SOAS Research Online

Abstract

From the late 18th century onward, the twin revolutions of industrialization and nationalism posed existential threats to multireligious, multiethnic, multicultural territorial empires like those of the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. During this period, the imperial ruling elite responded to these new challenges using various ideological interventions. In the Ottoman Empire, these were, respectively, Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism. Kemalism is the offspring of this turbulent process, borne out of the rise and fall of the three ideologies of Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism and the experience of a decade of war and destruction between 1912 and 1922. It emerged as the ideology of revolutionary Westernization from above, conceived and carried out by the modernized intelligentsia of a largely premodern society.