Library of Ottoman Studies – serie

The Great War was the first example of a total war in history, reflected in the cultures and literatures of Europe in the shape of propaganda. What began as civic patriotism developed into a weapon of war, programmed and organized by the state to devastating effect. In almost all countries, writers of different ideological hues were ready to undertake the job of representing the war, in accordance with the state's guidance. War propaganda in the Ottoman Empire, the most anachronistic belligerent of the war according to historians, was condemned to failure. In the underdeveloped and multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia could not produce adequate propaganda to support the battlefronts and the home front. Why did propaganda efforts die after 1915? Can this be explained with the laziness or cosmopolitanism of the cultural agents? Or did the lack of propaganda derive from reasons that are more material?Erol Koroglu seeks to address these questions in a unique interdisciplinary assessment of Turkish literature and propaganda, interpreting literary texts written by the representative writers of the period.These interpretations follow a literary cultural history method and give an analysis of the complex interaction between literary texts and the historical context. Koroglu discusses the subjects of First World War propaganda, Turkish nationalism and national identity construction. He concludes that the unfavourable conditions in the Ottoman-Turkish cultural sphere, the literature of the years 1914-1918, even if superficially full of propaganda aims, was essentially the continuation of a project to build a national culture, inherited from the pre-war years and never completed. Turkish literature therefore did not reflect powerful propaganda, but was more a difficult attempt to create 'national identity'.

Frontiers of Ottoman Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the surge in research into Ottoman history and culture of the past two decades. The second volume covers Ottoman-European International Relations; Ottoman manuscripts in Europe; Ottoman-European cultural exchange and Christian influence and the advent of the Europeans. The work makes a significant contribution to diplomatic history and international relations; Ottoman geographical knowledge; the nature of Ottoman artistic and cultural aesthetics and the intellectual, cultural, technological and human interactions between the Ottoman world and Europe.

In the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire restored direct rule over Yemen, the resulting turmoil came to threaten the security of the entire Arabian Peninsula. This book describes the various military campaigns to regain control over Yemen, surveying the increased foreign encroachments by the British in the south and the Italians through the Red Sea, and the revolts of the Zaidi Imams and Isma'ili tribes. Using previously unknown archival material, this history of political rivalries and challenges confronting Ottoman Yemen in the 19th century should prove useful for scholars and students.

The military campaign of the Ottomans, when they entered the region of Yemen in the mid-16th century, was chronicled by Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, a scholar charged by an Ottoman general to document his army's progress. This book makes this 16th-century Ottoman source document available in English for the first time.