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The Everyday Forms of Peasant Politics in Early Republican Turkey: Resistance to Agricultural Taxes
Abstract
This paper examines the peasants’ response to heavy agricultural taxes of the Turkish single-party government, which funded the industrialization program with burdensome direct agricultural taxes during the interwar period. Despite the abolition of the Tithe in 1925, the rates of other taxes, especially the Land Tax, the Livestock Tax, and the Road Tax multiplied during the late 1920s and weighed heavily on the peasantry, especially poor peasants and smallholders. Although these taxes did not generate widespread peasant insurrections, contrary to the arguments of conventional accounts focusing exclusively on high and legal politics, the peasants did not remain passive, but resisted the agricultural taxes in covert ways in everyday life and forced the government to reduce the tax rates and other tax obligations. Although the peasantry composed almost eighty percent of the population, the interplay between the peasants and the government has not been studied in depth. Scholarly interest in the Anatolian peasantry during the period has remained focused exclusively on the state economic policies and socio-economic trends. Therefore, the scholars mostly failed to notice the covert and informal forms of struggles waged by the peasants against the state. The existing accounts have portrayed the Anatolian peasants during the interwar period as hapless victims succumbing to the over taxation due to the absence of organized and political peasant movements. This paper, on the basis of new archival sources such as gendarme records, provincial governors’ situation reports, and the politicians’ reports on their election districts and inspection district, and local newspapers reports, and drawing on history from below approach, “everyday forms of peasant resistance” concept of James C. Scott, and source reading methods suggested by Subaltern Studies, shows that the peasantry resisted the heavy agricultural taxes in daily life and managed to curb and circumvent the heavy taxes to a remarkable degree. Furthermore, this paper examines the impact of the everyday resistance of the peasants on decision-making of the government. Underscoring how far the peasants thwarted the tax-collection efforts and forced the government to reduce the high rates of agricultural taxes and to implement tax relief programs during the 1930s, this paper brings “the rural passivity thesis” into question and locates the everyday politics of the peasants in the center of the political life even under the single-party regime in Turkey.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries