Book Talks, Çağdaş Sümer: The Ottoman in Search of Order: Political Conflict and Regimes in the Ottoman Empire from the Old Regime to the Constitutional Monarchy II

The Department of International Relations would like to invite you to a talk by Çağdaş Sümer on his latest book titled ‘The Ottoman in Search of Order: Political Conflict and Regimes in the Ottoman Empire from the Old Regime to the Constitutional Monarchy II’.

Abstract

Dominant approaches that read Ottoman history in terms of state-society antagonism and that attempt to explain the political conflicts of the Empire's long nineteenth century by centring on the inevitable struggle of nationalisms are increasingly being challenged and criticised. However, the need for further theoretical debate and empirical research to construct a coherent alternative narrative that can replace these dominant approaches has not diminished. Class struggle-orientated analyses, which are vital to fulfil this need, continue to be the ‘missing link’ of Ottoman historiography. The Ottomans in Search of Order aims to contribute to the formation of a narrative centred on class struggle and the uncovering of the ‘missing link’ by focusing on the ‘co-constitutive’ relationship between the different phases of state formation and the dynamics of political conflict in the Ottoman Empire over a long period from the Old Regime to the Constitutional Monarchy II. On the one hand, the study deals with the crisis dynamics that brought about the end of the Ottoman ancien régime, and on the other hand, it re-discusses the Marxist theory of bourgeois revolution through the Ottoman example by revealing the specificities of the stages of democratic revolution, passive revolution and counterrevolution. Analyzing in detail the various political conflicts that were the product of class struggle in different historical geographies of the empire, the book proposes an analysis that goes beyond dichotomies such as state-society, elite-minority, and Muslim-non-Muslim. The Ottomans in Search of Order should also be read as a call to continue the fruitful ‘order debates’ of the 1960s, which have been put aside due to the tendency to avoid grand narratives and over-specialisation, in the light of new research and approaches.

Çağdaş Sümer:

Born in 1981 in Ankara. He completed his undergraduate education at Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of International Relations in 2003. He continued his doctoral studies in the same university's Department of Political Science and Public Administration. Çağdaş Sümer, who worked as a research assistant at METU History Department between 2005-2016, has been continuing his academic studies at Cappadocia University since 2020, where he completed his PhD. In 2010, Sümer compiled the book Hegemonyadan Diktatoraya Liberal-Conservative Alliance and AKP with Fatih Yaşlı and has more than twenty translations in different disciplines of social sciences.