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Drawing on a wealth of rare archival material, Turnaoglu presents the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. She shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. Turnaoglu demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. She reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics - including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism - arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology.

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"This is truly a work of depth, narrative power, and substantive importance. Turnaoglu ably and deftly argues that approaching Turkish republicanism exclusively in Kemalist terms would be a serious mistake, showing instead how it represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual debates and discussions." - M. ükrü Hanioglu, author of Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography

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Banu Turnaoglu is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

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