Between Two Empires —— Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey

----- 两个帝国之间

ISBN: 9781860648557 出版年：2002 页码：289 A Holly Shissler Bloomsbury Publishing

The life of Ahmet Agaoglu (1869-1939) spanned a period of momentous developments in Europe and the Middle East: world-shaking revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917 and in Ottoman Turkey in 1908; the First World War; the defeat of the Central Powers and triumph of the Entente; the Turkish War of Independence and establishment of the new Turkish nation state under Ataturk; and the establishment of the new state of Azerbaijan. This is the intellectual biography of a major player in many of these events, that brings these turbulent times into sharp relief. His was a life lived on the cusp of intellectual and political ferment, and at the principal meeting-point of the Great Powers with Turkey, Persia and the Caucasus, where the great matters of 19th and early 20th century diplomacy were played out against the dynamic rise of nationalism and the nation-state.But who was Ahmet Agaoglu and what was his 'identity'? - Ottoman Turk, Russian, Azerbaijani, devout Muslim, Turkish nationalist, modernist, liberal - all of these labels could fit. His life embodied the struggle of other late-Ottoman, Transcaucasian intellectuals: as an academic teaching the history of Turkey and Ottoman civilisation, or law, at the Universities of Ankara and Istanbul; as a politician and activist in revolution, supporting the new Turkish state; or as member of the Turkish legislature, responsible for drafting the 1924 Constitution. Agaoglu was also Director of the Press Bureau, co-founder of the Free Republican Party, and a journalist with a prodigious output both polemical and academic. He did, however, find his true vocation and 'his people' in the creation of the Republic of Azerbaijan, as a citizen of the new republic, member of the legislature and its intellectual father - a new state which embodied the traditional values of the Transcaucasus region with nationalism and modernity.Shissler's outstanding account of Agaoglu's life and work is based on extensive fieldwork in the Caucasus - especially in Azerbaijan – and on Agaoglu's own huge corpus of writings.`... a very interesting book ... It manages to place the life story of Ahmet Agaoglu in the Imperial twilight of the Russians and Ottomans ... The attempt to trace the intellectual influences Agaoglu underwent ... in the Caucasus and then in St petersburg and Paris is particularly successful'. - Professor dr Erik J Zurcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, University of Leiden`Shissler ... is a brilliant thinker and scholar ... her scholarly and analytic abilities are the very highest ... her book ... I am sure it will be very well received. - Professor Nikki Keddie