From Enemies to Allies
Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960
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Book Description
British–Turkish relations were transformed in the first half of the 20th century, from a state of belligerence during the First World War, through a period of heated confrontation over the fate of Mosul and trade and business access to the new Republic of Turkey, to rapprochement and financial cooperation in the 1930s, and finally a formal military alliance under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The edited collection provides a selection of important chapters by senior and early-career scholars from Britain, Turkey, and the wider world. The chapters use new sources to address issues as diverse as the Turkey–Iraq frontier, colonial governance in Cyprus, the legal rights of foreigners in Istanbul, commercial relations through the era of the Great Depression, contested neutrality in the Second World War, and the search for new alliances in the Cold War. Knowledge of this tumultuous transition and its impact on public memory is key to understanding points of tension and cohesion in present-day UK-Turkey relations. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journals Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas, and William Hale
Section I: The Interwar Period
2. Resurrecting legal extraterritoriality in occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
3. Elusive forces in illusive eyes: British officialdom's perception of the Anatolian resistance movement
Alp Yenen
4. Making borders from below: the emergence of the Turkish–Iraqi Frontier, 1918–1925
Jordi Tejel Gorgas
5. Great Britain and ‘a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation
Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet
6. Turkish–British relations in the 1930s: from ambivalence to partnership
Dilek Barlas and Seçkin Barış Gülmez
Section II: The Second World War
7. Turkey and Britain in World War II: Origins and results of the Tripartite Alliance, 1935–40
William Hale
8. Turkish foreign policy in the chaos of war, 1939–1945
Mustafa Aydın
9. ‘A friendly neutral’: Churchill and Turkey in the Second World War
Warren Dockter
10. ‘To accustom Turkish minds to a state of belligerency’: the delicate balance of British propaganda in Turkey during the Second World War
Edward Corse
Section III: The early Cold War
11. A tepid alliance: Britain and Turkey in the post-war and early cold war years
Ekavi Athanassopoulou
12. The transformation of Britain-Turkey-United States relations at the advent of the Cold War (1945–1952)
Şuhnaz Yılmaz
13. British foreign policy and military strategy: the contradictions of declining imperial power and the Baghdad Pact, 1947–55
John Kent
14. From indifference to independence: Turkey’s shifting Cyprus policy in the 1950s
Seçkin Barış Gülmez
15. Playing the Turkish card: British policy and Cyprus in the 1950s
Robert Holland
Editor(s)
Biography
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge and is currently Assistant Director of the British Institute at Ankara, where he researches the social history of Istanbul during the armistice and early Republican period.
Dilek Barlas received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has been teaching Turkish and European history at Koc University, Istanbul, since 1993. Barlas has books and many articles published in international journals on Balkan and Mediterranean history, the history of European integration and 20th-century Turkish-British-US relations.
William Hale is Emeritus Professor, and formerly Professor of Turkish Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He is a specialist on the politics of the Middle East, especially Turkey, in which he has been interested since his student days.