Prohibition in Turkey

Alcohol and the Politics of Identity

By Emine Ö. Evered

University of Texas Press

A social history of alcohol, identity, secularism, and modernization from the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras to the present day.

Prohibition in Turkey investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.

Prohibition in Turkey brings out a world of new information relevant to the origins and the development of the modern Turkish nation state as well as its relationship with the world. Through interesting, novel, and revealing comparative discussions, Emine Evered provides an innovative study of the fraught attempt to institute American-style Prohibition in the newly emerging state of Turkey. Rudi Matthee, author of Angels Tapping at the Wine-shop’s Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World

Highly original, Prohibition in Turkey is a meticulously researched history of alcohol in Turkey. Emine Evered brings together a remarkable array of sources, addressing the frequent gap between alcohol regulations and their everyday application throughout the Ottoman centuries and the post-Ottoman Turkish republic, at the level of sultans and presidents as well as ordinary citizens. Hale Yilmaz, author of Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923-1945

Emine Ö. Evered is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. She is the author of Empire and Education under the Ottomans: Politics, Reform, and Resistance from the Tanzimat to the Young Turks.