The Balta Limam Treaty of 1838, the Nanjing Treaty of 1842, and the events that led to them have epochal significance in the history of Britain's involvement in the Ottoman Empire and China. In addition to stipulating the principles according to which commercial relations were to take place between England and the Ottoman Empire and China, these treaties became the first in a series of international and domestic measures that marked a turn toward free trade and informal empire as distinct from the widespread use of formal methods of control that had characterized British policies in previous periods. As such, the treaties are also regarded as having a global significance. Furthermore, unlike previous unilateral grants by the Ottoman and Chinese governments that restricted the commerce and the residence of foreigners, the Balta Limam and Nanjing documents were drawn up as bilateral agreements that greatly expanded the foreigners’ ability to trade and reside in the Ottoman Empire and China.

Turkey’s association over the past thirty years with what is now known as the European Union has further stimulated the debate about the nature of European-Turkish relations. This debate began early in the nineteenth century, intensified after the modern Turkish state was founded, and has continued throughout the post-war period.

Because it derives from a conceptual heritage developed within a cohesive world of academic reviews, political journals, research projects, institutes, and other bodies and organizations, the body of literature accumulated during the last two decades, particularly during the 1980s, can be deciphered and its overt as well as latent reasoning sketched. The basic elements of this conceptual heritage come primarily from students of Turkish-European relations and Turcological historians, but also from public officials (such as diplomats and bureaucrats), military personnel, and researchers in social sciences.

This paper explores the democratic capacities, demands, and aspirations of citizenship movements in relation to deliberations within a formal political system whose territorial boundaries have become blurred as a result of global political and economic restructuring. The case of the mobilization of a group of people from 17 villages located in the hills of Bergama in the northern Aegean region of Turkey in opposition to Normandy Mining Corporation, an Australian-based multinational consortium operating a gold mine in the region, provides an empirical context for the discussion. Normandy Mining Corporation uses the controversial cyanide-leaching method to extract gold, a method that allegedly has damaged the environment and has resulted in health problems for local residents. For more than a decade, Bergama villagers have been struggling to drive Normandy out of their region, as they are concerned about their own health and the well-being of the land on which they live and work.

According to official data, urban poverty has been rising in Turkey since the 1990s. Macro-level causes include repetitive economic crises, the implementation of neoliberal policies recommended by international financial organizations, the failure to create employment and the increasing inequality in income distribution. The intensity of poverty in different provinces is related to the specific conditions of a particular region. In the 1990s, there was an influx of internally displaced people (IDPs) into the cities of Southeast Anatolia. The lack of employment opportunities, the state's reluctance to address the problems of IDPs and the IDPs' loss of kinship/community networks contributed to the deterioration of their condition in the new urban setting.

The article deals with the decline in the military's influence on the foreign and security policy making process in Turkey. Turkey's harmonization process with the EU that gained momentum in the early 2000s and the US invasion of Iraq in April of 2003 seem to have played a key role in this transformation. While the EU reforms provided for the gradual elimination of legal prerogatives of the military, the increasing US influence in Iraq limited the military's operational power and led to a situation in which it could not exert influence in Northern Iraq, a key area for Turkeys security.

Much of the recent debate on the labor market issues of developing countries has revolved around the interaction of the labor market with stabilization and structural adjustment policies, introduced mostly in conjunction with the IMF and the World Bank. In particular, there is a growing body of literature on the interaction between structural adjustment policies and employment performance in these countries.

According to the dominant view in this literature, the favorable employment effects of these policies stem basically from the shift of industrial trade strategy from state-led import substitution towards market-based export orientation.

Nicknaming is a social practice that presents an area for comparative historical research. From a communal perspective, nicknames can be evaluated as markers of status in social hierarchy. On a personal level, they play a crucial role in defining personal identities. This article evaluates some examples from Ottoman archival documents from these perspectives. It focuses not only on the impact of dynamic elements on local community, as in cases of migration and conversion, but also on the question of how social prestige in a local setting could be perceived through the prism of nicknames.

When multi-party politics was initiated in Turkey in 1946, rival interpretations of Kemalism emerged to confront the challenge posed by the center-right's surmounting electoral victories. While the left-populist interpretation led by Ecevit gained considerable momentum, there was also a parallel yet less visible formation of a reaction against it—namely, conservative republicanism. From the mid-1960s onwards, left populists and conservative republicans waged a serious political rivalry which temporarily foreshadowed the important similarities they shared due to the legacy of Kemalism. Following the failure of left populism in the late 1970s, these similarities gradually resurfaced and the left populists have withdrawn to the reactionary position of conservative republicanism which fits the language of frustrated elites.

The category of “woman” has historically been used not only to locate but also to regulate women. Women's magazines were and are part of that process, as Beetham maintains: “[T]hey not only defined readers as ‘women,’ they sought to bring into being the women they addressed” (Beetham 1996, p. ix). Since femininity is always represented as something to be achieved in women's magazines, they provide a context through which women learn their gender roles in the process of becoming feminine. The notion of femininity is not fixed and stable; on the contrary, definitions are continually changing, as evidenced by the consumer discourses that redefined femininity in almost every decade of the twentieth century. These various representations of femininity are ultimately related to the politics of identity. Magazines are, therefore, significant sources in circulating collective meanings, recognizing diverse female subjectivities, and constructing sexual differences.

This paper studies the idea of Turkishness as one thematic element that commonly characterizes recent Turkish box-office champions. The preoccupation with the idea of Turkishness in recent popular cinema can be seen as a reflection of Turkish society's bafflement with the process of rapid and intensive transformation during the 2000s. In this period, Turkish society has grown increasingly confused about how to assess its own worth in the contemporary world. The paper makes use of the terms “magnificence” and “monstrosity” to make sense of the excessive representations of Turkishness in Turkish box-office champion action films and comedies of the second half of the 2000s. The term “magnificence” stands for aspirations in Turkish society during the last decade about the revival of the glory of the Ottoman past and becoming a powerful actor again on the world scene. The term “monstrosity” is employed in relation to Turkish society's cynical indifference to the violence perpetrated by the Turkish state, which is often rendered acceptable through the presumption of “Turkish peculiarity.” The paper points to the continuity between recent blockbuster action films and comedies in their representations of Turkishness by suggesting that magnificence and monstrosity appear in these films as two sides of the same coin.

The Circassian Beauty, attributed to the women of the Caucasus, is a historical image of idealized feminine aesthetics that has prevailed in Orientalist literature, art and knowledge production as well as Turkish popular culture. This article argues that this image has been central to the gendered construction of diasporic identity among Circassian diaspora nationalists in Turkey. It aims to explore the multiple meanings attached to the image of the Circassian Beauty, and the ways in which these meanings are historically transformed in line with the political and historical transformations of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.