Yonca Koksal

This paper focuses on the development of national identity and the formation of political organizations in the Turkish minority in the early years of the formation of the Bulgarian state from 1878 to the 1940s. It studies transnational aspects of nationalism, which is usually considered territorially bounded, by studying the impact of connections between the Turkish minority and the Ottoman Empire and later with Turkey. In addition to studying inter-state relations and their reflection in the legal and political sphere, this paper studies the flow of ideas across borders, transnational networks among political activists, and the resulting cleavage formation. Findings show that transnational connections and actors played dual roles. The circulation of political activists, contributed to the formation of national organizations which played a crucial role in (re)formulating national identity. Transnational connections increased political activity in the name of the Turkish minority. Through these organizations the community was able to make collective demands from the Bulgarian state. However, transnational connections carried debates and divisions in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. By dividing the community, they decreased the capacity for collective action.

There are few studies on history writing in the Ottoman Empire, partly because the fact that the Ottoman chronicles tended to reflect the perspective of the ruling elites distracts scholarly attention from the topic. Most chroniclers in the Ottoman Empire were members of the ruling elite, and in most cases they were commissioned to write history by the state. Dana Sajdi has found a valuable source—the chronicle of Ibn Budayr, a barber in Damascus—for studying how a layperson could write history and report the events of his time. Sajdi has managed to link this unique source to the general social, political, and cultural context of the eighteenth century. As a period of change, the eighteenth century presented a new opportunity for ordinary people to enter the field of chronicle writing, which had previously been reserved for the elites. Sajdi explains this change through the birth of “nouveau literacy,” the emergence of authors from humble backgrounds. This development is in line with recent studies showing the opening of political spaces and the entrance of new actors onto the stage of late seventeenthand eighteenth-century politics and society in the Ottoman Empire. Methodologically, Sajdi’s study is inspired by microhistory. It begins with the deposition and chronicle of an individual, and it relates this micro level to largescale political, cultural, and social change in the Ottoman Levant. It also proposes an interesting link between the nouveau literacy of the eighteenth century and the al-Nahda movement, the so-called “Arab Renaissance,” of the nineteenth century, thus making a claim for path dependency in literary movements. According to Sajdi, “the arrival of the nouveau literates, well over a century before the ‘renaissance,’ paved the path for the emergence of the modern public intellectual” (p. 211). In the introduction, Sajdi defines this nouveau literacy by arguing that literary genres are socially apportioned, meaning that different groups use texts or genres as a means of self-presentation and/or preservation (p. 6). Thus, ordinary subjects entering the field of chronicle writing as new actors in the

The Tanzimat reform period, initiated with the Gülhane edict of 1839 and continuing up until the Ottoman-Russian war of 1876, was an important stage in the reorganization of the provincial administration of the Ottoman Empire. In order to increase state control, the modernizing and centralizing Tanzimat reforms addressed several areas of administration including the formation of a central bureaucracy, regulation of tax collection, and the pursuit of social and economic development in the Ottoman provinces.

This article studies how and why the policies of the Bulgarian and Romanian states towards Muslim/Turkish minorities differed widely from each other between 1923 and 1936. Minority policies in Bulgaria shifted from tolerance during the Agrarian People's Union government in 1919, to assimilation and repression in the 1930s. In contrast, the Romanian state tolerated and favourably treated Muslim minorities throughout the interwar period. In order to account for this difference, we highlight the influence of Turkey's diplomatic relations on Bulgarian and Romanian state policies towards minorities and the responses of the latter. While Turkish-Bulgarian relations see-sawed, Turkish-Romanian relations constantly improved from the 1920s to 1930s. We argue that, whenever Turkey's diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Romania ameliorated, Bulgaria's and Romania's minority policies improved. Yet, whenever diplomatic relations deteriorated, so did the minority policies.

H C Hakan Ozoglu's book, Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving £ Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries, studies the rise of "* Kurdish nationalism during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Studying social, political, familial and geographical factors in Kurdish nationalism, Ozoglu argues that Kurdish nationalism became an available ideology at the end of World War I. Contrary to the argument that separatist nationalisms contributed to the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the book argues that the birth of Kurdish nationalism was a by-product of the collapse of the Empire. In Chapter One, Ozoglu situates his approach to Kurdish nationalism among cultural constructivists, that is, nations are neither neutral nor eternal, but modern constructions. This construction emphasizes nonmaterialist means such as simple acts of remembering or forgetting, and thus, common religion, language and territory are not adequate to define the nation. The process of identity formation goes through dialectical, dialogical and monological stages. Imposition of ethnic identity on a particular group is monological, and interaction between a particular group and other forces represents dialectical and dialogical dimensions. This viewpoint contributes a more fluid and complex understanding of nationalism. However, the theoretical argument is not further advanced in the actual analysis of Kurdish nationalism. There are occasional references to responses of Kurdish nationalist leaders (as individuals, not as organized groups) and to Ottoman policies, but a systematic analysis of the dialectic and dialogical stages, that is, how transition from one stage to another occurs and with what consequences, is not provided. Chapter Two discusses the evolution of the Kurdish identity from the original meaning of "Kurd" in medieval sources to the late Ottoman period. The chapter emphasizes the role of territory in defining Kurdish

This paper studies the lucrative sheep trading networks connecting Erzurum with major urban centers extending from Istanbul to Aleppo and Damascus. It traces the evolution of these networks in order to show how the dynamics of the sheep trade changed from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In opposition to the view that Eastern Anatolia remained largely excluded from domestic and foreign markets during the capitalist integration of the Ottoman economy, it is argued that the province of Erzurum maintained and even reinforced its position in the sheep trade. While sheep exports to Istanbul had increased by the early twentieth century, there was a decline in shipments to the Syrian provinces. The paper analyzes the political, financial, technological, and environmental factors that played a role in this transformation.

This article studies how and why the policies of the Bulgarian and Romanian states towards Muslim/Turkish minorities differed widely from each other between 1923 and 1936. Minority policies in Bulgaria shifted from tolerance during the Agrarian People's Union government in 1919, to assimilation and repression in the 1930s. In contrast, the Romanian state tolerated and favourably treated Muslim minorities throughout the interwar period. In order to account for this difference, we highlight the influence of Turkey's diplomatic relations on Bulgarian and Romanian state policies towards minorities and the responses of the latter. While Turkish-Bulgarian relations see-sawed, Turkish-Romanian relations constantly improved from the 1920s to 1930s. We argue that, whenever Turkey's diplomatic relations with Bulgaria and Romania ameliorated, Bulgaria's and Romania's minority policies improved. Yet, whenever diplomatic relations deteriorated, so did the minority policies.

This article studies how the Cihanbeyli tribe became a crucial economic actor for the meat supply of İstanbul, by focusing on a conflict between the tribe's leader, Alişan Bey, and the Russian trader David Savalan, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1850s in and around the province of Ankara. Two important processes of the early Tanzimat era had an impact on the Cihanbeyli's role in animal trade. First, as part of the centralization project of the Tanzimat, the Cihanbeyli tribe was sedentarized in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, although the Ottoman state adopted liberal economic policies during the Tanzimat, the provisioning of meat to the imperial capital continued until 1857. Therefore, the article examines the Cihanbeyli's role in the animal trade in the light of these administrative and economic changes. Our findings support the argument that tribes were an integral part of the imperial economy, politics, and society. The dependence of the Ottoman state on the supply of meat by the Cihanbeyli increased significantly from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This opposes the conventional view that posits tribes as primordial forms hindering economic and social development in the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.