A familiar depiction of Turkey is as a country between two worlds, East and West. And a commonly used lens for viewing this dynamic – particularly but not only among European and American journalists – is a look at drinking. To describe it as such is, of course, not to deny some truth. İstanbul stretches across Europe and Asia, and drinking does have a particular resonance under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). And yet as Emine Evered’s refreshing book demonstrates, the possibility of this bifurcated rendering is recent. Indeed, just over a century ago, the question of drinking brought those in the seemingly separate worlds of East and West together as the United States and Turkey both experimented with prohibition. And temperance activists in both places repeatedly referred to one another. As the American William “Pussyfoot” Johnson declared, “We Americans are honored to accept the Islamic viewpoint on alcohol and to include exactly the same ban that Islam established” (p. 101). The physician Mahmut Esat Işık hailed Woodrow Wilson as “Chief Magistrate of the greatest dry country in the world” (p. 115). Işık hoped Wilson could help prevent Turkey from “going wet.” He would be disappointed.

Over the course of seven chapters, Evered expertly accounts for how this convergence came about and, then, how it quickly unraveled. She begins with three chapters detailing both Ottoman drinking and temperance. Despite assertions otherwise in recent years (“we do not know a Kanuni [lawgiver] like that,” declared Erdoğan in response to a historical serial about Sultan Süleyman), the Ottoman Empire largely tolerated drinking, with some paroxysms of puritanism. Some people were more enthusiastic than others, as demonstrated by the alliterative sobriquet for Selim II (Sarhoş Selim) or the şarab and kebab parties of Beyazid I (pp. 27, 30). But leaving aside personal taste, alcohol was also a financial matter. There was for centuries the Hamr Emaneti, which administered tax farms on alcohol as well as levied fines (p. 28). Intermittent closures of the institution and bans on alcohol consumption were typically reversed due to what Evered playfully calls the state’s “addiction to the revenue collected from taverns and alcohol sales” (p. 51). The fiscal dimension became even more pronounced with the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881.

While drinking exposed some aspects of communal division, both the practice and opposition to it also brought people together, perhaps in surprising ways given the persistent sense that opposition to alcohol is a peculiarly Muslim stance. If drinking culture in a place like İstanbul was ecumenical, the business and labor of taverns was not, as licenses were largely held by Greek Orthodox and Armenian men. This is not to mention various illicit forms of drinking ranging from the koltuk meyhanesi (speakeasy) to the ayaklı meyhane (wandering tavern), in which a man concealed a cup underneath a robe that he shared with roving patrons (pp. 42–44). No shortage of religious figures opposed such practices, as most would expect. But what Evered interestingly reveals is a confluence of progressive reformers who were against alcohol. Besim Ömer is perhaps the most well-known among these advocates. He declared the tavern was nothing more than the vatan of alcoholism. But also involved in the efforts to curb alcohol if not outlaw it all together were the İstanbul parliamentarian and doctor Krikor Zohrab and future Arab nationalist Sati’ al-Husri. Altogether, their shared disdain toward what Ferik Ahmed Muhtar denigrated as “the damned white fairy rakı” and other drinks reveals what Evered calls “a pluralistic cause that transcended religious faiths and ethno-national divides” (pp. 96, 98).

It was in this context that the American experiment – detailed especially in Chapter 4 – had real resonance in what would become Turkey. While activists and missionaries from the United States certainly had big plans for global temperance, their vision had success elsewhere precisely because local actors had their own ideas. Drawing primarily on the materials of the Anti-Saloon League of America and the World League Against Alcoholism, Evered shows the “reciprocal” rather than “unidirectional” nature of relationships between American and global temperance organizations and local ones, such as the Yeşilay, founded in 1920.

It is a curious fact that amidst the tumult of the Turkish War of Independence, on September 14, 1920 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey passed measures aimed at prohibition. The debates were wide ranging and are traced in Chapter 5. In addition to appealing to religious conservatives and medical progressives, anti-alcohol intersected with Turkish nationalism. For others, prohibition was a means of repairing the moral devastation of the war. And for still others, such matters ought to be decided on the grounds of revenue (finance minister Ferit Bey’s support of alcohol, he stressed, was merely “an economic matter”). Ultimately, the measure only passed with a single tie-breaking vote by the body’s presiding figure. The tenuous victory was a reminder that whatever the population’s thoughts about alcohol, temperance was not the product of a sustained social movement as it was elsewhere (p. 145). Staying close to the parliamentary debates reveals no shortage of memorable lines (“let them make molasses” was the prohibitionist variation on that other optative food-related declaration, apocryphally attributed to Marie Antoinette), seeming digressions such as discussions of syphilis, and references to the ongoing temperance politics of the United States.

