Turkey Book Talk

Ryan Gingeras, historian and author of books on mafias and modern Turkey, traces how criminal networks shaped Turkey's politics and economy. He explains the rise of new youth gangs and globalized illicit markets. He discusses drugs transit routes, changing law enforcement, and the lasting public impact of scandalous revelations and mythmaking.

Mustafa Aksakal, Georgetown history professor and author of The War That Made the Middle East, guides listeners through World War I’s role in ending the Ottoman Empire. He discusses how the war reshaped identities and politics. Topics include wartime mobilization, famine and social collapse, Great Power rivalry, the Sarıkamış disaster, and debates over responsibility for mass atrocities.

Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of Modern European History and author on Turkish-German migration, discusses West Germany's guest worker program and why temporary labor became permanent. She covers rising xenophobia, the 1983 return incentives and 1984 departures, returnees' cultural estrangement in Turkey, and transnational politics shaping migrant identities.

Murat Yıldız, associate professor of history at Skidmore College and author on Ottoman sports history. He traces Istanbul’s modern sports culture through multilingual archives and club records. He discusses how physical training tied to modernization and anxieties, how clubs mixed communities yet reinforced boundaries, and why football outshone traditional wrestling and emerged as a mass spectacle.

Berin Gür on “The Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture: The Islamist-Nationalist Rhetoric of Conquest and Melancholy” (Routledge). The book explores how the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is remembered in Turkey's mainstream official narrative and how architecture contributes to this. Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substack. Supporters get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to each episode.

Journalist Adnan Khan, a former Turkey-based reporter focused on migration and the global waste industry, dives deep into Turkey's booming plastic waste imports and the exploitation of migrant labor. He discusses how China's ban on plastic imports and the EU-Turkey migration deal have fueled this industry, leading to toxic working conditions and high mortality rates among workers. Khan critiques Turkey's zero waste branding and highlights the environmental and human toll of these practices, advocating for better policies to address the crisis.

Burcu Karahan on her translation of “One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories” (Translation Attached). The book brings together 65 stories blending humour and eroticism, published anonymously in 1923-24. The stories are a fascinating time capsule of a vanished age, but much remains unknown about who was behind them. Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substack. Supporters get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to each episode.

Mehmet Gurses on his article “Turkey's Kurdish Conflict Transformed”, published in the Current History journal. The conversation places the PKK's emergence and transformations in a historical context over the past five decades, also weighing up shifts that may be triggered by its current dialogue process with Ankara. Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substack. Supporters get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to each episode.

Reuben Silverman on “The Rise and Fall of Turkey's Democrat Party: The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945–60” (Cambridge University Press). Today's AKP government is often placed in the lineage of the Democrat Party, in power for 10 years before being overthrown in a coup in 1960. But as the book shows, the line from the Democrat Party to today is "neither as straight nor as flattering as Erdogan would have it be". Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substack. Supporters get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to each episode.

Seçil Daǧtaș on “Under the Same Sky: Everyday Politics of Religious Difference in Southern Turkey” (University of Pennsylvania Press). The book is an ethnographic study of “the social reproduction of religious differences” in Turkey's uniquely diverse Hatay province. Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substack. Supporters get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to each episode.