ABSTRACT
Edremit is one of Turkey's largest and most modern county seats, with a wholly Turkish-Muslim population of some 30,000 merchants, artisans, olive growers, wage workers and small commercial and industrial entrepreneurs and their families. In Ziya Gokalp's formulation, in the course of the war the Turks had emerged from Islamic civilization and the Ottoman polity and were now prepared — at least the large majority who opted for, or acquiesced in, Ataturk's Republic were prepared — to give their allegiance to a secular Turkish nation-state patterned after the states of Western Europe. The Republic inherited from the shattered empire little of material value beyond land and water, but the human legacy — a largely intact army and civil service — was crucial. Under the empire, most entrepreneurial activity had been foreign, or in the hands of ethnic minorities.
