In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide “whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person”; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turks’ whiteness, was cheekily entitled “Is the Turk a White Man?” Within a few decades, having understood the importance of this question for their modernization efforts, Turkish elites had already started a fantastic scientific mobilization to position the Turks in world history as the generators of Western civilization, the creators of human language, and the forgotten source of white racial stock. In this book, Murat Ergin examines how race figures into Turkish modernization in a process of interaction between global racial discourses and local responses.

Considers the complications of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in Europeanizing from below

Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ethnographic portraits, Açiksöz examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans’ everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans’ bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability.

FROM the land of the Turks-Turkestan in Central Asia-there descended beginning in A.D. 800 a series of hordes and armies which overran and gradually took possession of that portion of South-Eastern Europe and Western Asia once known as Turkey. After five hundred years Mohammed II seized upon Constantinople, and that city became the capital of the Turkish Empire;-for the next two hundred years the dominion spread until it became an immense and important world-power. Then began a period of decline; and vice and prodigality in harem and seraglio brought about disruption and war. Russia saw her opportunity to extend her borders towards the sea-and went on gaining Turkish territory from early in the 18th until the middle of the 19th century when the Crimean war crippled her power in that corner of Europe. But Turkey could not hold the heterogeneous populations of her European provinces. Insurrection after insurrection broke out and one by one she lost many of the more important of them. She became bankrupt and a concert of the European Powers proposed and partially carried out a scheme for her reform. But she proved stubborn and went to war with Russia in 1877-1878; this ended disastrously for her and more territory was lost.

"Explains current situation and designs a plan to ease tensions in Turkey. Proposes a 'grand bargain' between Turkey and the Kurds, advocating greater support for increased liberalism and democracy, renewed European and Turkish commitment to promote EU membership, a historic compromise with Armenia, and greater Western engagement with Turkish Cypriots"--Provided by publisher.