Present-day Iskenderun (Alexandrette) is a purely modern city. Throughout the pre-Tanzimat period, settlement in this locality was insignificant, and the name of Iskenderun denoted a landing stage(iskele), rather than a town or city. When the traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through Iskenderun in the middle of the seventeenth century, he noted the fact that there was no business district or even shop-lined street, no khan and no public bath (Evliya Çelebi, 1314/1896-97 to 1938, Vol. 3, pp. 46-47; Vol. 9, p. 367 ff.). Moreover, since the few inhabitants were all non-Muslims, there was no mosque, but Evliya did not notice any churches either. Thus seventeenth-century Iskenderun belonged to a very specific category of settlement found in other parts of the Ottoman Empire as well as in medieval northern Europe or seventeenth-century Mexico: very few people lived there permanently, but during the seasonal arrival of ships, the settlements came to life, only to empty again during the “dead season.” In the present study, we will attempt to sketch the commercial activity that went on in Iskenderun during the second half of the seventeenth century and explain why the place, in spite of an advantageous geographical location, did not develop into a town.

The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marks the official construction of a new community and new forms of belonging that were expected to replace the communities and forms of belonging characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. The convention signed at the end of the First World War on January 30, 1923, concerning “the compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox Religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory” can be seen as the hallmark of this republican attempt to create a new homogenized republican community called the nation. Exchanging populations meant the mutual exclusion of the largest ethnic and religious minority groups from the post-World War I nationalized lands of Greece and Turkey.

This article assesses the recent performance of the Turkish economy, questioning whether the currently observed unusual boom conditions will lead to a process of sustainable growth. The latest phase of Turkish neo-liberal transformation in the post-2001 era is placed in a broader historical and global context; at the same time, the performance of the economy in recent years is compared with that of other key emerging markets, based on selected macroeconomic indicators. Utilizing the East Asian experience as the principal benchmark for comparison, this paper examines whether Turkey is on its way to accomplishing tiger-like development performance. Given the current challenges to sustainable growth, we conclude that it is premature to suggest that the impressive performance of the recent years will lead to durable success and tiger-like performance. While the focus is on the Turkish experience, the paper also probes the very nature of tiger-like performance itself, highlighting the fact that in setting standards for exceptional economic performance we need to extend our horizons beyond high rates of economic growth sustained over time, to broader indicators of social, political and human development.

“The East” is an exceptional territory identified with Kurdish ethnicity within the geographical boundaries of the Turkish nation. This paper focuses on a critical historical moment, circa 2000-2004, when the promise of peace in this region was coupled with the explosive growth of urban consumer markets, to bring into public circulation a host of commercialized images of “the East” and “Eastern people.” It examines how “the East” became codified in popular television melodrama. It also tracks how “Eastern tourism” became incorporated into middle-class leisure practices. By juxtaposing television narratives and tourist narratives, it argues that the commodification in cultural markets both affirms its “exceptionalism” and challenges its taken-for-granted parameters.

The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the economic aspects of armament expenditures in Turkey in recent years. There are two forms of arms acquisitions: purchasing from abroad and purchasing from domestic arms producers. In both cases, the government is the sole purchasing and/or ordering body. When purchasing from domestic producers, the government expresses a preference in terms of promoting a new industrial activity. Hence the acquisition decisions of the Turkish armed forces are reflected onto the markets through the government. This is the main reason why armament decisions do not remain solely in the political and/or military domain, but have serious economic implications, the means of financing being the most important.

In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.

In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.

This worthy man combined in his single person the various characters of diplomatist, husbandman, merchant, manufacturer, and master of a privateer. To be more explicit-he was drogueman to the French consul at Chios; in town he kept a silkloom at work; in the country he had a plantation of agrumi (citrus); he exported his stuffs and fruits to the principal sea-ports of the Archipelago, and, in the first Russian war, he employed all his spare money in fitting out a small vessel to cruise against the enemy-for so he chose to consider the Russians, in spite of all their amicable professions towards the Greeks. As a loyal subject of the Porte, and an old servant of the French government, he felt no sort of wish to be delivered from the yoke of the Turks; and he looked upon those barbarians of the north, who cared no more for the Patriarch of Constantinople than for the Pope of Rome, as little better than rank heretics, not worthy of being treated even like his silkworms, which he got every year carefully exorcised before their spinning time. (Hope, 1819, vol. 1:2)

The essay deals with Zabel Yesayan's supposed feminism, both in her literary production and her political activity. It shows that any attempt at a discourse of reconciliation on the basis of women's solidarity became impossible after 1909. This explains the tone of her 1911 testimony on the events in Adana and the powerful appeal to her Turkish compatriots for a future citizenship. Here Yesayan spoke as a witness, not as a woman any more. The fact that after 1911 Yesayan slowly opened for herself a new field of “feminine” writing should be interpreted along that line, as an unexpected consequence of her turnabout.

Living groups are an important subject in sociology, demography, economics, social medicine, and anthropology. In many studies, households are chosen as the most suitable unit of investigation, though other choices also have their advantages and limitations (Yanagisako, 1984 pp. 161-205). The household is preferred in the present study, because it enables us to present new information that has been collected by the Turkish census and to discuss its implications for understanding living arrangements during the life course.

This article traces the patterns of irony and the carnivalesque in Murat Uyurkulak's fantastic fiction Har, focusing especially on the depiction of a group of misfits, yamuklar (the crooked), as portrayed in the central chapter, “Cinema Grande.” Arguing that a reconfigured carnival spirit finds its way into Uyurkulak's novel, the article explores from a Bakhtinian perspective the ways in which the author offers a modern version of popular festive elements, especially the jester or the fool who signifies the symbolic destruction of authority and resistance to the mechanisms of power. The employment of the carnivalesque enables the author not only to speak of what is essentially unspeakable, but also to displace the illusion of progress fabricated by authority. This turns out to be possible only through artistic illusion. By focusing on the portrayal of the outcasts in Cinema Grande, this article also draws attention to the different representations of madness in Atay's “disconnected” and Uyurkulak's “crooked.”

Modern conservatism, at least in its philosophical form, is a child of what it attacks—modernity. If the central ethos of modernity is a belief in the plasticity of society and the individual, the central ethos of conservatism is a belief in the sanctity of community, kinship, tradition. Modernity's fascination with the new is matched by conservatism's defense of past tradition. It is on the priority of a past order bequeathed by history, and its traditional institutions, that the conservatives base their critique of modernity. The modernist idea that societies can be shaped, molded, and steered in new directions, and that individuals can direct their own destinies, finds its counterpart in conservative thought in the rediscovery of the past-its institutions, values, themes, structures.

Even though multicultural groups have always existed in Turkey, identity politics has only recently been central to the Turkish political system. There have been many studies that have argued that this is a late development delayed by the repressive measures of the state. I shall not refute these arguments, but I shall take a different approach. I shall try to indicate some of the socio-economic developments in Turkey in the 1980s that either facilitated or initiated identity politics. I will not argue that these are the only reasons; on the contrary, there may be many other international, cultural, and political factors that have been influential.