July - December 2015
Mail onuryil(at)metu.edu(dot)tr
Onur Yildirim completed his undergraduate studies at the History Department at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara and went on to study at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Having received his master's degree in History, he then attended Princeton University where he completed his PhD studies at the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Hellenic Studies. His dissertation explored the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations on the basis of Greek and Turkish archival materials. The dissertation was later published as "Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922-1934". In addition to his research on the Turco-Greek Population Exchange, he also carry out research on Ottoman social and economic history. His research generally tends to document and analyze the struggles of ordinary people for survival against state violence. In that respect, he has conducted extensive research on the students of the sixteenth-century Anatolia, the artisans of the eighteenth-century Istanbul and the minorities and refugees of the twentieth-century Turkey and Greece. I is currently a professor and teaches global economic history at the Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
My project explores the intellectual aspects of the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations as a world historical event. During the first decade of the Population Exchange, many Greek intellectuals, consisting of bureaucrats and scholars, set out to appropriate and recreate the past in order to explain and legitimize what they considered as the historical foundations of their nation-state. They committed themselves to the realization and furthering of the nationalist agenda of the Greek state, which was based essentially on the promotion of ethnic and religious homogeneity at the expense of pluralistic national frame. In this respect, Greek scholarship chose to "remember" the Population Exchange as part of a series of tragic events encapsulated by the term 'Asia Minor Catastrophe.' As they retold the story of the defeat, the refugees provided them with the most visible evidence to back up their narrative. Their politicized endeavor took the form of conceptualizing the Population Exchange as a tragedy to be endured by the larger Greek society, strengthening the ties between its diverse elements and contributing to the re-constitution of a homogenous nation. They furthered the discussion by considering the handling of this whole event by the Greek state as a success story and regarded it as a testimony to the vitality of Greek statecraft. Their state-sponsored publications sought to illustrate, often through selective quotations, the quality of Greek statecraft in absorbing over a million displaced individuals as well as the contributions of the latter to the socio-economic and cultural development of Greece. Thus the interwar Greek scholarship created a powerful discourse on the Exchange of Populations that would hold sway on the collective memory of the nation. Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of this discourse was that by stripping the event (e.g. Population Exchange) of its human dimension and historical realities, it presented the Population Exchange as a weapon of choice to many 'state-builders' across the globe to rid themselves of their "unwanted" minorities. This project explores the interwar Greek scholarship with a special emphasis on the careers of the intellectuals and bureaucrats. In that respect it analyzes the information about the family and educational backgrounds, and professional experience of these people and finally document their formal and informal affiliations with the Greek state prior to, during, and after the Exchange of Populations
Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922-1934, New York and London: Routledge, 2006 (ISBN: 041597982X) Paperback edition appeared in 2012.
Diplomasi ve Göç: Türk-Yunan Mübadelesinin Öteki Yüzü, İstanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2006 (ISBN 975-6176-67-9) (Second Edition forthcoming 2015)
Osmanlı'nın Peşinde Bir Yaşam: Suraiya Faroqhi'ye Armağan, Ankara: İmge Kitabevi Yayınları, 2008.
(With Seven Ağır), "Gedik: What's in a Name," in Bread from the Lion's Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, (ed.) Suraiya Faroqhi, London: Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 217-236.
"Ladas, Pentzopoulos ve Türk Yunan Nüfus Mübadelesi: Bir Üst-Anlatının Anlatısı," Toplum ve Bilim, No. 119, 2010, pp. 184-205.
The articles "Amasya, Anatolia, Ankara, Balat, Beratli, Capitulations, Crete, Cyprus, Hatt-i Humayun (Islahat Fermani), Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane, İzmit, Mardin, Slavery and Slave Trade (General), Tanzimat Reforms & Period, Tax-Farming, Tokat, Trabzon, Tire", in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, 4 vols., (ed.) Norman Stillman, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010.
"Ottoman Guilds in the Early Modern Era," in International Review of Social History, vol. 53, Supplement S16, December 2008, pp. 73-93.
"The 1923 Population Exchange, Refugees and National Historiographies in Greece and Turkey," in East European Quarterly, vol. 40, No: 1, March 2006, 45-70. Greek translation was published as "H Antallagi Plithusmwn tou 1923. Prosfuges kai etnikes istoriografies stin Ellada kai Tourkia" in H Ellhnotourkikh Altallagi Plithusmwn: Ptuxes mias etnikis suykrousis, (ed.) Konstantinos Tsitselikis, Athens: Ekdoseis Kritiki, 2006, pp. 65-97.
"Repräsentation und Realität: Historiografie, nationale Meistererzählungen und persönliche Erfahrungen des griechisch-türkischen Bevölkerungsaustausches von 1923" in Definitionsmacht, Utopie, Vergeltung "Ethnische Säuberungen" im östlichen Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, (eds.) Ulf Brunnbauer, Michael G. Esch and Holm Sundhaussen, Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2006, pp. 49-76.
"Ottoman Guilds as a Setting for Inter-Religious Conflict: The Case of Silk-Thread Spinners in Istanbul," in International Review of Social History, vol. 47, issue 03, December 2002, pp. 407-419.
Review of Vally Lytra (ed.), When Greeks and Turks Meet: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship Since 1923, London: Ashgate, 2014, in ΔΕΛΤΙΟ Κέντρου Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών, Forthcoming 2015.
Review of Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800), Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011 in International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 45, No. 1, 2013, pp. 170-171.
Review of Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Change, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004 in Studies in Development/ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi, vol. 37, No. 3, December 2010, pp. 293-295.
Review of Hikmet Özdemir, The Ottoman Army, 1914-1918, Disease and Death on the Battlefield, Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2008 in The American Historical Review, vol. 114, No: 2, April 2009, pp. 516-517.
Review of Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History, An Introduction to Sources, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 in The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, vol. XXV-XXVI, Nos. 1-2, Fall 2001-Spring 2002, pp. 61-68.
A full list of publications can be found here.