New Books in Turkish Studies

By: New Books Network
  • Summary

  • Interviews with authors about new books in Turkish and Ottoman Studies.
    New Books Network
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Episodes
  • Emrah Yildiz, "Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders" (U California Press, 2024)
    Oct 22 2024
    Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband across state borders, Zainab's Traffic unsettles our approaches to ziyarat (pilgrimages) by provoking the reader to dwell in matters of urban and spatial development, sectarian demarcations, flows of consumer goods (Syrian lingerie and Ceylon tea) and the seeking of spiritual blessings. Yildiz moves with various pilgrims, traders, and goods on buses on a nearly eight-hundred-mile journey. These stories of flow from his interlocutors based on extensive fieldwork experiences renders any easy framing of pilgrimage practices in Islamic parlance impossible and forces us to contain the multitudes of ever-changing reality of ritual and lived Islam set against fickle state borders and its sociality. This book will be a great resource to scholars of anthropology of Islam, especially those interested in methodology of fieldwork and writing ethnography, and scholars who think about pilgrimages, and the regions of Iran, Turkey, and Syria and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024)
    Oct 6 2024
    Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Norton, 2024)--the first major history of that arena in fifty years--the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record. Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Sep 28 2024
    In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order. In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics. As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism. Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins

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