‘is The Turk A White Man?’: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity

In 1909, US courts set out to decide whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person. Turkish elites had already undertaken to portray the Turks as the historic source of Western civilization, white racial stock, and human language. Examining this interaction between global racial discourses and local responses, Ergin recentres Turkish modernization on imaginings of race.