Review

Reviewed Work(s): Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey by Kemal H. Karpat

Review by: Yucel Yanikdag
Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 525-526
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2677211
Accessed: 26-04-2019 08:20 UTC

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 Book Reviews

Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey. Edited by Kemal H. Karpat. Leiden, The
Netherlands: Brill, 2000. ISBN 90-04-11562-5. Tables. Notes. Index. Pp. xxii,
306. $96.00.

The purported central theme of this book is the question of identity,

especially the transformation or continuity of the several important identi-
ties common to the Ottoman and republican periods. While most of the
chapters deal with the continuity between the empire and the republic,
three articles deal with the modem historiography of the Ottoman period in
the Balkans (Fikret Adanir) and the Arab lands (Wajih Kawtharani and Karl
Barbir). Here the question of identity and continuity from the empire to the
republic turns into one of how the modem historians in the formerly
Ottoman lands have viewed and represented their Ottoman past.
Arguing that they could not have existed without each other, Kemal
Karpat concentrates on how three prerepublican identities-Muslim,
Ottoman, and Turkish-evolved, amalgamated, and fused into the single
"national" identity of Turkishness and, ultimately, of Turkism during the
republic. This happened while the republican state officially ignored and
even condemned the Ottoman and Islamic components. Turkish national-
ism, promoted at the beginning of the twentieth century by a few intellectu-
als, developed in a relatively harmonious environment along with
Ottomanism and Islamism. After the Balkan Wars (1912-13), the Ottoman
state attempted to make Turkism its formal ideology while still holding onto
Ottomanism and Islamism. In many ways, Kemal Karpat's argument is com-
plemented by Erik Zurcher, whose chapter challenges two views of Turkish
nationalism. One is the more traditional view that the Young Turks gradually
discarded Ottomanism, because the non-Muslim Ottomans (Greeks, Arme-
nians, Bulgars) continued with their nationalist claims even after the Young
Turk Revolution of 1908, and later Islamism, because the Muslim Albanians
and Arabs developed their separatist movements after the Balkan Wars. The
other is the view that the Committee of Union and Progress converted to
Turkish nationalism before 1908. Convinced that the actual policies, rather
than the ideological debates, are what shaped both Turkey and the psyche of
its people, Zurcher eagerly dismisses the possibility of Islam as a political
instrument in the hands of the political elites, and concludes that the period
1918-22 was the zenith of Ottoman Muslim nationalism. Both Karpat and
Zurcher point to the role of the state in identity formation, which dovetails
with Carter V. Findley's thoughtful discussion of the state as a key element
in the paradigm of continuity, innovation, and synthesis.
Beyond the aforementioned, this book includes chapters by Mehmet
Alkan, Inci Enginuin, Mehmet Genc, Haim Gerber, and ?evket Pamuk that
focus on topics relating to the central theme, ranging from education to the
Ottoman monetary system. Some chapters are more successful than others
in maintaining the theme of continuity and change between the Ottoman
and republican periods.
While some of the chapters suffer from minor shortcomings such as the

MILITARY HISTORY * 525

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Book Reviews

omission of footnotes, the inconsistent use of Turkish diacriticals, and the

failure to translate some Turkish and Arabic words into English, this is a use-
ful and thought-provoking volume of essays authored by some of the leading
international scholars in Ottoman and Turkish history.

Yucel YanikdaA Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio

Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam,

1919-1950. By Mark Bradley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8078-4861-1. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv,
304. $19.95.

Mark Bradley, associate professor of history at the University of Wis-

consin-Milwaukee, has written an interesting and thought-provoking book
about relations, imagined and otherwise, between the United States and
Vietnam in the early twentieth century. Bradley is one of the few historians
of American foreign relations who speaks and reads Vietnamese, and cer-
tainly one of the best theoretical minds in the profession.
Bradley suggests that the American relationship with Vietnam did not
begin with the war proper, and that it is impossible to understand the con-
flict without looking seriously and deeply at mutual misperceptions early in
the twentieth century. The radical nature of the modern Vietnamese revolu-
tion challenged many commonly held assumptions in Washington long
before the Cold War and the containment policy made Vietnam an enemy.
The bulk of Bradley's impressive study is devoted to a sophisticated
review of the literature and intellectual underpinnings of American percep-
tions of the Vietnamese and French colonialism. Americans were mostly
informed about Vietnam through the writings of social scientists. Virginia
Thompson and others "orientalized" the Vietnamese, describing them as
lazy, cowardly, vain, dishonest, and unclean. Western observers also used
environmental explanations to certify Vietnamese inferiority. Ultimately,
Bradley suggests that negative racial stereotyping and determinism in the
interwar period had a profound impact on American policymakers. Long
before they knew of Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong, or Truong Chinh, the
architects of the Vietnamese revolution and founders of Vietnam's Commu-
nist party, American officials had determined that the Vietnamese were
incapable of self-government and that the anticolonial movement was led by
outside agitators. These conclusions, of course, were inaccurate and would
narrow U.S. options in the postcolonial period.
Bradley is also concerned with Vietnamese perceptions of Americans
and U.S. policy. Interestingly, both Vietnamese intellectuals and American
policymakers based many of their observations on the writings of French
scholars and authorities. The Vietnamese intellectuals, for example, were

526 * THE JOURNAL OF

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