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Volume 5
New Directions in Turkish Studies
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Occupied Istanbul
Urban Politics, Culture and Society, 1918-1923
Edited by Yaşar Tolga Cora, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal and Gizem Tongo
340 pages, 17 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-83695-500-9 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (June 2026)
eISBN 978-1-83695-501-6 eBook Not Yet Published
Description
More than a century has passed since the arrival of British, French, and Italian forces in Istanbul in 1918, marking the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The almost five-year-long occupation of the city that followed remains largely ignored in history writing in the former occupying powers, and is often marginalised in Anatolia-centric narratives of the Turkish War of Independence. The book brings together many of the scholars working to redress this neglect in recent years. Chapters cover issues as diverse as policing, commerce, fashion, labour, infrastructure, justice, and housing, revealing the impact of the occupation on all aspects of social, cultural, and political life. By bringing this tumultuous period back into focus, the book makes a significant contribution to First World War studies, research on European imperialism, and the modern history of Istanbul, Turkey, and the Middle East.
Yaşar Tolga Cora is Associate Professor at Bogazici University, Istanbul. He has published on the social and cultural history of the Armenian communities in the late Ottoman Empire. His works appeared in journals including Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and International Review of Social History. His current research is on the Armenians’ role in the commodification of Ottoman textiles and their transformation into identity markers in the late nineteenth century.
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal is a researcher at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Napoli, and an honorary fellow of the British Institute At Ankara, where he was Assistant Director from 2019-2023. His first monograph, Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923, compared the military occupations of Istanbul, Alexandria and Thessaloniki during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. He is currently researching the transformation of the Istanbul opium market from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the Second World War in response to the creation of new opium-derivatives and local and international legal restrictions on trade in the drug.
Gizem Tongo is a British International Research Institutes (BIRI) Postdoctoral Fellow and a member of the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and cultural history, with particular emphasis on the late Ottoman Empire and the Greater War period (1914–1923). Her work has been published in New Perspectives on Turkey, Archiv orientální, and CLIO: Femmes, Genre, Histoire, among others. She has also been involved in curating and writing material for exhibitions and has taught at Oxford, Middle East Technical University, Hacettepe University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Subject: History: 20th Century to PresentHistory: World War I
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Contents
Of Related Interest
Working Class Formation in Turkey, 1946-1962
Work, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday
Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State
Allied Occupation, National Resistance, and Political Conflict, 1918-1923
