In the Shadow of War and Empire

Front matter

STUDIES IN GLOBAL SOCIAL HISTORY STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

IN THE SHADOW OF WAR AND EMPIRE

INDUSTRIALISATION, NATION-BUILDING, AND WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN TURKEY

Introduction

Postimperial Synchrony: Industrialisation and Nation-Building as

Entwined Processes 1

1 The Story: From Economic Colonialism to Economic Nationalism

2 The Argument: Controlling Labour on and beyond the Shop Floor

3 The Historiography: Industrial Workplace in Global Labour History 17

4 The Book: Sources, Themes, and Organisation 26

PART 1 1 The “Turkish Manchester”

Factories in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul 33 The Ottoman Military-Industrial Complex 37 Ottoman Industrialisation in the 1840s 45 The Dadian Family 46 The Agro-Industrial Complex 50 The Construction of the Basmahane 52 Labour in State Factories 56 The Demise and Memory of Tanzimat Industrialisation 59 oN an fw N FR

The Bakırköy Factory in the Twentieth Century 63

2 A“Home-Grown Plant”

State-Led Industrialisation between Ideology and Empiricism 69 1 From National Economy to Economic Nationalism 71 Industrial Structure in the 19205 75 The Search for a Post-depression Economic Policy 78 Etatism and the Politics of Foreign Expertise 83 The First Five-Year Industrial Plan 87 “A Classless, Fused Mass”: Populism and Industrial Labour gı The Labour Code: Fifteen Years in the Making 95 a DO RP EO bv

VIII CONTENTS

8 The 1936 Labour Code: A Regime Law 100 9 Conclusion 104

3 Smokestacks of “Atatürk's Minarets”

Industrialisation and the Politics of National Space 106 ı Space, Ideology, and Industrial Site Selection 108 2 Industrialising Anatolia 114 3 Consuming Industrial Modernity: State Factories and the Rural-Urban Connection 120 National Planning versus Local Labour Markets 126 “But Where Are the Heroic Turkish Women?” 136 Local Industrial Labour Market in Istanbul 145 a DAG A

Part 2

4 The View from the Factory State-Led Industrialisation as Myth and Ceremony 155 ı “It Looks Like One of Those Famous American Factories!” o 157 2 Organisational Structure and Managerial Personnel 167 3 Recruiting and Promoting 173 4 Wages: Policy, Payment Systems, and Valorisation 180 5 Wages and the Working Day during the War 187 6 Labour Discipline 191 7 Technical Relations and Workers’ Skills 195 8 Unweaving Leaving 198 9 How Long Does the Harvest Season Last? 202 10 The Reasons Behind Discontinuity 204 u Industrial Welfare Policy 207 12 Industrial Welfare Provision during the War 211 13 Working-Class Housing in Early Republican Istanbul 216 14 The Move to Gecekondus 220 15 Conclusion 223

5 Voices from the Shop Floor Politics, Law, and Workplace Industrial Relations 226 ı TheWar atthe Workplace 229 2 Postwar Changes in the External Regulation of Labour 236 3 Questions of Distribution: Mümin versus Management 242

CONTENTS oN CO A

The Investigation 245

Questions of Dignity: Mustafa versus Management 249 A Reverse Order: from İşçi to Amele 256

From the Logic of Escape to the Logic of Control 258 Conclusion 262

6 Textures of Struggle Worker Politicisation from the Shop Floor to the Trade Union 264

1 A Formative Experience: The First Work Stoppage 266

2 The Return of the Repressed 270

3 Weakening the Trade Unions, One Step ata Time 286

4 Union Structure: Fragmentation, Finances, and Leadership 287 5 Parties and Politics in the Trade Union Movement 290

6 What Are Trade Unions For? 300

7 TheArrest 312

Conclusion

Shattering Silence, Deafening Nostalgia: The Legacy of State-Led Industrialisation 318

Index 365

IX

Foreword

Görkem Akgöz has written an important and original book. Not only is the subject new, so is the methodology used. She explores new paths and she does so convincingly.

Her greatest merit is probably that she connects two spheres that usually remain separate: on the one hand, the “public” sphere of economic development, industrial politics, and business management—what Marx called the “noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone”—and on the other hand, “the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business.” Akgöz places the developments in one textile company in Istanbul, the Bakırköy Cloth Factory, in a broad economic and political context from the 1840s onward. She situates the fortunes of the enterprise and its workforce during the downturn and collapse of the Ottoman Empire and in the subsequent state-led industrialization in Republican Turkey until the 1950s. Creatively exploiting hitherto unused sources, she then leads the reader in the second part into the everyday world of the women, men and children within the company walls, their lives, problems, ambitions and actions. She has an eye for contradictions and differences. The workers about whom she has been able to find biographical data— often only after persistent sleuthing—are described as individuals with their individual idiosyncrasies, some very courageous, others less so. Always Akgöz guards against stereotypes and simplifications.

