Erik Jan Zürcher Libri

The modern history of Turkey is characterized by significant political transformations and rapid cultural, social, and economic changes. This comprehensive history examines Turkey's integration into the capitalist world and the modernization of its state and society. It begins by exploring the closer ties with Europe established after the French Revolution and the shifting dynamics of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, highlighting its decline amid rising nationalisms and European imperialism. The ruling elite's attempts at modernization are discussed, emphasizing the period from 1908 to 1950 as a continuous era focused on constructing Turkish national identity through radical modernization and secularization efforts led by Young Turk bureaucrats and officers. The book provides a revisionist interpretation of Kemal Ataturk's influence as Turkey's founding father. It also addresses the post-1950 era, focusing on mass politics, military coups, rapid industrialization, migration, human rights issues, integration into the global economy, alliances with the West, and complex relations with the Middle East. Additionally, it explores the Kurdish question and the role of Islam in a secular state. This original reading of Turkish history draws on recent studies and will engage both students and general readers interested in Turkey.

Fighting for a Living investigates the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last 500 years. It does so on the basis of a wide range of case studies taken from Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East and Asia. The novelty of "Fighting for a Living" is that it is not military history in the traditional sense (concentrating at wars and battles or on military technology) but that it looks at military service and warfare as forms of labour, and at the soldiers as workers. Military employment offers excellent opportunities for this kind of international comparison. Where many forms of human activity are restricted by the conditions of nature or the stage of development of a given society, organized violence is ubiquitous. Soldiers, in one form or another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. Nevertheless, Fighting for a Living is the first study to undertake a systematic comparative analysis of military labour. It therefore speaks to two distinct, and normally quite separate, that of labour historians and that of military historians.