Class, State and Property: Modernity and Capitalism in Turkey (European Journal of Sociology) (original) (raw)
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2023 marked the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. Our second article by Alp Yücel Kaya, entitled “Bourgeois Revolution in Turkey (1908-1923)”, analyzes the making of bourgeois revolution in Turkey. Kaya argues that although 1908 was the first and 1923 the final stage of this revolution, it is a product of class struggles that spread over an even longer period of time, and which emerged in the process of the development of capitalism. In the article, he therefore discusses the main stages of these struggles and the making of the bourgeois revolutions of 1908 and 1923. Accepting that there are some very competent studies on the question of the bourgeois revolution in Turkey and the revolutions of 1908 and 1923 (those of Hikmet Kıvılcımlı and Sungur Savran) he proceeds through the framework laid out by these studies, but unlike them, he pays more attention to the making of the bourgeoisie, intra-class and inter-class conflicts, and especially to the legal regulations that these conflicts have produced; in other words, he discusses the making of the bourgeois revolution through the making of bourgeois law. He focuses on the making of bourgeois law to reveal better the struggles within the bourgeois class as well as the struggles between classes, and in this way, he develops a different perspective on Turkey’s long bourgeois revolution.