Ryan Gingeras - "Internal Reflections on Elites and the Countryside in Atatürk’s Turkey, 1931-1938"

October 28, 2020

"The Revolution Looks Inward: Internal Reflections on Elites and the Countryside in Atatürk’s Turkey, 1931-1938" - A lecture by Ryan Gingeras (Naval Postgraduate School).

By 1931, the men who governed the Republic of Turkey were confident that they had built a strong, centralized state upon the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Yet doubts within the inner circle of Atatürk’s government remained. Beginning in 1931, ruling party officials in Ankara commissioned a series of investigative surveys of political, economic, and social life in the Turkish countryside. These surveys reveal much about how Turkey's leaders genuinely perceived both the achievements and limits of the revolution inaugurated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This talk takes a critical look at these internal reports and places them in the context of other revolutionary and post-imperial states in the aftermath of the First World War.

This virtual lecture was given on October 21, 2020, jointly organized by Columbia University's Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies & Department of History.