat left his mark further by establishing UW-Madison’s Central Asian Program (currently Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia) in 1985, together with the Association of Central Asian Studies (currently Central Eurasian Studies Society). All of these programs advanced and expanded the study of Ottoman and Turkish history, and Central Asian history, drawing scholars from across the globe to the institution, and solidifying his legacy.
Throughout his illustrious career, Karpat authored numerous pivotal works, including Turkey’s Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System (1959, Princeton University Press), Ottoman Population: 1830-1914 (1985, University of Wisconsin Press), and The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (2001, Oxford University Press). These works not only reshaped academic perspectives but also bridged the historical understanding between the late Ottoman and modern Turkish periods. Karpat is specifically known for works that he developed by looking at the history of the modernization period from the perspective of people or society rather than the perspective of the state. He is also known for his work in which he brought a new methodological approach by analyzing the way the history of the Ottoman Empire is divided into different periods by using land management as a base. Karpat wrote extensively on more recent Turkish history as well; publishing noteworthy studies of Turkish foreign policy, Turkish migration, and the “squatter settlements.”
Professor Karpat was among the founding members and past president of the Middle East Studies Association, a constituent society of the American Council of Learned Societies; and the Institute of Turkish Studies (housed at Georgetown University), which he directed from 1983 to 1985. For his groundbreaking scholarship, he was honored with multiple awards, including the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award and Presidential Medal of Honor from the Turkish Government, the Medal of Freedom from Romania, and the Honorary Membership from the Turkish Historical Society. Beyond academia, his influence extended to advising on policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations and as a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities and UNESCO.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Karpat trained over 30 PhD students and taught thousands of undergraduates, leaving an indelible mark on the field. Like many of his students, he was an avid fan of UW athletics, rarely failing to watch Badger football and basketball games or to attend them in person when he could. In 1996, his contributions were further recognized with the university’s Hilldale Award for distinguished contributions to teaching, research, and service.
In 2001, he established the Center for Turkish Studies on the Madison campus to advance the study of Turkish history and society, Ottoman studies, and Turkish diaspora studies; and endowed a faculty position in Ottoman history at the Department of History. Now renamed the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies in his honor, the Center relies on the highly generous endowment bequeathed to it by Professor Karpat to provide funding for faculty and student research, travel, language training, course improvements, library acquisitions, and academic events. After he retired from teaching in 2003, Professor Emeritus Karpat continued to publish and deliver scholarly papers and to edit the International Journal of Turkish Studies, which he had established in 1979. In 2011, he generously donated his archive of rare books, manuscripts, and personal items to İstanbul Şehir University, where he sat on the board of trustees. After that university closed in June 2020, preservation of the Karpat collection and archive was entrusted to Marmara University waiting to be opened up to benefit the academia and the public alike.
A state funeral in Istanbul, attended by high-ranking Turkish dignitaries, emphasized Kemal Karpat’s significance in the annals of Ottoman and Turkish history. His enduring legacy continues to inspire scholars and students alike.
In Memory of Kemal H. Karpat
- Obituary by Turkish Magazine MarmaraLife
- Obituary by UW-Madison College of Letters & Science
- Obituary by Central Eurasian Studies Society
- Obituary by UW-Madison History Department
- The Life of Kemal H. Karpat by Turkish Historical Society
- An Interview with Professor Karpat
- The Beyoğlu Municipality event in commemoration of Professor Karpat’s first anniversary of passing
- A commemoration by Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) for Professor Karpat’s second anniversary of passing
- A commemoration by Anadolu Agency for Professor Karpat’s third anniversary of passing
- A commemoration by Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) for Professor Karpat’s fourth anniversary of passing
- Kemal H. Karpat’s name is given to the Center for Turkish Studies he founded
- A commemoration by Istanbul Governor and the Istanbul Directorate of Culture and Tourism for Professor Karpat’s fifth anniversary of passing
Kemal H. Karpat Students
Karpat Students’ Accomplishments
Professor Kemal H. Karpat dedicated over thirty-five years of service to the History Department at UW-Madison. Throughout his career, alongside his academic publications and valuable contributions and philanthropy to the department and the university, he guided numerous master’s and PhD theses. Professor Karpat was pivotal in nurturing scholars in Turkish Studies and beyond. Even today, the students of Professor Karpat continue to make significant contributions to Turkish history, society, Ottoman studies, Turkish diaspora studies, and beyond. Their efforts stand as a testament to the enduring legacy of Kemal Karpat, ensuring that his profound impact still stands and continues.
Below is a select list of book publications by scholars who completed and defended their Ph.D. theses under the supervision of Professor Kemal H. Karpat at UW-Madison.
Keiko Kiyotaki. Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad. Brill. 2019
In Ottoman Land Reform in the Province of Baghdad, Keiko Kiyotaki traces the Ottoman reforms of tax farming and land tenure and establishes that their effects were the key ingredients of agricultural progress. These modernizing reforms were shown to be effective because they were compatible with local customs and tribal traditions, which the Ottoman governors worked to preserve.
John K. Bragg. Ottoman Notables and Participatory Politics: Tanzimat Reform in Tokat, 1839-1876. Routledge. 2014.
Focusing on events in the Anatolian town of Tokat during the final two decades of the great Ottoman legal and administrative reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839-76), this book applies elements of social networking theory to analyze and assess the establishment of local governments across the Middle East.
Ilan Karmi. The Jewish Community of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century: Social, Legal and Administrative Transformations. Gorgias Press LLC. 2010.
In this work, Ilan Karmi studies the Jewish community in Istanbul and how it was transformed by the Ottoman reform movement of the nineteenth century.
Brian G. Williams. The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation. Brill. 2001.
Taking as its starting point the ethnogenesis of this ethnic group during the Mongol period (13th century), this volume traces their history through Islam, the Ottoman, and the Russian Empires (15th and 17th centuries). The author discusses how Islam, Russian colonial policies, and indigenous national movements shaped the collective identity of this victimized ethnic group.
Part two deals with the role of forced migration during the Russian colonial period, Soviet nation-building policies, and ethnic cleansing in shaping these people’s modern national identity. This work also has wider applications for those dealing with the construction of diasporic identities. Taking a comparative approach, it traces the formation of Crimean Tatar diasporas in the Ottoman Balkans, Republican Turkey, and Soviet Central Asia (from 1944).
Adeeb Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. University of California Press. 1999.
Adeeb Khalid offers the first extended examination of cultural debates in Central Asia during Russian rule. With the Russian conquest in the 1860s and 1870s, the region came into contact with modernity. The Jadids, influential Muslim intellectuals, sought to safeguard the indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state. Through education, literacy, use of the press, and by maintaining close ties with Islamic intellectuals from the Ottoman Empire to India, the Jadids established a place for their traditions not only within the changing culture of their land but also within the larger modern Islamic world.
Hakan Kırımlı. National Movements & National Identity Among the Crimean Tatars (1905-1916). Brill. 1996.
This volume dwells on the process of the formation of the modern national identity among the Crimean Tatars during the first decades of this century. One of the basic postulates of this study is that the national movements played a crucial and definitive role in this process. Therefore, the formation of national identity among the Crimean Tatars is traced and analyzed in the course of the successive national movements of the period.
Although the main focus of the study is on the period between 1905-1916, the subject matter is complemented by a general portrayal of Crimean Tatar society during the first century of Russian rule over the Crimea and an analytical account of the two formative decades of İsmail Bey Gaspıralı’s reforms prior to 1905. The study devotes meticulous care in placing the subject within the context of the parallel processes of other Turkic and/or Muslim peoples.
H. Islamoglu-Inan. State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century. Brill. 1994.
State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire studies the dynamics of the Ottoman peasant economy in the sixteenth century. First, it shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom about the ‘stationariness’ of the Asian agrarian economies, the Ottoman peasant economy witnessed substantial growth in response to population increase, urban commercial expansion, and increased taxation demands. Second, the book argues that economic development did not take place independently of the political structures, of the state. The book develops these arguments in the context of a detailed empirical study of the economic trends, of the state rules or institutions that embodied the relations of revenue extraction, and exchange in Ottoman Anatolia.
Aryeh Shmuelevitz. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries: Administrative, Economic, Legal, and Social Relations as Reflected in the Responsa. Brill. 1984.
In this book, Aryeh Shmuelevitz draws extensively upon the major collections of responses issued by the leading rabbis of the Ottoman Empire during the 15th and much of the 16th centuries which were the halcyon days of Ottoman Jewry and the heyday of Turkish imperial wealth and power. He limits himself to asking certain broad, pertinent questions of his material, namely: What was the Jewish community’s place within the Ottoman governance system?
