Turkish-American Relations, 1800-1952: Between the Stars, Stripes and the Crescent.

• Author: Christofis, Nikos
• Position: Book review

Turkish-American Relations, 1800-1952: Between the Stars, Stripes and the Crescent

By Suhnaz Yilmaz

London and New York: Routledge, 2015, 182 pages, $145, ISBN: 9780415963534.

Since the end of World War II, good relations between Turkey and the U.S. have been thought to be a de facto situation, and indeed for the most part that has been the case. Despite the problems that have erupted between the two countries at times, such as the Cyprus crisis which led to the Johnson letter in 1964, relations between the two countries have generally been on the best of terms. This relationship faced a rocky road following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the situation is still vague as the power game in the Middle East is being played out in Syria. Because of recent developments, especially those following the end of the Cold War, most studies tend to see Turkish-American relations through a prism that focuses on geopolitics, foreign policy and international relations. Especially for nonTurkish audiences, this has left a considerable gap in the literature in regard to how relations between the two countries developed over time and reached this point of alliance. In this context, Turkish-American Relations, 1800-1952 fills an important gap in explicating the shared history between the two countries.

In this extremely informative, welldocumented and compact study, characterized by extensive archival research, Suhnaz Yilmaz starts off by examining the understudied nineteenth century. Beginning with the first contact made between the two countries in the early nineteenth century, a period in which the Ottomans had difficulty even identifying the American flag when George Washington visited Istanbul in 1800 (p. 32), the author identifies the two key elements that formed the main spheres of Turkish-American interaction: trade and philanthropic/missionary activities. Trade relations started in 1830 with the Ottoman-American Treaty, a treaty that preceded the Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of 1838. On the other hand, American missionaries proved to be fundamental to the existence and development of Ottoman-American relations, while at times, depending on the issue at hand, they opposed and put pressure on American business circles. A significant yet neglected issue the author brings to readers' attention is an instance of "diplomatic romance," a term coined by Oscar Strauss, who was the American Minister in Istanbul from 1887 to 1889 and again from 1898 to 1899. This...