This study examines the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Republican People’s Party (RPP) within a comparative-historical framework along the axis of “continuities and discontinuities.” The transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic is approached not merely as a change of political regime, but as a multi-layered field of transformation that can be traced through the state’s institutional reconfiguration, the reshaping of political cadres, forms of organization, ideological repertoires, and economic policies. The text seeks to make visible the limits of the “total rupture” or “unbroken continuity” schemas prevalent in official historiography, and to reconstruct the relationship between the two periods through simultaneous continuities, breaks, and contradictions.

The book does not confine its comparison to discourse and programmatic texts; it evaluates party organization, center–periphery relations, leadership mechanisms, cadre composition, institutionalization practices, and fields of implementation together. The CUP and the RPP are brought into relation under shared headings such as founding conjuncture, organizational construction, social bases, institutional architecture, and ideological-political preferences; similarities and divergences are analyzed through specific historical thresholds and balances of power. In this respect, the study offers an examination that opens the CUP–Kemalism relationship to debate without reducing it to single-axis explanations, situating it instead within institutional and ideological formations.