Festschrift in Honor of Kemal H. Karpat
Hoca, ‘Allame, Puits De Science: Essays in Honor of Kemal H. Karpat (2010)
Edited by Kaan DURUKAN, Robert W. ZENS and Akile ZORLU-DURUKAN, Kaan Durukan and Robert Zens: Introduction
- Ahmet Yaşar Ocak: Islam’s Second Aspect in Turkey’s History: Rethinking the Shî’a Element in Anatolia, or Some Comments on the Isma’îlî Influences
- Viorel Panaite: Tributary Principalities in the Pax Ottomanica System: The Case of Wallachia and Moldavia
- Yavuz Cezar: Comments on the Ottoman Salary System and Its Evolution as a Key to Understand the Socio-Economic Transformation of the Empire
- Engin Deniz Akarlı: Maslaha from “Common Good” to “Raison d’Etat” in the Experience of Istanbul Artisans, 1730-1840
- Virginia Aksan: Expressions of Ottoman Rule in an Age of Transition: 1760 and 1830
- Keiko Kiyotaki: Ottoman State Finance: A Study of Fiscal Deficits and Internal Debt in 1859-63
- Carter V. Findley: Subjectivity and Society: Ahmed Midhat and Fatma Aliye
- Oktay Özel: Women, Justice and Power in the late Ottoman Society: The Story of Firuze Hanım
- Azade-Ayse Rorlich: Empire and Self: Sadri Maksudi’s Encounter with England
- Stanford J. Shaw: The Ottoman Special Organization/Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa and its Military Activities from August to November 1914
- Brian Glyn Williams: Dostumnama. Living with a Warlord in Afghan Turkestan
- Kaan Durukan: A Note on Kemal Haşim Karpat’s Books and Articles Contributors
Kemal Karpat’a Armağan: Karpat – Koca Bir Çınar (2014)
Edited by Kaan DURUKAN, Robert W. ZENS and Akile ZORLU-DURUKAN
- Türkiye tarihinde İslâm’ın diğer yönü: Anadolu’da Şiilik unsurunu yeniden düşünmek ve İsmaili etkisi hakkında bazı yorumlar
- Osmanlı barışı sisteminde haraç veren voyvodalıklar: Eflak ve Boğdan meselesi
- Osmanlı maaş sistemi ve imparatorluğun sosyo-ekonomik değişimini anlamadaki rolünün gelişimi üzerine yorumlar
- İstanbul esnafı örneğinde “Kamu yararından” “Devlet çıkarına” maslaha, 1730-1840
- Osmanlı devlet maliyesi: 1859-63 yıllarındaki bütçe açığı ve iç borç üzerine bir çalışma
- Öznellik ve toplum: Ahmet Mithat ve Fatma Aliye
- Geç Osmanlı toplumunda kadın, adalet ve iktidar: Firûze Hanım’ın öyküsü
- Osmanlı özel teşkilatı/teşkilat-ı mahsusa ve Ağustos-Kasım 1914 arasındaki askeri faaliyetleri
- Dostumname: Afgan Türkistan’ında bir savaş ağası ile yaşamak
Denize Kavuşan Irmak (2020)
Edited by Kaan DURUKAN, Robert W. ZENS and Akile ZORLU-DURUKAN
- TÜRKİYE TARİHİNDE İSLÂM’IN DİĞER YÖNÜ: ANADOLU’DA ŞİÎLİK UNSURUNU YENİDEN DÜŞÜNMEK VE İSMAİLİ ETKİSİ HAKKINDA BAZI YORUMLAR
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak - OSMANLI BARIŞI SİSTEMİNDE HARAÇ VEREN VOYVODALIKLAR: EFLAK VE BOĞDAN MESELESİ
Viorel Panaite - OSMANLI MAAŞ SİSTEMİ VE İMPARATORLUĞUN SOSYO-EKONOMİK DEĞİŞİMİNİ ANLAMADAKİ ROLÜNÜN GELİŞİMİ ÜZERİNE YORUMLAR
Yavuz Cezar - İSTANBUL ESNAFI ÖRNEĞİNDE “KAMU YARARINDAN” “DEVLET ÇIKARINA” MASLAHA, 1730-1840
Engin Deniz Akarlı - BİR GEÇİŞ DÖNEMİNDE OSMANLI İKTİDARININ İFADELERİ: 1760 VE 1830
Virginia H. Aksan - OSMANLI DEVLET MALİYESİ: 1859-63 YILLARINDAKİ BÜTÇE AÇIĞI VE İÇ BORÇ ÜZERİNE BİR ÇALIŞMA
Keiko Kiyotaki - GEÇ OSMANLI TOPLUMUNDA KADIN, ADALET VE İKTİDAR: FİRÛZE HANIM’IN ÖYKÜSÜ
Oktay Özel - İMPARATORLUK VE BENLİK: SADRİ MAKSUDİ’NİN İNGİLTERE İLE KARŞILAŞMASI
Azade-Ayşey Rorlich - OSMANLI ÖZEL TEŞKİLATI/TEŞKİLAT-I MAHSUSA VE AĞUSTOS-KASIM 1914 ARASINDAKİ ASKERİ FAALİYETLERİ
Stanford J. Shaw - DOSTUMNAME: AFGAN TÜRKİSTAN’INDA BİR SAVAŞ AĞASI İLE YAŞAMAK
Brian Glyn Williams - KEMAL HAŞİM KARPAT’IN KİTAPLARI VE MAKALELERİ HAKKINDA BİR NOT
Kaan Durukan