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The Turks in World History. By carter vaughn findley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 320 pp. $19.95 (paper).
This is an ambitious and timely book. Findley, as reviewers of the cloth edition point out, faced numerous pitfalls in tackling the project. His success speaks to a command of the subject and a deft way of managing unwieldy material. The book's timeliness relates to the significant movement in Near Eastern / Central Asian post-Cold War politics, involving Turkey, the post-Soviet Turkic republics, and adjoining states toward commercial and diplomatic cooperation. The range of topics is vast and, on specific points, one can argue with Findley. But, as an introduction to the topic and as a teaching text, the book works very well. It is to Findley's credit that he offers scant support to the arguments on civilizational "clash" that one associates with Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and others. Findley offers one of several responses to that idea: human collectivities-in this case that of the Turks-have been always and remain today elastic on all fronts.
Findley begins with two images-the caravan / bus and the carpet-with which he proposes to render the sense of distance, that is, how far in history Turkic culture and society have travelled. The first of these concerns a Turkic / Turkish reception to history and the related construction of identity: who, then, belongs on the bus, particularly once it has arrived in modern Turkey? The image of...