The bulk of historical literature on early republican Turkey places a small circle of Kemalist elites at the center of the historical narrative and views them as the only agents of political and social change. However, some recent studies challenge this top-down approach and offer a more complex understanding of state–society relations. Hale Yılmaz's book belongs to this latter category. Drawing on a rich variety of primary sources (archival data, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, memoirs, and traveler accounts), Yılmaz explores “the ways in which the meaning of Kemalist reforms was negotiated between individuals, communities and the state” between 1923 and 1945 (p. 1).
The book analyzes four specific areas of reform in early republican Turkey. Chapter 1 focuses on the 1925 hat law, which required male citizens to wear European-style hats, and the social experiences to which it gave rise. Chapter 2 examines the attempts of Kemalist elites to regulate women's clothing. Chapter 3 explores the implementation of the 1928 alphabet reform, which adopted a new Latin-based Turkish alphabet to replace Arabic letters. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses the question of how national holidays, specifically National Sovereignty and Children's Day (ulusal egemenlik ve çocuk bayramı), were celebrated. These reforms, Yılmaz argues, sought to eliminate outward signs of difference between citizens of Turkey and to create a shared national identity and collective historical memory. Thus, they were part and parcel of attempts by Kemalist elites to produce a modern and unified Turkish nation.
This study shows that Kemalist reforms were not implemented in a social vacuum. On the contrary, they drew significant support from urban, educated, upper- and middle-class men and women. Yet Yılmaz's narrative also illustrates the limited capacity of the new republican state to penetrate society, particularly in the predominantly Kurdish eastern provinces. There, Yılmaz argues, the state's cultural reforms had little effect on village and tribal populations (pp. 206–207). Even in regions where the state's involvement in people's lives was more visible, the implementation of reforms was met with resistance. To mitigate the effects of the 1925 hat law, for instance, men from different social backgrounds avoided the public sphere, wrote petitions, and wore legally acceptable hats that could double as older forms of headgear banned by the new law (pp. 33–36). The threat or actual use of violence by state officials largely prevented these men from resorting to more overt forms of protest and defiance.
Yılmaz demonstrates how Kemalist efforts to formulate and enact reforms were sometimes restrained by the threat of popular resistance. Anticipating considerable male opposition and fearing the erosion of their support base, for instance, Kemalist elites refrained from passing a national law governing women's sartorial practices (p. 101). While examining actual and potential resistance to the reforms, the author is also attentive to the exercise of power by state agents. Rather than treating the state as a unitary actor, she shows that disagreements existed between various state agents on how to interpret and enforce the laws (pp. 68–71).
Despite the strengths of Yılmaz's analysis, her book is not without shortcomings. At several points, Yılmaz does not provide solid arguments or evidence to support her claims. In Chapter 3, while discussing the Nation's Schools founded by the government in 1928 to promote literacy in the new alphabet, she writes that not every province was able to spend the same amount of money on the schools, leading to uneven results (p. 153). Yet she does not provide statistical data on the actual performance of these schools in different provinces. In the same chapter, she argues that the collective experiences of war (the Balkan Wars, World War I, Allied occupation, and the Turkish War of Independence) deeply influenced the younger generation's expectations of the state (pp. 168–69), but this point remains largely underdeveloped in the text.
Moreover, in Chapter 2, one finds a contradiction between the main text and the endnotes. In the text, Yılmaz writes that in the late 1930s, local authorities were allowed wide discretionary powers to implement reforms of women's dress. A number of cases from the province of Izmir, she continues, seem “to imply that for the leadership in Ankara achieving the desired results was a more important consideration than how those ends were achieved” (p. 134). Yet in the endnotes it appears that local authorities in many other provinces were not given the same “wide discretionary powers.” The evidence Yılmaz presents shows that for the Ministry of Interior, the means employed by authorities in other provinces were as important as the ends. In letters addressed to the governors of Maraş, Aydın, Kayseri, and Ordu provinces, for instance, ministry officials disapproved of the use of police officers and the gendarmerie to enforce dress reforms (p. 267).
My final criticism of the book relates to its exclusion of non-Muslim and non-Sunni communities, such as Christians, Jews, and Alevis, from the narrative. Yilmaz misses an opportunity to further demonstrate the inclusive and exclusive aspects of the Turkish nation-building project by examining how these communities and their individual members negotiated the meaning of Kemalist reforms. In the end, however, this richly researched book makes an important contribution to the social history of early republican Turkey. It will give historians interested in state–society relations and nation-building processes in Turkey much food for thought and probably ideas for future research.
