Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History

This book comprises a collection of articles and essays published in a variety of journals during the past decades, which seek to identify and analyze mainly the internal forces which transformed the Ottoman State into a variety of national states in the Balkans and the Middle East. Kemal H. Karpat studies the transformation of miri (state) lands into private property, the subsequent rise of a new propertied middle class in the countryside with its own stratum of intellectuals and notables as preparing the rise of a civil order which embraced or rejected as the situation demanded the old statist philosophy and the new bureaucracy. The book studies migration as a key factor which brought many Muslim ethnic groups into Anatolia that produced a social restructuring and new modern Ottoman-Islamic-Turkish culture that formed the ethno-cultural roots of Republican Turkey.

Kemal H. Karpat is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A Turk born in Dobruja, he obtained degrees from Mecidiye Seminary, Istanbul, Washington and New York Universities publishing more than a dozen books starting with the pathbreaking Turkey's Politics (1959) and culminating in Politicization of Islam (2001).

'The qualities of scholarship, the spare and unpolemical writing style, and the breadth of subject-matter investigated, make this a great storehouse of knowledge in the English language about Turkey and its neighbours for the last two centuries.'
Tom Gallagher, University of Bradford.