Agreeing to write a review is, in its way, akin to going to a book auction. One does not know in advance whether one is going to come away with something that is as obscure as it is unreadable, something worthy that looks nicer on the shelf than in the perusing, or, all too seldom, a masterpiece to treasure. Meeker's new volume is that utter rarity. He does not just break new ground in brilliant fashion but offers too what is likely to remain the definitive statement within it for a generation. Not just this, in a series of beautifully crafted arguments, he presents answers to a whole series of problems that have long troubled students of Turkish society.

A whole conference is needed to debate, argue, sift, and evaluate Meeker's suggestions and conclusions. However, I shall try to outline a few of the general and more specific reasons why they should be regarded as a watershed in our understanding. Modern Turkey, as is well-known, emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The story of the formation of the new nation has been told many times. The crucial question of what was carried over into the Republic from Ottoman society has hardly been touched upon. In part, this may be due to academic fashion, but it is certainly also true that the Republicans themselves preferred to regard the nation as a clean break with the past. It is also true that there really were astonishing innovations. Paul Stirling, for one, right up until the end of his life preferred to stress these rather than think about the possible continuities.

Meeker turns all this upside down. Through a meticulous study of the town of Of (pronounced “off”) on the Black Sea coast he illustrates that highly significant aspects of their social structure, long remarked upon by travellers (such as kinship moeties, “big men,” and so on) may be regarded as being functions of the region's early incorporation into the imperial endeavor. Major family groups from the late Ottoman Empire, he argues, survived into Republican times, and achieved importance within it, right up until the time that he conducted his fieldwork in the 1960s. He then goes further back into the records, and through documentary evidence is able to link these leading families with the unruly Janissary bands that roamed the area before their emasculation in the early 19th century. Thus he is able to demonstrate a quite remarkable level of continuity within the region's dominant social hierarchy.

This argument, fascinating in itself, has wider significance. It suggests that many of our models of the relationship between the Ottoman and the later Republic society are simply wrong: that there was a far greater degree of local participation within the political process than a simple, once-off “top-down” model of the transformation to Republic permits. Meeker also has highly specific suggestions concerning religious conversion and ethnic identity. His model is, simply put, that the topographic isolation of the region, combined with the high population and poor possibilities of further extending the area under cultivation, has always encouraged the population to travel and to interact with the outside world. Though the ethnic and religious populations of the region have historically been very complex, their increased mobility, necessary economically within the modern nation, was vastly facilitated by their collectively adopting orthodox Islamic mores. This helps to explain at once their insistence on seeming pious to the outside world and their care to appear to be particularly assiduous in guarding the honor of their women. The absence of men further explains why women often seem to work harder than males in the region: they really must do so given that the other sex is so often not there to help. The argument, when considered for Turkey as a whole, has one further, crucial implication. It suggests that the imposition of the egalitarian, secular nation-state proved, far from an impediment, an enormous stimulus to the spread of Sunni Islam because an expressly orthodox worldview became the uniform culture, the lingua franca of everyday life, through which fluid interpersonal relations could be achieved in an increasingly mobile but ethnically and religiously diverse society. If valid, at a stroke, Meeker has gone a long way toward solving the paradox of a secular Republic that became increasingly, and uniformly, religious.

Even those who remain sceptical will be unlikely to dismiss with any ease the huge weight of evidence that Meeker has accumulated, though of course there may be many questions. I could not help wondering about the contrasting relations between the Janissary depredations in the area, the pious “Ofians,” and the Bektashis. One reason that the Janissary bands were able to burn villages, destroy mosques, and ignore the seriat courts with such freedom might be precisely because they had an independent internal system of dispute regulation that drew its inspiration from Bektashi holy figures rather than the authorized system. Similarly, I also wondered whether Meeker was sufficiently fastidious in the way that he discusses and rejects traditional social anthropological approaches. He is surely correct to suggest that The Nuer-like lineage structures and mediation did not operate on the Black Sea coast. However, they clearly did (and do) in other parts of Anatolia (particularly in the east), and it is perhaps this difference that explains the comparative ease with which the Black Sea region became part of the Republic, and the contrasting, tragic difficulties that have become evident in the east. This rejection also perhaps leads him to underestimate his own debt to the classical school: In his attention to power, organization, social relations, cause and effect, and meticulous ethnography, he has produced a work that is as fine, and as significant, as anything that appeared in that golden age.