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9780195393316

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Written with wonderful skill and understanding,Fezzes in the River is a dispassionate account of a complex, troubling, and little-known subject. Roger Owen, Harvard University In addition to offering a valuable reexamination of international relations in the troubled years leading up to the Second World War... Shields also attends to the impact of those relations on the delicate balance of post-Ottoman identity politics among the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Circassian residents of the Sanjak itself. What emerges is a painstaking reconstruction of the violent 'dismemberment' of a deeply intercommunal and 'cosmopolitan society' in the Sanjak through its reinscription as ethnically Turkish in the name of regional stability, international peace, and, ironically, the principle of national self-determination. H-Net

<br> Written with wonderful skill and understanding, Fezzes in the River is a dispassionate account of a complex, troubling, and little-known subject. -Roger Owen, Harvard University<p><br> What can a caf quarrel in 1938 over headgear-the sporting of a brimless hat-in the disputed province of Alexandretta tell us about grand historical processes in Europe, the Middle East, and indeed world-wide? In this compelling and vividly written study, Shields traces the momentous shift away from older European obsessions with 'protecting' religious minorities in Muslim lands to another kind of imperial intervention in the region after the Great War. The League of Nation's attempts to impose an immutable ethno-linguistic identity upon the polyglot, multi-religious peoples inhabiting the borderlands between the new Republic of Turkey and the French mandate of Syria illustrates how fierce international struggles, nationalisms, and local realities clashed and intermingled to produce startling outcome

<br> Fezzes in the River is a very engaging book, not only shedding light on the process that ended with Turkey's incorporation of the Sanjak of Alexandretta, but also opening a window into the interwar years in the context of the Middle East ..An essential work for students and scholars dealing with issues of identity in the Middle East in the interwar era, French imperialism in the Middle East, Turkish diplomatic history, and modern Syrian history. --Syrian Studies Association Newsletter<p><br> In addition to offering a valuable reexamination of international relations in the troubled years leading up to the Second World War... Shields also attends to the impact of those relations on the delicate balance of post-Ottoman identity politics among the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Circassian residents of the Sanjak itself. What emerges is a painstaking reconstruction of the violent 'dismemberment' of a deeply intercommunal and 'cosmopolitan society' in the Sanjak through its rei

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Sarah D. Shields is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells.

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