Beller-Hann and Hann have supplied an inestimable service to scholarship by researching and publishing a major work centred on the Black Sea coast. At its heat, just as the title Turkish Region implies, this is a description of the successful incorporation of a once brutally remote, often mountainous region into the national and world system. It is also, however, the most sustained, depiction of the Laz, a large indigenous minority, and the region that they inhabit that has yet appeared...In organisation, this seamlessly jointly-authored volume is divided into general chapters respectively entitled State, Market, Civil Society, Patriarchy, Marriage, Islam, and Ethnicity. As these general headings imply, they can be read partly as individual essays, and partly as a continuous theoretical argument with a specific geographic focus...Having read the book through as a whole, I couldn't help concluding that the region is remarkable precisely for what the title implies: a Turkish region, not one that is particularly Laz, or wrought with separatist movements...The work beautifully captures therefore what might on the one hand be regarded as a triumphant success for the forces of nationalism, from another point of view as a sad loss of regional divergence and, like all good books, raises supremely important questions without presuming to offer easy answers.-

- David Shankland, SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY