Kucuktaka In the Shadow of War and Empire

Yıllık: Annual of Istanbul Studies, 2024

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?

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.

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 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.

… Review of Social …, 2009

This paper intends to shed light into a social class, the Turkish artisans who were ignored by the mainstream historiography for a variety of reasons. Yet, they were the ones who formed the bulk of the middle-class in the following decades, helped shape the contours of Turkish politics and were seen as responsible for propogating the ideology of conservatism. In fact, without a thorough analyses of this social class, one could hardly grasped the evolution of the so-called modernization process Turkey underwent for the last half a century or so. By using parliamentary records, periodicals, newspapers and memoirs of the time as well as artisans' own journals, we trace the social and ideological demands of the Turkish artisans of the 1950s and bring about a comparative perspective by using the historical experiences of other countries. We argue that their conservatism should not be confused with the modern day conservatism since they represented a version of a peculiar form of progressive ideas and demands together with pro-Western and pro-capitalist inspirations.

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.

Pluto Press, 2021