Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman army officer who emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement after the First World War. He had already established his military reputation during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. After the Ottoman defeat he rejected the post-war partition plans, organised resistance from Anatolia, led the Turkish War of Independence and secured international recognition of the new Turkish state in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

As the Republic of Turkey’s first president from 1923 until his death in 1938, Atatürk presided over an ambitious programme of secularisation and state-directed modernisation. His governments abolished the sultanate and caliphate, adopted new civil and penal codes, replaced the Arabic-based Ottoman script with a Latin alphabet, expanded secular education and promoted a strongly national conception of Turkish identity. These changes were imposed through an authoritarian one-party system in which organised political opposition was tightly restricted.

Saul David’s non-fiction works 1915 and 100 Days to Victory place Mustafa Kemal within the military history of the First World War, particularly the Gallipoli campaign that made his reputation. Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost follows the destruction and evacuation of Smyrna in 1922 at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, placing Atatürk’s nationalist victory within the violent collapse of the post-Ottoman settlement in western Anatolia.