Book Review: Eyal Ginio, The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and Their Aftermath
| Author | Ahmet Gencturk |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929917718156 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsOther Areas |
Book Reviews 683
assets compared to Egypt from the beginning
of the post-revolutionary period’ (p. 233).
Christopher Featherstone
(University of Birmingham)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917718671
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The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan
Wars and Their Aftermath by Eyal Ginio.
London: C. Hurst & Co., 2016. 360pp., £40.00
(h/b), ISBN 9781849045414
Recent years have witnessed a significant con-
tribution to studies on the Balkan Wars. This
situation surely has something to do with the
centenary events of the Balkan Wars and World
War I (WWI) whose eruption was accelerated
by the former. It is generally argued by those
scholars who deal particularly with the issue of
the Balkan Wars and the Ottoman Empire that
the unexpected and humiliating defeat which the
Ottoman Empire suffered during the Balkan
Wars marked the end of Ottomanism, and the
endorsement of proto-nationalism by the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP),
which immediately started pursuing a policy of
homogenisation of Anatolia through expelling
and killing Christian minorities between 1913
and 1923.
This line of argument is in line with the
fashion of scapegoating the CUP with anything
that went wrong in the Near East. This approach
simply understands the CUP as a criminal gang
and ignores the trauma, shock and shame the
Turkish population experienced as a result of
the Balkan Wars. It therefore fails to reveal
how the Turkish masses, who until then mostly
stayed away from endorsing nationalism unlike
other Balkan nations, were enlisted to the cause
of Turkish nationalism.
Therefore, Eyal Ginio’s The Ottoman
Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and their
Aftermath is not only a groundbreaking work
that studies hitherto untapped primary sources
in Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Ladino and French
but also a timely contribution to the literature. In
the book, Ginio aptly argues that the Balkan
Wars created an identity crisis in the Turkish
element of the Empire and hence compelled the
construction of proto-Turkish nationalism in
which Turkish civil society played a crucial role.
In this manner, Ginio defies the recent revi-
sionist historiography that Turkish identity
after the Balkan Wars was merely dictated by
the Turkish nationalist CUP. Addressing differ-
ent topics in turn, he uncovers the roles of the
various actors in Ottoman Turkish society,
such as print media, thinkers, philanthropic
associations, nascent women’s associations
and student organisations, in shaping a Turkish
identity that would replace the multi-ethnic,
multi-religious identity of Ottomanism through
a process ‘from below’.
Ginio’s book is composed of six chapters in
addition to an introduction and a very compre-
hensive and useful bibliography that shows the
quality and volume of the primary and second-
ary sources the author has studied. Accordingly,
this work is strongly recommended to scholars
and students of Ottoman/Turkish studies who
would like to gain a deeper understanding about
the creation of Turkish identity and how it was
shaped by multiple actors in the aftermath of
the catastrophic defeat in the Balkan Wars.
Ahmet Gencturk
(Panteion University, Athens, Greece)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917718156
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HIV/AIDS and the South African State:
Sovereignty and the Responsibility to
Respond by Annamarie Bindenagel Šehović.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 243pp., £65.00 (h/b), ISBN
9781472423375
The author Annamarie Bindenagel Šehović
presents a rich and comprehensive narrative of
South Africa’s three decades of struggle with
HIV/AIDS. She divides the book into eight
chapters, beginning with a discussion of the
responsibility of the state to acknowledge the
sensitivity of the chronic disease, which
requires unparallel attention.
The initial chapters of the book provide an
in-depth analysis of the domestic context of the
disease in South Africa, then moving to exam-
ine the international framework and describe
the negotiations around policy decisions, the
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