By tracing the lines of development from the mid-nineteenth to the midtwentieth century, Akgöz mines new ground, for as she herself rightly writes, the story of Turkish industrial relations in the 1930s and ‘gos is “a largely neglected history.” In recent decades, Turkish labour history has undergone tremendous development. After earlier historians had already explored institutional aspects, others have expanded the field to broader questions, concerning labour relations and workers’ struggles. But this initially focused on the Ottoman period and the first years of the Republic. Akgöz follows subsequent developments, during the world economic crisis and etatist attempts at import substitution. In doing so, she simultaneously lays the groundwork for a more in-depth analysis of Turkish society after World War 11.

By paying attention both to wider social relations and to the feelings and actions of concrete workers, Akgéz makes the age-old opposition between structure and agency manageable. Historians are constantly faced with a dilemma: the more they focus on real individuals the more social processes and structures on a larger scale move to the background. And the more intensely

XII FOREWORD they focus on structures and large-scale processes the more individual actors with their personal histories are erased. Each approach has its price. Akgöz does not choose either approach, but combines them fruitfully.

In doing so, she adopts a feminist perspective. She recognizes that the working class is extremely heterogeneous and complex at all levels. She leaves the “single-axis framework” of the “white, male industrial worker” behind and sketches a multi-dimensional picture of interacting factors that, in combination, keep people in subordinate social positions in different ways. Akgöz exposes intersections between class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and age, among others. The analysis of such intersections is difficult. It has even been argued, that it is almost impossible to simultaneously keep more than two concepts such as gender and class in play. Akgöz's study nevertheless succeeds in unifying the importance of aspects heuristically.

With her creative and complex approach, Akgöz demonstrates that while a single narrative can never tell the whole story, a so-called Grand Narrative remains possible. Like spotlights, each separate perspective generates a great deal of light, but also leave something in the shade and may even blind the observer. In combination however they can create an unprecedentedly rich picture.

In the Shadow of War and Empire is undoubtedly a landmark in the social historiography of the Global South.

Marcel van der Linden International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making, From the beginning, it emanated from concerns that were at once political and personal. These concerns only grew over time, and the writing was shaped and buffeted by a huge amount of contemporary change. I began contemplating this book more than ten years ago in Amsterdam. Back then, I had a job waiting for me in Turkey, my home country, and I naively thought that I would spend the early years of my academic career learning to teach and writing my book. Little did I know that these years would be spent mostly on political activism. In the end, I could only begin writing after I had to flee my home country in 2017, and found myself settled in Berlin. Since then, its progress has fluctuated with the ups and downs in the political situation in Turkey, and it was finally finished under circumstances dramatically different to those in which I began writing it.

Many people and institutions have contributed to the completion of this study, and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge this. The dissertation that lies behind this book was supervised by Marcel van der Linden, who, among other things, taught this converted social scientist to think like a historian. His support continues to this day. The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam provided me with office space, library facilities, and, most important of all, supportive and intellectually stimulating colleagues. Among those, sevgili hocam Touraj Atabaki has a special place in my heart.

This book has been substantially improved by the intellectual engagement provided by colleagues at re:work, where I have found a home away from home in the last five years. The pleasure of exchanging ideas and information with other scholars of labour, and the joy of watching their projects come to fruition, has greatly enriched my writing. I am especially thankful to Felicitas Hentschke for her continuous support over the years.

Without the generosity of two funding agencies, this project would have been impossible. A three-year Gerda Henkel Fellowship allowed me to begin writing; additional support came from an Einstein Stiftung Grant. I cannot thank enough the numerous librarians and archivists who provided guidance and access to the sources that form the empirical foundation of this book. I am especially indebted to Geran Özdeş Çelik, Elifcan Çoruk, Bülent Erdem, Daniella Greca, and Zeynep Ecem Pulaş. My special thanks go to Ergin and Nebahat Aygöl, Sibel Bozdoğan, İlhan Oden, Emre Öncü, Ediz and Esin Tenşi, and Turgay Tuna for the photographs they shared with me.

