The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement investigates the emergence of the boycott in the late Ottoman Empire as an economic and sociopolitical tool, examining various boycott movements between 1908 and 1914. These movements are shown to be spontaneous mass mobilizations occurring within the expanding Ottoman political and public spheres during the Second Constitutional Period. Çetinkaya is eager to render the history of the boycotts a strategic entry point for engaging with broader historiographical discussions. This is not surprising for those readers who have had the opportunity to follow Çetinkaya’s work in Turkish.Footnote ¹ In The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement, Çetinkaya brings together the whole rich scope of the theoretical and historical issues he has been dealing with.

There are two main pillars to Çetinkaya’s work that enable him to engage with manifold historiographical discussions with ease: his unapologetic use of concepts, and solid historical research based on diverse sources. Çetinkaya’s work does not shy away from using such broad concepts as class, the public sphere, human agency, or civil society, as these concepts open up opportunities for comparative studies, which would be a cure against the exceptionalism that typically plagues Turkish historiography. The prospects of such comparative work is specifically hinted at in the book when Çetinkaya situates the emergence of the boycott movement in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution (1908) within the context of “the Age of Boycotts” that spanned the constitutional revolutions of Russia (1905), Iran (1906–1909), Mexico (1910), and China (1911).

The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement seeks to examine the Ottoman leg of “the Age of Boycotts,” and, in doing so, fills the content of the related theoretical concepts with richly documented research. The most valuable aspect of Çetinkaya’s research is its reliance not only on the Ottoman state archives, but also on the Greek and, to a lesser extent, the British and French state archives. Not less significantly, the book also draws on a variety of contemporary periodicals and pamphlets of both the Muslim/Turkish and Greek communities. These sources are memorable not only for what they record for historians, but also, and even more so, for their contemporary function as political media. Given that Çetinkaya’s is a historical account that puts non-concordant social actors and their agency in the movement to the forefront, these latter sources in particular provide the opportunity to present to readers the diverse stakes invested in late Ottoman mass politics.

Over the course of four main chapters, Çetinkaya focuses on the geographically and socially diverse boycott movements in the Ottoman Empire and their constitutive role in the emergence of Muslim/Turkish nationalism. The first chapter conceptualizes the boycott movement as a mass social movement and introduces its social constituents—Muslim merchants, the working classes, and the non-Muslim bourgeoisie—in conversation with the existing literature on these social classes in the Ottoman context. This literature has either underrepresented such actors or else undermined their agency in regards to such “macro” shifts as the emergence of Turkish/Muslim nationalism, of the idea of Milli İktisat (national economy), and of the new instruments and political language of national and public issues. Çetinkaya is interested, above all, in the social origins of these shifts. Placing these actors at the center of his narrative, he challenges the scholarship, which either treats nationalism as an exclusively intellectual current or contents itself with the actions of a handful of komitadjis, even when it does pay attention to concrete policies.

The ensuing chapters of the book chronologically narrate the transformation of the boycott movement from its conception in 1908 to 1914. Chapter 2 tells the story of the emergence of the boycott in the Ottoman Empire in the immediate aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution as a spontaneous popular reaction to the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the declaration of Bulgarian independence. This spontaneity was a double-edged sword for the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti): on one hand an arbiter of Ottoman society’s mobilization and on the other an unconsolidated power in the new constitutional politics, the CUP sought to contain the grassroots movement without risking losing its oppositional image, which explicitly showed sympathy for such “constitutional” movements. Çetinkaya visibly demonstrates the elite’s fear of the masses during the boycott, which included an unpredictably nebulous organization and, at least provisionally, linked such strange bedfellows as port workers and Muslim and non-Muslim merchants both. The port workers “presented themselves as the representatives of the nation and the true interpreters of national interests” (p. 63) in order to push for their class interests through “boycott actions” hardly distinguishable from strikes. The Ottoman merchants, on the other hand, were divided among themselves, not by their confessional identity, but by an economic assessment of whether a boycott would be beneficial to their business or not (p. 72, 79). By the time this first wave of the Ottoman boycott movement ended in 1909, “different symbolic, ideological and political demands related to the national economy [had already] appeared in the public space” (p. 79). Because feelings of inter-confessional fraternity prevailed in the heyday of the revolution, these demands of Milli İktisat—e.g., wearing a kalpak, the headgear newly made fashionable, or consciously buying Ottoman products—had not yet targeted non-Muslim Ottomans.

