Politics and the Peasantry in Post-War Turkey

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the First World War, the feudal system which had survived untouched in much of Anatolia began to change. Kemal Ataturk''s task of building a nation ''from the people up'' meant that the peasantry, by far Turkey''s largest ethnographic group, became an important symbol of social cohesion. Here, Sinan Yildirmaz analyses the history of modern Turkey through...