Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION 
29 
Finally, a word about translation and transliteration. Except where indicated 
translations from Turkish and Greek into English are my own. Turkish texts in the 
Ottoman script are transliterated using the orthography of Modern Turkish. 
Transliterations from Greek are largely phonetic except where there is a current 
English alternative eg. Cavafy rather than Kavafis. 

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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
30 
The aim of this chapter is to supply for the purpose only of ready reference an 
outline of the historical background to the literature discussed in this thesis. The 
history is an amalgam of the well known, the much discussed and the much 
controverted. The limited purpose of this chapter will necessarily restrict the scope 
of the treatment of the events outlined
1
.
At the level of general impressions the historical process which underlies the War of 
Independence and the Asia Minor Disaster can still, nearly a century later, be 
summarised by the title of Toynbee’s famous book, 
The Western Question in Greece 
and Turkey
or, more expressly, the creation of (largely) monoethnic states in the 
territories of a polyethnic empire. The war can also be regarded as a recent episode 
in one of the most enduring problems in world history, whose first appearance in 
antiquity long predates the nation state: the relation between the littoral and the 
interior of Asia Minor; in particular whether a territory in the former can exist 
independently of a power which dominates the latter
2
. 
It is not easy to produce a summary, both clear and succinct, of the process following 
a linear chronology, because it operated at different levels which at times developed 
1
For convenience citations will generally be to an accessible secondary source such as Llewellyn Smith or 
Mango, where there is no reason to doubt what is stated. 
2
As pointed out by D. M. Lewis in the last pages of 
Sparta and Persia
[1977] where the analogy between the 
events leading up to the Peace of Antalcidas in 387 BC and those leading up to the Treaty of Lausanne in AD 
1923 is expressly drawn
(on p 156).

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