The book also bears the stamp of many people who contributed in diverse ways to its completion. Numerous scholars and colleagues have read and

XIV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS commented on various parts of the book. Hasan Ashraf, Pınar Dönmez, Şirin Fulya Erensoy, Eda Güçlü, Rick Halpern, Nurçin İleri, Ezgi Pehlivanlı, Christian Strümpell, Gürsan Şenalp, Onurcan Taştan, Alp Eren Topal, and Nitin Varma commented on particular chapters. A number of other colleagues have offered helpful criticism and/or have engaged me in enormously useful discussions about the ideas in this book. Aslı Odman has been an unwavering intellectual support and a true friend, generously sharing her ideas and insights. At Brill, Alessandra Giliberto has been a model editor; she remained warmly encouraging without ever rushing the final product, even as deadline followed deadline. Special thanks go to Helen Veitch, who meticulously copy edited the manuscript. I also gratefully acknowledge the stimulating and invaluable comments of the two anonymous readers of the manuscript.

In the wider world, the range of my gratitude is equally great. No amount of academic support, intellectual stimulation, or financial aid would have enabled me to finish this project without the nurturing I received from family and loving friends. I am grateful to my parents, Meliha and Haluk, my brother Giircan, and my entire extended family for the unconditional love and support they showered me with. Fiti and Piti have been my rocks as always; Supurna Banerjee, Seda Cantekin, Cem Dinler, Anil Duman, Yasemin Erensoy, Sebastian Großmann, Sevda Hamzacelebi, Dimitra Kofti, Georg Mayer, Hakan Mıhçı, Sevinç Topuzoğlu Mıhçı, Duygu Nesli, Nico Pizzolato, Özlem Sarıyıldız, Açalya Temel, and Regina Tunke have accompanied me through the long and strange trip this book has taken me on. But there is no one to whom I am more indebted than Pieter Verstraete, who has been an unflinching supporter of my writing projects over the past few years. He not only read the several drafts, he also listened to practically every little detail that made or did not make to the final manuscript. He has also provided an enormous amount of care and love labour during the time of the writing.

I dedicate this book to my beloved grandmothers, Neriman and Sabiha, who, like most women, carried the double burden of paid work with unpaid care work, while at the same showering me and my cousins with the gift of unconditional love; and to my soulmate, Behcet, for healing the child in me during the twelve years we spent cheek to cheek, anne seni çok seviyor ömrümün baharı.

Maps, Figures and Table m.

Rw DN a DO PE ON

Maps

Nineteenth-century Istanbul 34

Industrial buildings and enterprises in Istanbul, 1800-1850 49 Industrial buildings and enterprises in Istanbul, 1850-1900 50 Railroad network, factories, and planned cities in Turkeyin 1940 15

Figures

The weavery of the Bakırköy factory, c.1920s 63

Hidayet Usta at the factory celebration, 1950 67

Poster in the special new year issue of Vatan, 1933 108

Preparations for the opening ceremony of the Nazilli Factory, 1937 117 Poster for Sümerbank stores, c. 19405 123

Machinery at the Kayseri factory, c. 1936 o 132

Comparison of women's industrial work under the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 1949 140

Women and men at the Feshane factory spinnery, c. 1930-1940 144 Workers at the Bakırköy spinnery, 1950 144

Cover of the official publication La Turquie Kemaliste, late 1930s 159

The old factory building at the back and the construction site at the front, 1934 160

Construction of the main production building, 1934 160

Construction site, 1934 161

Bakırköy neighbourhood, 1934 161

The front of the factory overlooking the train tracks, 1940s 163

The back of the factory, 1949 163

The construction of the new production building, 1934 164

Workers bringing in new machinery to the new production building, 1934 165 Factory Director explaining the new machinery to Prime Minister, 1933 165 Women at the spindlers at the Bakırköy Factory, 1950s 178

A street with rundown houses in Bakırköy, 19305 217

Ground-breaking ceremony for the new social buildings of the Bakırköy Factory, c.1948 240

Head foremen with technicians and engineers in the factory garden,

MAPS, FIGURES AND TABLE

Senior engineers at the factory clubhouse, 1950 253

An engineer and head foreman in conversation, c. 19505 260

Enver Tengi with his father, 1936 295

Enver Tengi with Nuri Demirağ, c. 1950 297

Ahmet (second from the right in the front row) in front of the Bakırköy Textile Workers Trade Union, c.1949 301

