| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: From 1944 through the beginning of the 1950s, the ruling Republican People’s Party (RPP) in Turkey funded more than 100 Iranian students to study in Turkey. Combined with the existing scholarship on the period, an analysis of a large number of original Turkish archival documents on these students suggests that this wartime project aimed to extend the influence of Turkey into Iran. The outstanding contribution of this study is that it approaches the Great Power conflict during the Second World War and its aftermath in Turkey and Iran not through the accounts of political elites but through young, ordinary students from Iran as reflected in their letters and petitions, mainly addressed to the RPP officials. Bringing to light the names, photos, petitions, and letters of Iranian students studying in Turkey in the second half of the 1940s and reflecting their voices cloaked in an official discourse, this study is hence an original contribution to the social history of modern Turkey and Iran. |
