Hasan Kayali

Imperial Resilience tells the story of the enduring Ottoman landscape of the modern Middle East's formative years from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the conclusion of the peace settlement for the empire in 1923. Hasan Kayali moves beyond both the well-known role that the First World War's victors played in reshaping the region's map and institutions and the strains of ethnonationalism in the empire's "Long War." Instead, Kayali crucially uncovers local actors' searches for geopolitical solutions and concomitant collective identities based on Islamic commonality. Instead of the certainties of the nation-states that emerged in the wake of the belated peace treaty of 1923, we see how the Ottoman Empire remained central in the mindset of leaders and popular groups, with long-lasting consequences.

The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations

Imperial Resilience

Joseph W. Esherick

Eric Van Young

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China illustrate both the common features and the diversity of the transition. While previous studies have focused on the rise and fall of empires or on nationalism and the process of nation-building, this intriguing volume concentrates on the empire-to-nation transition itself.

Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World

Empire to Nation

Arabs and Young Turks provides a detailed study of Arab politics in the late Ottoman Empire as viewed from the imperial capital in Istanbul. In an analytical narrative of the Young Turk period (1908-1918) historian Hasan Kayali discusses Arab concerns on the one hand and the policies of the Ottoman government toward the Arabs on the other. Kayali's novel use of documents from the Ottoman archives, as well as Arabic sources and Western and Central European documents, enables him to reassess conventional wisdom on this complex subject and to present an original appraisal of proto-nationalist ideologies as the longest-living Middle Eastern dynasty headed for collapse. He demonstrates the persistence and resilience of the supranational ideology of Islamism which overshadowed Arab and Turkish ethnic nationalism in this crucial transition period. Kayali's study reaches back to the nineteenth century and highlights both continuity and change in Arab-Turkish relations from the reign of Abdulhamid II to the constitutional period ushered in by the revolution of 1908. Arabs and Young Turks is essential for an understanding of contemporary issues such as Islamist politics and the continuing crises of nationalism in the Middle East.

Hasan Kayali

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