Two names you will want to familiarize yourself with for late Ottoman and early Republic history are Erik Zürcher and M. Sükrü Hanioglu. Both of these historians have been vital in drawing the connections between the period of the Young Turks and the Kemalist period, a connection whose existence that the public history of the Republic tried to deny. Although all of their work is worth checking out, two of their books stand out for this question. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk's Turkey by Zürcher is a collection of essays that are both accessible and thought-provoking. Similarly, Hanioglu's A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire focuses a lot on the national issue and the dilemmas of both centralization and modernization.

Outside the Anatolian core, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 by Hasan Kayali and Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine by Michelle Campos are two monographs on the late-Ottoman project of Ottomanization and attempting to construct a form of Ottoman citizenship that was congruent with a Turkic-run empire. Finally, although ethnic policy is only one component of it, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran by Nader Sohrabi is an elegant comparative history of the Young Turk and the 1905 Iranian Revolutions.