Review of Görkem Akgöz, In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey. Leiden: Brill, 2024. xviii + 374 pages, 4 maps, 32 figures, and 1 table. ISBN: 9789004416741 (original) (raw)
Related papers
In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey , 2024
In the 1840s, the Ottomans built an industrial complex on the northern coast of the Marmara Sea, which they referred to as the "Turkish Manchester," symbolising their resolve to match European manufacturing capabilities. They failed. In the 1930s, a cotton plant within the complex became the "secret to and the foundation of Turkish capitalism," as described by one of the country's leading Marxist theorists at the time. What was the outcome of this second round of peripheral industrialization? And how did working-class politics shape its course?
International Review of Social History (vol.54), 2009
The years between the late 1940s and late 1950s constituted a critical period in the historical formation of the working class in Turkey. During that period, Turkey experienced a number of structural transformations. It also saw the elaboration of a new discourse on the working class by labor representatives, organizations, and by workers themselves. That discourse provided the workers and their organizations with the channels necessary to articulate their demands when other forms of expression were considered ineffective and dangerous. Using the language of equality, justice, and human rights, workers appealed for improvement in their status both at the workplace and within society at large. This new political culture and language was built on the critical assessment of the corporatist construction of labor relations and the rejection of the idea that employers and workers were members of the same (national) family. Based on worker and union newspapers, the primary objective of this essay is to discuss the basic components and characteristic features of this new discourse and its place in working-class politics in early republican Turkey.
The semantic field of the definition of society during the first decades of the Young Turkish Republic displays a rupture in terms of the definition of ‘work’ and ‘labor’. Hard-work was glorified and conceptualized in the proximity of abstractions like the West, technology, prosperity, development, ‘contemporariness’, ‘civilization’, discipline and time-drill and as binary opposed to everything that was deemed ‘Islamic’, but also hostile to the concept of ‘class’. This paper explores the dynamics of this rupture followed by this new productivity-oriented conceptualization of society, subordinated to the ‘solidarist nation without classes’. This period is compared with the 1860’s when the modern concept of ‘society’ was for the first time translated into the Ottoman public sphere in a way to hybridize it with inherited concepts of an early-modern empire. The Turkish language reform in 1928 which constituted a radical purge of Arabic and Persian vocabulary of the Turkish language and the substitution of the Arabic by the Latin alphabet lies between these two periods and makes this comparison even more challenging and interesting.
Working Class Formation in Turkey, 1946-1962: Work, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday
Berghahn Books, 2024
The political identities of the Turkish working class began a transformative journey that started during a period of industrialization following World War II and continued until the military interventions of 1960. Working Class Formation in Turkey addresses common, structural generalizations to recover the complex history of developing political, recreational, familial, residential, and work-related lives of Turkish workers. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, this volume brings the concept of "everydayness" to the fore and uncovers the local contexts that fostered class solidarity, examines labor practices that fueled radicalism, and analyzes the shifting dynamics of industrial discipline that impacted working-class identity and culture.
International Journal Middle East Studies, 2000
At its heart, Aykut Kansu's The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey is a thoughtful attempt to revise the way Turkish and Western historians have portrayed the events that ushered in the Ottoman Second Constitutional Period. Consisting of both a provocative historiographical essay and a detailed political narrative of the years 1906–8, the book reads the dominant accounts of the last years of the empire against the grain and makes a fresh contribution to the often staid discussions of this fundamentally important moment in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although his arguments are compelling, evidentiary and rhetorical problems inherent in the work undermine its overall value; less persuasive, though still worthwhile, is his attempt to mitigate the historical significance of the statist reforms of the Kemalist period. In Kansu's revision, the events of 1908 constituted the last great bourgeois revolution of the “long nineteenth century.” It succeeded in wresting power fro...
Yalçınkaya: In the Shadow of War and Empire
Turkish Historical Review, 2024
"Görkem Akgöz’s In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, NationBuilding, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey is a multifaceted and multilayered book, which makes it all the more challenging to discuss in a book review. The variety of sources, archival richness, and narrative skill of the author make the book a pleasure to read. It offers a contextualized and grounded view of Turkey’s labor history from the Ottoman to the republican period. Scholars interested in the history of labor, social history, business and management history, and economic history in general should undoubtedly give it a thorough reading.”