This latest volume of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts explores the role of design and decorative arts in the making of modern Turkey, from the late Ottoman Empire to the middle of the twentieth century.

As in many countries outside of western Europe and North America, Turkey's encounter with modernity has largely been the result of an official modernization project "from above." In the absence of the material and social conditions--industrialization, capitalist production, urbanization, and the existence of an autonomous bourgeoisie--that characterized the...