Erik-Jan Zürcher – författare

Fighting for a Living investigates the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last 500 years. It does so on the basis of a wide range of case studies taken from Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East and Asia. The novelty of Fighting for a Living is that it is not military history in the traditional sense (concentrating at wars and battles or on military technology) but that it looks at military service and warfare as forms of labour, and at the soldiers as workers. Military employment offers excellent opportunities for this kind of international comparison. Where many forms of human activity are restricted by the conditions of nature or the stage of development of a given society, organized violence is ubiquitous. Soldiers, in one form or another, are always part of the picture, in any period and in every region. Nevertheless, Fighting for a Living is the first study to undertake a systematic comparative analysis of military labour. It therefore speaks to two distinct, and normally quite separate, communities: that of labour historians and that of military historians.

The proclamation of Jihad by the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople, after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, made the headlines. This book investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation in addition to its effects in the wider Middle East - both among the Arabs and the Turks, and among Sunni Muslims as well as Shi'ites. It brings to light the German hopes for and British fears of a worldwide uprising of Muslims in the colonial empires at that time. Moreover, it scrutinises the fierce academic debates caused by the Jihad proclamation, in which the 1915 manifesto of Leiden Islam scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje ("Holy War Made in Germany") played a key role.

On October 29, 2023, the Republic of Turkey will celebrate its centennial. The foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 marks the catastrophic, yet triumphant, foundation of a new nation-state as the successor of the defeated and partitioned Ottoman Empire. Until today, Turkey remains to be the center of attention due to its continued state of crisis and its position between Europe and the Middle East. In the 100 years of its history, Turkey went through multiple political and social transformations. The Kemalist origins in the Interwar years were marked by an authoritarian nation-state building in a post-imperial society with cultural reforms and modernization projects which radically constructed a new national identity and a secular ethos. The tumultuous decades during the Cold War opened a more democratic and culturally diverse field, but rapid socio-economic developments and ideological radicalization contributed to political instability, which in return legitimized Turkey’s endemic military tutelage over civilian-democratic affairs. While post-Cold War Turkey suffered from corruption and intensified identity politics, the brief moment of political stability and opening as well as the economic growth reached in the 2000s proved to be a false promise under the Justice and Development Party. Contemporary Turkey under the President Recep Tayyip Erdo.an is suffering from multiple problems resulting from the authoritarian policies of the government, Muslim-conservative vulgar populism, and an aggressive foreign policy that feeds into Muslim-Turkish nationalism at home. This volume is the first of its kind in offering a history of hundred years of Republican history through expert introductions to 100 sources on various themes of politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts. In doing so, this project will not only tell a truly multi-facetted history under the guidance of prominent and promising scholars of Turkish Studies, but will also allow its readers to hear voices and see images of a fascinating Republican past.

An investigation on the circumstances that have produced starkly different systems of recruiting and employing soldiers in different parts of the globe over the last 500 years