Andrew James Alexander Mango (born 1926) is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
author who was born in
ConstantinopleIstanbul is the largest city in Turkey and fifth largest city proper in the world with a population of 12.6 million. Istanbul is also a megacity, as well as the cultural and financial centre of Turkey. The city covers 39 districts of the Istanbul province...
,
TurkeyTurkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey
, is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe...
, one of three sons of a prosperous Anglo-
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n family. He is the brother of the distinguished Oxford historian and Byzantinist Professor
Cyril MangoCyril Alexander Mango is a British scholar in the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire. He is a former King's College London and Oxford professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature...
. Mango's early years were passed in Istanbul(Constantinople) but in the mid-1940s he left for Ankara and a job as a press officer in the British Embassy. He moved to the
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
in 1947 and has lived in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
ever since. He holds degrees from London University, including a doctorate on Persian literature. He joined
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
's Turkish section while still a student and spent his entire career in the External Services, rising to be Turkish Programme Organiser and then Head of the South European Service. He retired in 1986.
Writings on Turkey and Atatürk
Mango abandoned his early intention of becoming an academic, finding his career at the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
congenial. He also wrote copiously in his spare time, publishing books and pamphlets on Turkey of which
Turkey (1968) and
Discovering Turkey (1971) are the most important. In addition he wrote a large number of shorter articles and working papers for British and American thinktanks on Turkey and its strategic role. He has also written for many years an annual review of major western studies of Turkey for the academic journal,
Middle East Studies.
The high point of Mango's career as an author, however, came after he retired from the BBC in 1986 when he was commissioned by the British publishers, John Murray, to write a new biography of
Mustafa Kemal AtatürkMustafa Kemal Atatürk was a Turkish army officer, revolutionary statesman, and founder of the Republic of Turkey as well as its first President....
. The aim was to replace the earlier biography written by
Lord KinrossJohn Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross was a Scottish historian writer noted for his biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and other works in Islamic historiography.He was educated at the University of Oxford....
who, though enthusiastic about Atatürk, had not actually been able to read Turkish sources himself.
Mango spent five years on the biography, using Turkish printed sources though not archival material. It has been claimed that his biography of Kemal Atatürk constitutes the definitive account among many other works and "reveals the long suppressed darker aspects of its subject, showing us a far more complex personality than we had seen before."
He presents Atatürk's life within the broad framework of the future of the Ottoman lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and the question of what homeland, if any, the Western Powers would leave to the Turks in the coming breakup of the
Ottoman EmpireThe Ottoman Empire or Ottoman State , also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey , was an empire that lasted from 1299 to November 1, 1922 The Ottoman Empire or Ottoman State (Ottoman Turkish: دَوْلَتِ عَلِیَّهِ عُثْمَانِیَّه Dawlet-il ʿAliyyat-il ʿOs̠māniyye, Modern Turkish:...
. He presents Atatürk's life within the broad framework of the future of the Ottoman lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and the question of the nature of the new Turkish state. Like earlier biographers of Atatürk, Mango gives a highly detailed account of the events of Gallipoli and the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) and as a result the final decade of Atatürk's life when he was attempting to transform Turkey into a western-style nation is somewhat compressed. The biography has in general been warmly received and is now regarded as the standard life of the founder of the Republic.
Mango's next work,
The Turks Today had a more mixed critical reception. He argues that Turkey has now become a modern urban metropolitan industrial society and that the gap with western Europe is closing fast. Mango, in line with a number of economic forecasters, suggests that by the middle of the present century, Turkey will rank in the middle of OECD group in terms of per capita income and because of its size will thus have become a major economic power. Turkey is already the sixth largest external trading partner of the European Union. Mango disagrees with those who believe that political Islamism is a danger in Turkey, comparing its role to that of the Christian church in Victorian England. A number of reviewers also commented that the book contained too many statistics to make an easy read.The Turks Today
is probably the best single volume account of Turkey at the opening of the 21st century.
In 2005, Mango published Turkey and the War on Terrorism, a medium-length study of terrorist movements in Turkey and their international links, arguing that the problems with which the West is grappling since 9/11 have been faced by the Turks for many years.