ABSTRACT
The term “Young Turk” characterizes a string of cognate sociopolitical platforms and associational affiliations in the late Ottoman Empire. Already in the 1860s, the literary political dissident group that had formed in Istanbul and called itself the “New Ottomans” was becoming known to Europe as the “Young Turks” after the more familiar progressive movements that had previously sprung up across the continent: “Young Italy,” “Young Germany,” “Young Irelanders,” and the like. The strongest association of the term “Young Turk” is with the group that appropriated as its name and slogan the positivist motto “union and progress” in 1895, and with this group’s various incarnations and offshoots, which left a profound collective imprint on the political life of the Ottoman Empire in its last three decades. Even after military and political failures and denunciation and persecution by post-Ottoman successor states relegated Union and Progress, as an organized entity, to the dustbin of history, significant continuities in ideology, organization, and political cadres have provided a compelling reason for some historians to characterize the early nation-state period in Republican Turkey as a continuation of the “Young Turk” era (Zürcher, 1997).