“We are the enemy of communism,” Aydın branch of the Textile, Knitting, and Clothing Industry Workers’ Union (Türkiye Tekstil, Örme, Giyim ve Deri Sanayi İşçileri Sendikası, TEKSİF), c.1955 310

İhsan Aydın leaving for the United States with a big send-off from his family and factory personnel, c.1951 312

Ahmet Cansızoğlu in prison with Hikmet Kıvılcımlı and other Homeland Party members, c.1957 313

Enver Tengi in front of the prison, c. 1960 314

Table

The share of the Sümerbank in the volume of industrial output, 1939 91

Abbreviations

AKP CHP DIP DISK

DP ICFTU ILO MKP TKP TSEKP

TSP Türk-İş

WFTU

Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi)

Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi)

Democrat Labour Party (Demokrat İşçi Partisi)

Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu)

Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti)

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions

International Labour Organization

National Development Party (Milli Kalkınma Partisi)

Communist Party of Turkey (Türkiye Komünist Partisi)

Socialist Party of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey (Türkiye Sosyalist Emekçi ve Köylü Partisi)

Socialist Party of Turkey (Türkiye Sosyalist Partisi)

Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türkiye İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu)

World Federation of Trade Unions

Introduction

Postimperial Synchrony: Industrialisation and Nation-Building as Entwined Processes

Shortly before the First World War would cast a further shadow over the “sick man of Europe,” Rosa Luxemburg was working on the publication of a series of lectures she had delivered at the central school of the German Social Democratic Party. The then crumbling Ottoman Empire was one of the examples Luxemburg cited in what would become a popular work of economic history and theory on the complexity and unevenness of capitalist development:

A country like Turkey [has] a large surplus of imports, amounting in many years to almost double the quantity of exports. How can Turkey ... afford the luxury of such a copious filling of the “gaps” in [her] “national economy”? ... Do the Western powers offer the crescent ... each year a present of several hundred million marks, in the form of all kinds of useful goods, out of Christian charity? Every child [knows] that ... Turkey [is] actually up to [her neck] in the jaws of European usurers, and [has] to pay the British, German and French banks an enormous tribute in interest. ... Turkey has virtually no industry of its own, and cannot conjure this out of the ground of its medieval peasant subsistence agriculture with its primitive cultivation and tithes. ... And so not only the whole of the population’s needs for industrial goods, but also everything necessary for transport construction and the equipment of army and navy, has to be imported ready-made from Western Europe and constructed on site by European entrepreneurs, technicians and engineers.!

Two decades later, the leadership of the Republic of Turkey, the last nation-state to emerge from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, decided it was time to break free from the shackles of underdevelopment so masterfully described here by Luxemburg. This gave rise to the first attempt outside the Soviet Union to set out an industrial plan. The preface to the first five-year plan of 1934 echoed Luxemburg’s analysis in an equally powerful tone, suggesting that the German-speaking Turkish bureaucrats may even have read her work, which had been published posthumously in 1925. The text referred to Western Europe

1 Peter Hudis, ed., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2013), 113-114.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc-BY 4.0 license.

and the eastern shore of North America as “the workbench of the world” that had destroyed the productive means of non-industrialised societies by selling them their manufactured products. The rationale for the plan, again similar to Luxemburg's analysis, foreshadowed the basic premises of the Latin American dependencia school by more than three decades.” For countries such as Turkey, this unequal exchange between industrial and agricultural nations, the authors of the plan argued, resulted in de jure independence but de facto dependence.

The industrialised powers, for their part, were able to set aside their existing conflicts to join forces in an effort to retain the agricultural countries as raw material producers, which they saw as a way of controlling their national markets. The onset of the Great Depression affected the latter more adversely than the former, but the crisis of the entire liberal world of the nineteenth century, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, also had a silver lining: the core countries temporarily lost their grip on the periphery, presenting a small window of opportunity for the underdeveloped nations to turn the tide.3 The crisis of world capitalism, the planners asserted, was a chance for the Turkish state to reverse the peripheralisation of the country by quickly building national industry.*

And so, postimperial Turkey emerged from long years of war and economic destruction with a new developmentalist plan to embark on an ambitious import substitution model of national industry-building. This was before state-led import substitution industrialisation would spread throughout the developing world in the years after 1945.5 The new economic policy was baptised

2 Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment” in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, ed. Andre Gunder Frank (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Colin Leys, “Underdevelopment and Dependency: Critical Notes,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 7, no. 1 (1977), 92-107.

3 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Suffolk: Penguin, 1969), 210; Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 149.

