Course Description: This course covers the History of Modern Turkey and its transition as a society and political unit from an imperial Ottoman to a Republican Turkish reality. Each class will begin with a discussion of contemporary issues in Turkey, and then continue with a discussion of the historical development of Turkish society from the 19th century until today. Although there will be discussions of culture, religion, and politics, the primary focus is historical – focusing on how Turkish society evolved in response to a number of domestic, regional, and international challenges in the past century and a half. There is no prerequisite for this course.

This course aims to investigate the political, socio-economic, and demographic processes that culminated in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of Turkey as a new nation state. As a background for this inquiry, we will first outline the major patterns of the nineteenth century Ottoman modernization and reform movements. The second part of the course will focus on the traumatic and revolutionary developments of the period 1908-1945. In particular, we will examine the radicalization of the Young Turks movement along the ideological lines of Turkish nationalism, as well as the political and demographic consequences of this radicalization for the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. The course will conclude by looking at the major political and socio-economic developments that the republican regime underwent over the course of the period 1945-1980. We will pay close attention to the rise and fall of “national developmentalism” as a framework to understand the crisis of Turkish democracy in this period.

Turkey is a country of perennial importance for multiple world regions (notably Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Western and Central Asia). A review of the century-long social and political history of the Turkish Republic is valuable for understanding not only processes and relationships that converge at the national or subnational scale but also processes and relationships that far exceed the territorial boundaries of Turkey. Our course examines historical and contemporary processes and patterns of social and political life in Turkey. This course is organized around key themes in the study of Turkey, including nation building, state formation, social-cultural difference, popular culture and cultural production, political violence, and landscape change. Our learning will draw from multiple disciplines and fields of study including anthropology, art and architectural history, cultural studies, geography, and political science. Informed by an interdisciplinary literature, most of our learning will focus on dynamics within the national territory or at sub-national scales (for example, particular urban regions, cities, or provinces). In addition to developing a command of these dynamics in national context, we will also learn to situate the perspectives of the authors we are reading in wider fields of debate. Beyond the national scale, you will also develop an understanding of Turkey that illuminates ongoing and headline-grabbing dynamics at larger scales. Turkey is a country of enormous geo-strategic importance. You can accordingly anticipate developing proficiency in, among other things, debate around the composition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey’s fraught relationship with the European Union (EU), a much-heralded rapprochement of Greece and Turkey in the Aegean, the enduring conflicts and shifts in population geography related to the Syrian civil war, and geoeconomic and geopolitical realignments that are prompted and tested by intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and regional tensions in the wider Eastern Mediterranean.

The aim of this study is to present the changes and innovations in the field of education during the late Ottoman era, by using examples from the education sector (schools). Robert College, as it shines amongst the others due to its distinctive mission and vision and because it has continued its existence until today, have been chosen to represent foreign schools. The Mekteb-i Sultani, known as Galatasaray High School today, for it was the first local educational institution that modeled its curriculum on the modern educational system of the West, have been chosen as the sample Turkish school for analysis. With their contributions in developing the Turkish education system; in conclusion, the changes in the educational system and their role in transforming the society during the late Ottoman era have been studied, by considering these two schools, which are seemingly different but actually closely associated with each other. Öz Bu çalışmanın amacı, eğitim kurumlarından (okullardan) örneklerle, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun son döneminde eğitim alanındaki değişim ve yenileşmeyi ortaya koymaktır. Yabancı okullar içinden seçilen örnek, misyon ve vizyon farklılığıyla diğerleri arasından ayrılan ve günümüze kadar varlığını sürdüren Robert Kolej'dir. Türk okullarından seçilen örnek ise, batının modern eğitim sistemini örnek alarak ders programını oluşturmuş ilk yerli eğitim kurumu olan Mekteb-i Sultani, bugünkü adıyla Galatasaray Lisesi'dir. Çalışmanın sonucunda, görünüşte birbirinden farklı, ancak birbiriyle ilişkili olan bu iki okulun, Türk eğitim sisteminin gelişimine katkıları ortaya konularak, Osmanlı'nın son döneminde eğitim sistemindeki değişimler ve bu değişimlerin toplumun yenileşme çabalarındaki rolü incelenmiştir. Anahtar Sözcükler: Yabancı Okullar, Robert Kolej, Mekteb-i Sultani, Eğitim Tarihi.

The Ministry of Education (Maarif Vekaleti) sent circulars to public administrations until and after the period of adoption of Education Law Association (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu) and asked for the statistical information of the education and primary school existing in every province, conty and villages in order to be able to understand the heritage of primary school from the Ottoman period to the Republican period. Statistical data was gathered across the country for detection of all schools, teachers and students within the boundaries of the National Pact. The data was published in the Statistics Magazine (İhsaiyat Mecmuası) for the years 1923-1924 and in the State Journal (Devlet Salnameleri) for the years 1925-1926 and the infrastructure needs of the targeted education were determined. The purpose of the essay is to set a light to the numeric change of primary school, primary school students and primary school teachers between the years 1923-1928 through first-hand sources. The numerical data obtained from the first years of the Republic made an important contribution to the determination of number of school and teachers needed for elemantary school and to the identification of educational infrastructure through these datum.