IEAoLU Tuesday : lecture by Edhem Eldem February 13th

Tuesday 13th February at 6pm at the Lieu unique in Nantes ( free entry)

“The authoritarian shift in Turkey: break with the past or continuity?”

In recent years, Turkey has been dominated by a very clear trend towards the political and ideological hardening of the governing party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the authority of its founder and leader, president Erdoğan. For many, this represents an authoritarian shift which is fueled by nationalism and Islamism, coupled with populism and majoritarianism. For historians, the challenge is not so much to describe and analyse a system that is still in its infancy, but rather to examine the existence (or lack) of permanency that could explain the emergence of this regime. Does Erdoğan represent a break with a political tradition which seemed to be moving towards a greater liberalization, or is he merely a kind of epiphenomenon, driven by an age-old movement which links him to Kemalist or Young Turk traditions, or even older movements, going as far back as the reign of Abdülhamid II?

Edhem ELDEM is a professor in the history department at Boğaziçi University and holds an international chair in Turkish and Ottoman history at the Collège de France. He has taught in various institutions, including Berkeley, Harvard, l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, l’École pratique des hautes études, l’École normale supérieure and was a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His research interests include, amongst other things, trade in the Levant, the history of the Ottoman imperial bank, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, socio-economic changes in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century, biographies at the end of the Empire and the dynamics of westernisation.

Selected publications:

• French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Brill, 1999);
• A History of the Ottoman Bank (Ottoman Bank, 1999);
• The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (Cambridge university Press, 1999, with D. Goffman and B. Masters);
• La Méditerranée turque (Maisonneuve & Larose, 2000, with Feride Çiçekoğlu);
• Death in Istanbul. Death and its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture (Osmanli Bankasi Arsiv ve Arastirma Merkezi, 2005);
• L’épitaphe ottomane musulmane XVI^e-XX^e siècles (Peeters Leuven, 2007, with Nicolas Vatin);
• Un Orient de consommation (Musée de la Banque ottomane, 2010);
• Un Ottoman en Orient. Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak, 1869-1871 (Actes Sud, 2010);
• Le voyage à Nemrud Dağı d’Osman Hamdi Bey et Osgan Efendi (Editions De Boccard, 2010);
• Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (Salt, 2011, with Z. Bahrani and Z. Çelik);
• Camera Ottomana. Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1870-1914 (koc University Press, 2015, with Z. Çelik).