The Power of the People. Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923-38 – Murat Metinsoy
Metinsoy, M. (2021). The Power of the People. Cambridge University Press.
Description
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic in 1923 under the rule of Atatürk and his Republican People’s Party, Turkey embarked on extensive social, economic, cultural and administrative modernization programs which would lay the foundations for modern day Turkey. The Power of the People shows that the ordinary people shaped the social and political change of Turkey as much as Atatürk’s strong spurt of modernization. Adopting a broader conception of politics, focusing on daily interactions between the state and society and using untapped archival sources, Murat Metinsoy reveals how rural and urban people coped with the state policies, local oppression, exploitation, and adverse conditions wrought by the Great Depression through diverse everyday survival and resistance strategies. Showing how the people’s daily practices and beliefs survived and outweighed the modernizing elite’s projects, this book gives new insights into the social and historical origins of Turkey’s backslide to conservative and Islamist politics, demonstrating that the making of modern Turkey was an outcome of intersection between the modernization and the people’s responses to it.
- A new interpretation of the foundation of modern Turkey exploring the social dynamics of Turkish history and politics
- Demonstrates how the ordinary people, whose daily practices and beliefs survived and outweighed the modernizing elite’s projects, shaped modern day Turkey
- Offers new insights into the social and historical origins of Turkey’s current backslide to conservative and Islamist politics
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