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One of the first measures taken by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), after assuming power in 1908, was to abolish spying. This has been mostly treated as a simple outcome of the change of power. However, this article offers a different perspective on the abolition of spying in 1908 and the subsequent exile of the spies in 1909. This study focuses on the abolition of spying in the Ottoman Empire as a significant idea shaped since the earlier years of the Young Turks' opposition to the rule of Abdülhamid II and followed strictly as a policy after they assumed power. Rather than treating abolition of spying and the exile of spies as a byproduct of the 1908 Revolution, this study takes it as one of the pillars of the Young Turks' ideological discourse and a central policy of the CUP. The article maintains a thread from the origins of Young Turk aversion to spying to the exile of the spies in 1909 following the 31 March Incident. This research aims to contribute to the social history of the late Ottoman historiography by placing the abolition of spying into a larger context together with its agents– the spies.

The Ottoman–Italian War of 1911–1912, often overlooked as little more than a prelude to much greater calamities, produced a vibrant discourse in Ottoman-language newspapers that called attention to issues including the efficacy of international law, Ottoman sovereignty, and the place of North Africa in the Ottoman imperial imagination. This article explores the coverage of the war in the Ottoman-language press and argues that the outbreak of the Ottoman–Italian War produced similar claims on the need to protect the Ottoman nation – and Ottoman imperial ambitions – to those following the Balkan Wars to which historiography ascribes much more importance.

The Ottoman-Turkish historiography has been largely concerned with the economic nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which consisted of four doctrines: elimination of foreign dominance on the Ottoman economy, removal of non-Muslims from the economic sphere, creation of a Turkish/Muslim bourgeoisie, and rapid industrialization. Through its focus on the economic activities of the Society for the Ottoman Navy, a CUP-affiliated charitable organization with enormous economic power, the present study investigates how the economic policies of the period can be regarded as a practice of economic nationalism. Based on archival material and in dialogue with secondary sources, this article argues that although the Unionist leadership and intelligentsia employed the language of economic nationalism, the operation of the economy in practice was considerably different from its rhetoric. War conditions, the lack of indigenous capital accumulation, and relations of the Ottoman Empire with foreign powers heavily shaped the implementation of the economic nationalism of the CUP.

Introducing evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects.

This study aims to expose the ways in which leading officials of the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP) interpreted, internalized, and questioned the conditions of their mission in Arab lands during World War I (WWI). It builds on the memoirs of Falih Rıfkı, aide-de-camp of Commander-in-Chief Cemal Pasha, and Halide Edip, an ardent supporter of the social and educational reforms of the CUP government. Both written after the war, these memoirs reflect not only nostalgia and regret but also the complicated relationship between Turkish officials and Arabs on the eve of their breakup from one another as citizens of the Ottoman State. The study also questions the orthodox argument that the Turkist and anti-Arabic ideology of the CUP government in general and Cemal Pasha’s wartime crusade against Arab nationalists in particular triggered the emergence of Arab nationalism. By contemplating the memoirs of CUP members in Arab lands, this study argues that Falih Rıfkı, Cemal Pasha, and Halide Edip tried to understand the region and its people in order to create a mutual future for Turks and Arabs within the Ottoman Empire.

After 1909, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) abandoned the Ottomanist ideals that had earlier characterised the group, adopting instead a purely Turkish nationalist ideology. They were not necessarily hostile to Arab and Kurdish communities, but considered that the latter had no say in the definition of the Empire, let alone in its future. In contrast, many Arab and Kurdish intellectuals continued to define themselves as Ottomanists. These intellectuals, including Sāṭiʿ al-Ḥuṣrī and Şerif Pasha, were defenders of the fraternity of the Islamic umma and, before the 'nationalist-turn' they took after World War I, were opposed to any kind of nationalism within Islam. They could not, however, easily justify the fusion of Islam and an Ottoman entity defined as Turkish. Integration into the Ottoman Empire for them did not imply the dissolution of the Arab and the Kurdish component within its Islamic imperial fabric.