4 Korkut Boratav, “Büyük Dünya Bunalımı İçinde Türkiye'nin Sanayileşme ve Gelişme Sorunları: 1929-1939” in Tarihsel Gelişimi İçinde Türkiye, ed. Orhan Kurmuş et al. (Ankara: Makina Mühendisleri Odası, 1977), 3-4.

5 Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problem of Labour and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 271; Zivi Yehuda Hershlag, Turkey: The Challenge of Growth (Leiden: £.J. Brill, 1968), 74; Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 248-249; Charles Issawi, “De-industrialization and Re-industrialization in the Middle East Since 1800,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 12, no. 4 (1980), 474; Korkut Boratav, “Kemalist Economic Policies and Etatism,” in Atatiirk: Founder of a Modern State, eds. Ali Kazancigil and Ergun Ozbudun (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1981), 175; Zivi Yehuda Hershlag, The Contemporary Turkish Economy (London: Routledge, 1988), ix; Haldun Gülalp, “Capitalism and the Modern

“etatism,” a term used by French protectionists and socialists in the 1890s, which, in the economic life of the 1920s, came to mean direct state intervention. In 1935, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, hereafter the CHP) adopted etatism as a party principle. Two years later, etatism made it into the constitution as one of the six principles of the republic, together with republicanism, populism, secularism, reformism, and nationalism. By the mid- 19308, Kemalism, the official ideology of the republic named after its founding leader, Mustafa Kemal, had a strong industrial component. As industry and technology were celebrated as the centrepieces of state-building, a factory system took shape in the 1930s consisting of old Ottoman factories and newly built ones. State factories emerged as key sites of entanglement, where questions of nation-building, class formation, and modernisation were intimately tied together. They were expected not only to buttress Turkey’s hard-won political independence with economic independence from the advanced industrialised countries, but also to set the standard for relations between capital and labour throughout the country.

The republic was barely ten years old when it embarked on state-led industrialisation. The first decade was characterised by turmoil, politically as well as economically. The Kemalist leadership engaged in a radical and wide-ranging programme of superstructural reforms to address the institutional and legal framework and cultural issues of the 1920s. After violently suppressing the first armed Kurdish rebellion under the republican regime in 1925, the government enacted the Law for the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükün Kanunu), endowing itself with virtually absolute powers. It was at this point that authoritarian state-building began to gather momentum. By the time state-led industrialisation had begun, that momentum was in full swing.

The simultaneity of the two processes of postimperial nation-building and state-led industrialisation lies at the heart of this book. In the Shadow of War and Empire is a tale of these two distinct yet connected histories and the ways in which the interactions between them shaped and were shaped by working-class politics. The industrialisation efforts of the 1930s and 1940s

Nation-State: Rethinking the Creation of the Turkish Republic,’ Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 2 (1994), 155; Alfred Bonne, Studies in Economic Development (London: Routledge, 1998), 107-108; Haldun Giilalp, “The Eurocentrism of Dependency Theory and the Question of ‘Authenticity’: A View from Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 19, no. 5(1998), 954; Alan Richards, John Waterbury, Melani Cammett, and Ishac Diwan, A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2013), 239; M. Erdem Ozgiir and Eyiip Ozveren, “Turkey’s Attempt to Break the Fetters Before the Ladder was Kicked Away, 1929-1947,” in Political Economy of Development in Turkey 1838-Present, eds. Emre Özçelik and Yonca Ozdemir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 113.

and their consequences have their origins in the underdevelopment of the Ottoman Empire, an examination of which is essential for understanding the key characteristics and global connections of Turkey’s interwar economic policy. I therefore swerve the chronological marker that severed Turkey’s national present from her imperial past and reject the received wisdom that compares the Turkish republic to an “immaculate conception.” My first contention is that Turkey’s interwar state-led industrialisation can only be properly understood through a broader analysis of postimperial nation-building, one which neither reduces it to state actions nor ignores the relative autonomy of industrial relations.

