The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey

Çetinkaya Y. Dogan . The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey . London and New York : I.B. Tauris , 2014, xi + 291 pages.

Book Reviews

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.¹In 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...