The article analyzes the domestic dynamics of the political systems of the late Ottoman Empire and Khedival and British Egypt, aiming to determine the causes of radicalization of the Egyptian Society of the Muslim Brothers (MB) and the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as political parties in a comparative perspective. The study demonstrates that the nature of the two groups was determined by the constraints imposed by the political system upon party development. Constructed on the basis of the first predominant ideological cleavage, the political system and its actors were in turn shaped by the degree of penetration of foreign pressures into domestic politics. The first section of the article focuses on the impact of foreign pressures on the institutionalization of political cleavages, by examining modernizing reforms' trajectories and elite development. The second section analyzes the CUP and the MB as emergent externally created parties originating from the synthesis of intrasocietal and extrasocietal dimensions of the political systems in which they emerged.

This article surveys the appeal of Ottomanism for non-dominant group members of the Young Turk organisation. It focuses on a specific reading of Ottomanism as a nationalist discourse articulated by Young Turk intellectuals in exile. The article analyses the actions, thoughts and writings of Ottoman Albanian İsmail Kemal who, in 1900, after an influential career in Ottoman officialdom, escaped to Europe and affiliated himself with the leaders of the organisation in exile. What emerges from this study is that Ottomanism was, until the Committee of Union and Progress adopted an authoritarian and pro-Turkist stance, a feasible discourse for Young Turk activists from both a dominant and non-dominant background. The article also suggests that an assessment of the role of Young Turks from a non-Muslim or non-Turkish background needs to include a consideration of a simultaneous and compatible role of such members as working for imperial reform and for the improvement and protection of their own particular community.

GÜLTEKİN, Elif, Osmanlı Tıp Eğitimi Tarihinde Yarım Kalmış Bir Teşebbüs: Selanik Tıbbiyesi, CTAD, Yıl 21, Sayı 43 (Güz 2025), s. 741-782. Bu çalışmanın amacı Osmanlı Devleti'nin modern tıp eğitimi tarihinde bugüne kadar bilinmeyen Selanik Tıbbiyesi projesini Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi belgeleri ışığında tanıtmaktır. Çalışmamız, Osmanlı Devleti'nin İstanbul dışındaki ilk tıp okulunu Şam'da açmasının hemen ardından Selanik'te de bir tıp okulu açmak üzere teşebbüste bulunduğunu göstermiştir. Daha önceki çalışmaların ortaya koyduğu gibi, Osmanlı Devleti'nin Şam'da yeni bir tıp okulu açmasının temel motivasyonu misyonerlerin bölgedeki etkinliğini kırmak ve ayrılıkçı hareketlerin gelişmesini engellemekti. Arşiv belgelerinin sunduğu verilere göre, Osmanlı Devleti'nin İstanbul dışında açmak için teşebbüste bulunduğu ikinci tıp okulu için Selanik'i seçmesinin de dönemin siyasi atmosferinde bölgedeki karmaşaya yönelik bir stratejik hamle olduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Ancak okulun planları hazırlanmış, masrafları hesaplanmış, bütçesi planlanmış, mali kaynakları belirlenmiş, eğitim kadrosu ve müfredatı oluşturulmuş olmasına rağmen bu proje II. Meşrutiyet'in ilan edilmesinin ardından oluşan ortamda hayata geçirilememiş ve Osmanlı modern tıp eğitimi tarihinin tozlu sayfaları arasında yarım kalmış bir hikâye olarak yerini almıştır.

In Turkey the cult(s) of personality and authoritarianism have gone hand in glove since at least the foundation of the republic. Through an in-depth analysis of Ryan Gingeras’s Eternal Dawn: Turkey in the Age of Atatürk and Christine Philliou’s Turkey: A Past Against History, this review essay considers the republican origins of one-man rule and opposition to authoritarianism in the Turkish context. It discusses how, and why, the cult of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw the light of the day even when he was still alive. It also questions how the evolving m eanings and implications of muhalefet (opposition) could serve not only as a historical fact and analytical tool but also as a normative category in its own right to divert the public’s energy from un/ making nationalist mythos into consolidating basic liberal dem ocratic values and economic justice of which Turkey is in dire need today.