Alongside the richly textured and transnational history of the politics of alcohol prohibition, we get some glimpses of the material dynamics of agricultural production and forced migration in this period. For example, phylloxera in France ensured that grape growers in the Empire could make money by exporting their product in the 1870s and 1880s. And the Greek Orthodox ownership of many vineyards also played into some nationalist teetotaling sentiment. But more might be said. Phylloxera, of course, eventually made it to Ottoman shores, too, feasting on the monocrop viniculture previously taking advantage of misfortune further west in the Mediterranean. The blight required a massive agronomical effort to transcend, involving the distribution of millions of vines of American rootstock (less susceptible to the aphid-like creature). And though the disease and war destroyed many groves, still others remained rooted, left behind for someone else – sometimes new arrivals from the population exchange – to turn into wine (or molasses or raisins). At one point Mehmet Cemil (Uybadın) spoke up on behalf of the growers of his constituency in Thrace: their grapes could not be turned into molasses or raisins, he insisted, and therefore called for an exception to be made. Presumably other members of the Grand National Assembly had interests in not only their constituents but also making money for themselves from these lands and their fruits.

Any state emerging from a decade of devastation would struggle to enforce such a measure, but it was perhaps especially so for a state that was headed by a keen drinker, as Evered illuminates in Chapter 6. Mustafa Kemal put up a performance in public, such as when he and the Soviet ambassador performed a dry toast in 1922 (the Soviet Union was engaged in its own prohibition experiment). But his proclivities were such an open secret that Ali Şükrü publicly spoke of a tavern operating in Ankara that was never shut down despite his repeated complaints (Ankara police chief Dilaver Bey was a known bootlegger) (p. 152). However much Mustafa Kemal drank, it was nothing compared to İstanbul. The project of enforcing prohibition there was colossal. Turkey’s temperance alliance of “the idealism of traditionalists and physicians” could do little to address real limitations in capacity and will.

And so the barely passed measure was partially repealed with an easy majority in April 1924, before being totally repealed in 1926, the impact of which is elucidated in Chapter 7. For all the breaks of the Republic of Turkey with the Ottoman past, the temporary nature of repression of alcohol stood as a continuity, vindicating those who simply closed the curtains, as the euphemism put it, rather than entirely closing up shop. In this context, the state not only allowed drinking once again, but also took a key role in the production of alcohol. In contrast to the late Ottoman support of rakı and amidst concerns about the dangers of the high proof of lion’s milk, Republican authorities branched out to promote wine and beer, too. One wine variety’s label featured nationalist flair with “a young woman flanked by two gray wolves.” When a member of parliament tried to defend the honor of rakı by insisting one could not separate Turkey and the beverage, opponents shouted “our national beverage is ayran,” a sentiment echoed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in recent years as well (p. 208). The repeal of prohibition thus, in Evered’s words, saddled the state with the “awkward” position of “producing and selling alcohol, on the one hand, and being responsible for protecting public health, on the other.”

This position has only grown more awkward and contested in the age of neoliberal Islamist politics, and amidst the provocations of Erdoğan. Some might disagree with Evered’s suggestion that “the glass, mug, or open bottle in modern Turkey is displacing the headscarf … as one of the country’s foremost public symbols of resistance.” Yet one of the notable slogans of the Gezi Park protests was, after all, the sarcastic “cheers to Tayyip” (şerefine Tayyip). The slogan has taken on darker meaning in recent years, as Erdoğan has tapped into the hot-button issue by raising taxes on alcohol. Between this development and crippling inflation, bootleg alcohol has emerged as a cheaper alternative, as have scores of deaths from alcohol poisoning. Here, too, is another longer continuity largely left out of journalistic accounts and those of Erdoğan himself of the cultural symbolism of drinking. Erdoğan is mimicking the Ottomans in opportunistically cracking down on alcohol all while maintaining some reliance on it for revenue. It is thanks to Emine Evered’s careful historical work connecting Turkey and the United States that we can see these more complicated and interesting dynamics.