If the aim is to trace the historical continuities in peripheral industrial development, there could hardly be a better starting point than a factory that was central to the two rounds of state-led industrialisation, separated by almost a century. And it is here that the story begins, at one of the old imperial factories that was taken over by the republican regime. In the Shadow of War and Empire explores the close relationship between nation-building and workplace relations under state-led industrialisation. The book offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they had built on the northern shore of the Marmara Sea in the 1840s, which was taken over by the republican state in 1923. The building of this industrial complex marked a turning point in the prolonged process of the Ottoman state's resistance and accommodation to capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. During the interwar period, the factory was at the centre of another attempt by a new political regime to resist foreign control. In the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent Marxist theorists, the factory was “the secret to and the basis of Turkish state capitalism.” Both the imperial and the republican regimes had vested their hopes in this factory on their path to catching up with European industrialisation. The Ottomans, for their part, failed. This failure served as political capital for the republican Turks, who staked their ambitious industrialisation policy on the promise of transforming the semi-colonial Ottoman socioeconomic and geographic structure into a sovereign and autarkic nation-state. The Bakırköy Cloth Factory, together with three other old Ottoman and newly built state factories, would come to symbolise that transformation.

6 Selim Deringil, “The Ottoman Origins of Kemalist Nationalism: Namik Kemal to Mustafa Kemal,” European History Quarterly 23 (1993), 165. 7 Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Türkiye İşçi Smufinn Sosyal Varlığı (Istanbul: Bozkurt Matbaası, 1935), 51.

The empirical core of this book consists of an analysis of labour relations at a single state factory. Yet it has much more to say, by implication, not only about early republican Turkey, but also about nation-building and industrialisation in late-latecomer economies. Late Ottoman and early republican Turkey offers a unique opportunity to unpack the peripheral industrialisation and political economy of development because it serves as a critical juncture where political regime change and industrial development ideals intertwine. By placing these two processes within and against their wider historico-geographical field, this book elucidates the diverse array of international and domestic forces that shaped the political economy of underdevelopment, nation-building, and working-class politics in republican Turkey.

In writing this book, my aim is to strip etatism of its celebratory excess and highlight the critical role of nation-building in the construction of a new labour regime. In the Shadow of War and Empire is concerned with how workers, who were recategorised from imperial subjects to citizens, lived and worked through this transformation, struggling to be heard amid the thunder of nationalist developmentalism. The story of Turkish industrial relations in the 1930s and 1940s is reflective of many broader economic, political, and social trends in republican Turkey. Yet this is a largely neglected history, and one which has considerable wider significance for our understanding of the many meanings of work and working-class politics in the development of modern Turkey.

1 The Story: From Economic Colonialism to Economic Nationalism

It would not be inaccurate to describe the atmosphere of policymaking in the first years of the republic as “the urge to have done with empire.” The speed of the republican state’s superstructural and legislative reforms in the 1920s struck the international community as remarkable. Things were much slower in the economic realm though, because of the imperial commitments inherited from the latter part of the nineteenth century. The temporary economic provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), with regard to the Ottoman debt and customs tariffs in particular, hampered state capacity to assume the role of an autonomous policymaker. To begin with, this entailed Turkey relinquishing her right over the regulation of its trade regime and monetary policy. In addition to its massive international debt, the country was suffering in the face of the physical destruction of warfare and the financial and human cost of the population exchange with Greece, which meant, among other things, the loss of a significant portion of its skilled urban labour force. Despite its efforts, the republican regime was unable to reduce its dependency on the early industrialised economies during the first years of its existence.®

Then came the shock of the Great Depression. Turkey was one of the primary-goods producing countries hit hardest by the deflation that followed the 1929 crash. The vulnerability of the Turkish economy revealed that legal and cultural reforms were not enough to banish the Ottoman past to oblivion. The regime had already set up a temporal dichotomy between the Ottoman past and the republican present thanks to the superstructural changes. Following the global capitalist crisis, this dichotomy now shifted to the realm of economic policy, positioning factory-based industrialisation as the key symbolic site for revolutionary vigour and radical change. By the early 1930s, the state elite and middle-class intellectuals were becoming increasingly attuned to the depiction of the Ottoman economy as a colonial dependency controlled by European foreign interests. They argued that sustained industrialisation was the only way to transform the economic geography of a semi-colonised empire into a robust national economic entity.9

Perhaps the clearest expression of this came from a pro-government journalist, who resorted to racialised images of slave labour and Asian colonialism to describe the condition of the young republic. Prior to etatism, he lamented, Turkish cotton was “only as worthy as a Negro’s sweat.” But hope reigned by the end of the 1930s, he argued, as each rotation of the spindles erodes “part of our Asianness.”!° By the middle of the decade, industrialisation and economic nationalism would become key issues in Kemalist modernisation. The image of the belching industrial smokestacks, referred to “Atatiirk’s minarets” by a group of foreign experts, dominated the political and intellectual landscape to an extent that is difficult to imagine in the present-day era of deindustrialisation." The project of modernisation was now synonymous with