Migration Identity And Politics In Turkey From The Ottoman Empire To Today

The book aims to explore how the migration phenomenon has changed from the Ottoman times to contemporary Turkey. It analyzes the migration through different and broad perspectives, hence it also taps into the role of different international and national actors that shape migration movements in Turkey and beyond.

The book aims to explore how the migration phenomenon has changed from the Ottoman times to contemporary Turkey. It analyzes the migration through different and broad perspectives, hence it also taps into the role of different international and national actors that shape migration movements in Turkey and beyond.

This is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of Turkish migration 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, attitudes towards Islam, and essays on sources.

Why do so many Turkish migrants choose to make their fortune in America when the proximity of Europe makes it a less costly risk? Here Lisa DiCarlo offers us new insights into the study of identity and migration. She draws on research and the history of the Black Sea region going back to the early years of the modern Turkish Republic, to explain current Turkish labour migration trends. The forced ethnic migration between Greece and Turkey at the end of the Ottoman Empire stripped the Black Sea region of its artisans and merchants, weakening the economy and resulting in a trend of migration from this area. Many Greek families were forced to flee their natal villages to resettle in a country they had never seen, only to be marginalized by mainland Greeks for their Black Sea identity. This ostracization led to regional compatriotism, or hemserilik between Turkish migrants and Greek refugees from the Black Sea region, migrating to America in the 1970s and this kinship still holds resonance today. DiCarlo argues current transnational chain migration from the Black Sea area is led by regional identity over ethnicity, as this strong bond leads Turkish migrants from the Black Sea region to follow Greek Black Sea migrants across the Atlantic, rather than join their Turkish compatriots in Europe. Focusing on a Black Sea village, a squatter community in Istanbul (used as a holding place for waiting migrants wanting to enter the US illegally) and a coastal New England town, DiCarlo shows us how a diaspora community survives through an emerging transnational community. This is essential reading for those wanting to understand transnational migration and identity in today's global community.

Since Turkey's formal application for full membership of the European Community, the debate over whether it belongs in Europe or in the Islamic Middle East has acquired new significance. This book looks at Turkey's evolving sense of identity in the light of recent political and social change.

This substantially revised edition of Erik J. Zurcher's acclaimed and definitive history builds upon the themes of Turkey's continuing incorporation into the West and the modernization of its state and society. It begins with the forging of closer links with Europe following the French Revolution, charts the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and offers a strongly revisionist interpretation of the role of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Ataturk. In exploring the post-1950 period the author focuses on issues such as the growth of mass politics; internal and external migration, military coups and Turkey's human rights record; the transition from statism to an export-oriented market economy, Turkey's ambivalent relations with the Middle East and Europe; the growth of Islamism; the Kurdish question and the contested nature of Turkish identity.

In the first half of the 20th century, throughout the Balkans and Middle East, a familiar story of destroyed communities forced to flee war or economic crisis unfolded. Often, these refugees of the Ottoman Empire - Christians, Muslims and Jews - found their way to new continents, forming an Ottoman diaspora that had a remarkable ability to reconstitute, and even expand, the ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity of their homelands. Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 offers a unique study of a transitional period in world history experienced through these refugees living in the Middle East, the Americas, South-East Asia, East Africa and Europe. Isa Blumi explores the tensions emerging between those trying to preserve a world almost entirely destroyed by both the nation-state and global capitalism and the agents of the so-called Modern era.

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.