AYKUT KANSU, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey, Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997). Pp. 350. $110.00 cloth.

Abstract

At its heart, Aykut Kansu's The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey is a thoughtful attempt to revise the way Turkish and Western historians have portrayed the events that ushered in the Ottoman Second Constitutional Period. Consisting of both a provocative historiographical essay and a detailed political narrative of the years 1906–8, the book reads the dominant accounts of the last years of the empire against the grain and makes a fresh contribution to the often staid discussions of this fundamentally important moment in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although his arguments are compelling, evidentiary and rhetorical problems inherent in the work undermine its overall value; less persuasive, though still worthwhile, is his attempt to mitigate the historical significance of the statist reforms of the Kemalist period. In Kansu's revision, the events of 1908 constituted the last great bourgeois revolution of the “long nineteenth century.” It succeeded in wresting power from the grip of Turkey's ancien régime—bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte and the sultan—and placed it, temporarily, in the hands of the “citizens.”