In Chapter 3, Çetinkaya takes us to another boycott initiative in 1910 and 1911, this time prompted by the “Cretan Question” and targeted at Greece. Although Çetinkaya is cautious about not drawing sharp lines between different phases of the boycott movement, there are certain shifts that clearly point to qualitative transformations. Most importantly, the Greek boycott saw the targeting of non-Muslim Ottomans when it unofficially expanded to Ottoman Greek merchants. This, in turn, led to an Islamization of the discourse of Milli İktisat in the hands of the main actors of the Greek boycott; namely, Muslim merchants and port workers (p. 120). Such “expansion” was made possible by the vague border between legal and illegal boycotting actions, which is the second clear shift pointed out by Çetinkaya. Although strictly a constitutional initiative, the new boycott initiative had been accompanied—this time more than the previous one—by instances of violence, picket lines, and grassroots enlistment activities. The fact that the spontaneously founded Boykotaj Cemiyeti (Boycott Society) had never been legalized—despite its empire-wide organization, very public presence, and the activities of young cadres of the CUP in its branches (p. 111)—is perhaps the clearest example of the nominal border between legal and illegal boycotting actions. Throughout this chapter, Çetinkaya clearly illustrates how the vague lines between anti-Greek and anti-non-Muslim boycott acts, between legal and illegal actions, and between “national” and “class” interests were constituted by popular social movements comprised of divergent interests.

Chapter 4 tells the story of the final phase of the boycott movement after the Balkan Wars. With the territorial losses that accompanied the wars, the political milieu was ripe for a clearer shift in the target of the boycotts: the boycott acts became Ottoman Muslim protests against Ottoman non-Muslims. The boycotters argued that, as long as Muslims bought from non-Muslims, who were betraying their country by economically supporting Greece, Milli İktisat was doomed to fail and Muslim economic inferiority was to remain. Certain demographic changes directly affected the social background of this movement. First of all, the number of Muslim merchants visibly increased. Secondly, mass emigration of Greeks accompanied by a flow of Muslim immigrants into Asia Minor upset the social makeup of the empire. Lastly, unaccountable groupings and gangs became much more visible in the movement than the group of merchants and port workers had been (p. 203). The vague lines mentioned above were to be boldly delineated from each other: the boycott movement was promoting solidarity within the Muslim community via “safe lists” and didactic stories published as pamphlets. The increased use of violence by the boycotters and the more open support they found from the bureaucracy also set the movement that emerged after the Balkan Wars apart from the previous phases. At the end of this chapter, Çetinkaya leaves off his story at a dismal point, foreshadowing the unprecedented violence of Muslim/Turkish nationalism in World War I.

Çetinkaya offers the reader a rich and solidly grounded account of a social movement as a case for a practice of new politics, one made possible by the expanding public sphere of the late Ottoman Empire. Integrating all of the related issues and elements at once is of course an arduous task, and Çetinkaya’s narrative at times suffers from the organizational choice of engulfing the three empirical chapters (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) within the theoretically oriented ones (Introduction, Chapter 1, and Epilogue). A similar discreteness shows itself in the use of sources. Whereas Chapter 2 draws almost exclusively on contemporary periodicals, the following chapter uses archival sources in the same manner. A more balanced distribution of presentation and use of sources could well have revealed certain connections and arguments much more powerfully in this otherwise very solidly researched and lucidly analyzed book. Finally, although Çetinkaya refers to non-Muslim Ottomans in general, he states that his main focus is the Greek Ottoman community, and thus the admitted differences among various non-Muslim communities vis-à-vis the boycott movement remain to be investigated. In the end, by highlighting the divergent actions and discourses of society’s different segments, Çetinkaya succeeds in rendering obsolete the relevant scholarship’s rather caricaturized versions of confessional/ethnic communities and/or political organizations as entities acting en bloc. Putting human agency at the heart of its approach, Çetinkaya’s book represents a very welcome contribution to our understanding of the emergence of Muslim/Turkish nationalism with a clear emphasis on its social origins.