Avi Rubin, Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial: The Yıldız Case. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018, xviii + 226 pages.

Abstract

which scholars and politicians Yavuz is referring to. Moreover, the fact that the term does not have an established Turkish translation equivalent calls for elaboration. I also find it difficult to believe that Ziya Gökalp was “one of Atatürk’s right-hand men” (p. 41). The Turkish War of Independence lasted until 1922 and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk from 1934) was primarily a military leader up until then. Gökalp died in 1924, before the socially transformative reforms of the Turkish Republic were initiated. His writings may have been influential, but Gökalp was hardly Atatürk’s right-hand man. More egregious than the varying quality of factual claims is the overall framing of the work. The post-Kemalist take that was refreshing in the early 2000s appears stale when used in 2020. Perhaps it is because the party that its political version fostered has grown authoritarian, but more pertinently the scholarly version has run out of analytical purchase. If I were to be unkind, Nostalgia for Empire is a scholarly counterpart to those books and think pieces where American journalists go to “fly-over country” to interview Trump supporters in diners, essentializing “the real America” and buying/reproducing a particular narrative of where that America is (in Kansas) and what it wants (“make America great again”). The difficulty is that the resulting analysis is not only analytically problematic, but at the same time it is the legitimizing discourse of a particularly nasty political current. This review could have been the equivalent of a music fan claiming “I liked his early work better.” But the problem runs deeper. Like the “Trump voter in diner” genre, Nostalgia for Empire turns the sources’ political narrative into its own scholarly analysis. Despite extensive criticism of Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu, the book reads as an apologia for imperial nostalgia and for the post-Kemalist political project as much as an analysis of it.