The last decade or so has witnessed a range of commemorations and centenaries, particularly linked to the Great War and the tumultuous events that came in its aftermath. In Turkey, just as in a number of countries whose national histories carry the stamp of these tumultuous years, commemorations abounded. As the logical extension of this process, the historiography of the Extended Great War benefited from a pronounced rejuvenation.
In Turkish historiography, one of the most vibrant subfields has been the years of occupation in İstanbul, first de facto (1918–1920) and then de jure (1920–1923). In addition to a range of scholarly studies, several conferences, as well as the Occupied City exhibition at the İstanbul Research Institute, served as illustrations of the uptick in interest. Erol Ülker has already made a significant contribution to this conversation, not least through his earlier Turkish-language book, Mütareke’nin İlk Yıllarında İstanbul’da Direniş ve Sol, which focuses on the early years of Occupied İstanbul.
His new book, Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State: Allied Occupation, National Resistance, and Political Conflict, 1918–1923, represents yet another important contribution to the subfield by focusing “on the formation of the Turkish national movement in occupied Istanbul” (p. 1). The study is organized into five chapters, which, while working well as stand-alone case studies, still constitute building blocks towards the book’s main goal of understanding “how the resistance movement took shape and evolved, which social and political forces were involved in its rise, and how they contributed to the movement” (p. 1).
The first chapter tackles the famous Karakol society, which spearheaded the nationalist underground in İstanbul from 1918 to 1920, carrying out numerous actions ranging from transferring political and military cadres from İstanbul to Ankara to gun-running operations. Here, in a way, Ülker is picking up where Erik-Jan Zürcher left off in his seminal study, The Unionist Factor, some four decades ago. Based on a painstaking reading of primary sources, including archival documentation from Turkey, the United Kingdom, and France, in addition to a wide-range of Turkish-language periodicals, Ülker’s work significantly complicates the narrative on Karakol and its successors, particularly in relation to the formation of the National Defense Organization (NDO) in early 1920. In contrast to Zürcher, Ülker emphasizes the continued relevance of Karakol well after the establishment of the NDO, by continuing to operate under its new name, Zabitan. The careful study of factional competition within the NDO also provides a compelling argument for the autonomy of the İstanbul resistance movement vis-à-vis the leadership in Ankara.
Chapter 2, in a way building on the first chapter, dissects the de facto schism within the Union and Progress after the war, showing how the question of supporting the leadership in Ankara or not drove a wedge between the yesteryear’s fellow Unionists. Ülker demonstrates the ideological aspects of this split, and their repercussions, informing the emergence of both a dialogue between the future Second Group in the national assembly in Ankara and a strand of Unionists, as well as the emergence of a Unionist left with its corporatist Representation of the Professions program (Temsil-i Mesleki) – the subject of another book of Ülker’s, Meşrutiyet’ten Cumhuriyet’e Mesleki Temsil ve Sol. Read together, these two chapters offer one of the most nuanced and persuasive maps of the national movement at this moment of transition.
With the third chapter, another unavoidable actor enters the already complex web of the political networks: İstanbul’s communists. In addition to fascinating findings about local communists’ entanglements with national resistance organizations, the chapter has the further merit of connecting the factional fight within the national movement as a causal factor in the 1922 crackdown on communism. Indeed, the internecine fighting between various nationalist factions provides a nuanced narrative that links the fate of local communism to the complex topography of nationalist politicking.
The fourth chapter, focusing on the final months of 1922, provides crucial insights about the polarization “between those allied with the Second Group in Ankara and a loose coalition of the political circles and social movements associated with the radical, republican elements of the national movement” (p. 91). This uneasy trilateral alliance between communists, Mim-Mim – a faction dealing principally with intelligence within the NDO – and the Union and Progress is nothing less than fascinating. Here, the labor movement also emerges as an essential arena where the cooperation between these “radical, republican” elements unfolded. While providing a detailed list of collective actors involved in İstanbul’s labor politics, including the İstanbul General Union of Workers (GUW), which will figure prominently in the fifth chapter, the chapter also succeeds in explaining the complicated interactions between nationalism and labor movements in this local setting.
The final chapter examines the electoral defeat of the NDO in the 1923 municipal elections and how this defeat paved the way for its downfall and the establishment of an official İstanbul branch of the Society for the Defense of National Rights, as the new representatives of the Ankara government in İstanbul. The NDO’s debacle also brings about the end of a fleeting republican alliance built in İstanbul, not to mention (yet another) crackdown on local communists. The second part of the chapter finally uses the Silahtarağa Power Plant, a major industrial enterprise in İstanbul, as the microcosmos of the shifting fates of various factions in İstanbul. Here, Ülker shows how the ATTEW (Association of Tram, Tunnel, and Electric Workers), a union affiliated to the above-mentioned GUW, ran a campaign focusing on kicking out non-Turkish workers from the plant. Through the case of the campaign led by Recep Sadettin Efendi, which had put in its crosshairs the Christian personnel, particularly Greeks, Armenians, and recently arrived White Russians, Ülker provides us with a compelling example showing “how the transition from the Allied administration to Turkish national rule was experienced at the grassroots level” (p. 119).
The book’s biggest achievement, arguably, is to provide a highly refined and detailed picture of sundry groups and organizations either directly within the national resistance movement or working in its orbit. Particularly for students of this topic, Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State will remain a reference point for gaining a perspective beyond the broad-brush analyses often used in examining the internal politics of the nationalist underground in İstanbul. The wealth of primary sources lends considerable persuasiveness to this new narrative. On the basis of this rich material, the book demonstrates great deftness in capturing the different shades within and between groups that are often conflated in the literature.
In addition, some sections of the book seem to heed Zürcher’s earlier call to take the interpersonal connections seriously – from kinship to shared school benches – in mapping the national resistance, yielding excellent results. An intriguing example is the composition of the NDO, where we see how the organization interlaced with the İstanbul government, through Esat Bey, the president of the NDO, who also happened to be the brother of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Izzet Pasha, as well as another Central Committee member who was the aide-de-camp to the War Minister (p. 25, among others).
Crucially, Ülker’s book also joins a list of works – expanding by leaps and bounds – that insightfully remind us that the early stages of the National Struggle had a wide-ranging list of political projects. Hence, the political leadership that emerged victorious from this complex battlefield was not preordained for victory but rather an alternative in a crowded field of alternatives. To its great merit, in few other works is this multiplicity as remarkably patent as in Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State with clashing political groups, and their internal factions – and even sub-factions within them!
However, one issue stems from a particular strength of the book. While for scholars of this precise topic the book is nothing less than a treasure trove, for the rest, the sheer amount of factual detail – with a Tolstoy-like list of never-ending characters and an alphabet soup of organizations – risks being disorienting for a broader readership. Some signposting could have facilitated the reading and rendered the argument more accessible even to a non-specialized audience. However, this remains a minor drawback in what constitutes an excellent contribution to the flourishing literature on Occupied İstanbul and National Struggle.
