Böcker av Andrew Mango

This biography of Ataturk aims to strip away the myth to show the complexities of the man beneath. Born plain Mustafa in Ottoman Salonica in 1881, he trained as an army officer but was virtually unknown until 1919, when he took the lead in thwarting the victorious Allies' plan to partition the Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire. He divided the Allies, defeated the last Sultan and secured the territory of the Turkish national state, becoming the first president of the new republic in 1923. He imposed coherence, order and mordernity and in the process, created his own legend and his own cult.

In 1914 the Middle East was still dominated, as it had been for some four centuries, by the Ottoman Empire; by 1923, its political shape had changed beyond recognition as the result of the insistent claims of Arab and Turkish nationalism and of Zionism.

An account of Turkey's political history, society, and economy helps determine what degree of credence to attach to the claim that Turkey is an island of stability in a troubled area extending from the borders of the European Union to China.

World War I sounded the death knell of empires. The last Sultan Mehmet VI Vahdettin thought he could salvage the Ottoman state in something like its old form. But Vahdettin and his ministers could not succeed because the victorious Allies had decided on the final partition of the Ottoman state. This book deals with this topic.

Presents a chronological account of terrorist attacks inside Turkey and against Turkish targets outside the country, places them in the global setting. This book is useful to the students and scholars of international relations, terrorism and security studies.