It is argued that the historiographical approaches prevalent in the Ottoman Empire and then in the Turkish Republic, observable in both academic and cultural production and implemented in the education system, were closely related to material transformations in politics and economics. It is further shown, however, that these relations were not of a one-way causality in either direction, but rather part of a singular whole. Debates over the construction of the past and the modernization project survive today in discussions arising from Turkey's possible candidacy for membership in the European Union.