The conventional modernist approach to the history of industrialization in non-Western societies has largely assumed that this process did not begin until the twentieth century, through state-led projects. In the case of the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, as with many other “late comers” to industrialization, similar modernist assertions are also dominant in the literature. The etatist policies of the early Republican government are often justified by the alleged absence of industrial capital in the young Republic, along with the alleged lack of a late Ottoman bourgeoisie or working class. My research on social conflict in Ottoman Bursa from the 1840s through World War I challenges these assumptions and proposes to revise the prevailing Eurocentric narrative of the Industrial Revolution. Based on petitions and letters from industrial workers, court documents, and police interrogation reports, my paper presents evidence that many symptoms of industrial revolution, including the appropriation of public lands, natural and urban resources by industrialists, as well as environmental problems, unsafe working conditions, factory explosions, long working hours, and exploitation of child and female wage labor, were found in Bursa from the 1840s onward. Bursa’s shift from the handicraft silk industry to industrial silk filature (yarn) production was not led by the state, but pioneered by the private sector. The economic transformation was swift and forceful, and when combined with the legal and centralizing administrative provincial reforms of the Tanzimat, it uprooted the existing socio-economic and political structure at the provincial level. Ancient Ottoman institutions, such as artisan guilds, shar‘ia courts and waqfs, which played a crucial role in the protection of the public good, balancing the arbitrary power of the state, conflict resolution and allocation of urban resources, were doomed to vanish due to these developments, while two new classes, i.e. the bourgeoisie and the working class, emerged in Bursa’s new social fabric. The transformation was radical but not very peaceful. Class conflicts could easily develop into sectarian disputes in a multi-ethnic population like Bursa’s, particularly when Tanzimat and post-Tanzimat governments failed to fill the vacuum of ancient Ottoman institutions and to enact new laws to protect the public good against the outcomes of unbridled capitalism. This evidence of industrial conflict in mid-19th-century Ottoman urban centers suggests the need to revisit the claim that the young Turkish Republic lacked an industrial base.