In this presentation, on the basis of my field research and archival documents, I explore how politicians from different political parties affected class and gender relations with their speech acts and practices and how landless peasant women contested these effects in two large farms, Göllüce and Atalan, where the biggest secondary peasant movement occurred against landlordism in Turkey in the late 1960s. To do this, I first depict a historical and political background of changing relationship between peasantry and politics and explain new forms of involvement into politics for peasants, the debates on land reform, and new perception of peasant women and their politicization in the 1960s. And then I use this background to probe the politicians` speech acts and practices as it relates to existing gender and class specific relations of agrarian production and to landless peasant women`s political activism in two cases. By explaining how state politically perceived them, through which political mechanisms state tried to take their consents for the political and economic system and how political elites contested their political ideologies on peasantry, land reform and the political mobilization of rural women in two cases, my presentation contributes to history writing of peasantry and politics in Turkey. And it refutes statist approach to peasant behaviors in Turkish historiography according to which peasant behaviors are generally explained with references to changes in economy policies and so politically passive peasants exist only in terms of their obligations to state and legal rules rather than being active agents shaping it. In this way, I will not only denaturalize gendered and class specific interests of the politicians, but also challenge ahistorical conceptualization of state and apolitical representation of rural women in Turkey after WWII. As politically visible agents in the occupations, landless peasant women in two cases forced the politicians to take the occupiers into consideration and make heated debates on the necessity of land reform and poverty in rural Turkey. By exploring these debates, I also reveal the place of landless women in real politics in two villages and also nullify the arguments on the deployment of petty commodity production and abandonment of rural class inequalities after WWII in Turkey.

Lengthy discussions were extremely rare in the Grand National Assembly of early Republican Turkey, which is hardly surprising for a one-party parliament whose deputies were handpicked by the leaders of the governing Republican People’s Party. The Law for Providing Land to Farmers of 1945 is commonly considered the first instance of opposition. This paper argues that 1945 was not the first time that dissent surfaced within the parliament. My contention is that property rights on land tended to provoke backlashes in the otherwise submissive parliament of 1923-1945. At times, members of the parliament appeared confident in voicing their objections. At other times, opposition is harder to detect, as it was not put in words. But even so, it is possible to detect the impact of parliamentary resistance by examining how government bills changed as they proceeded through both the reviewing committees and the general assembly. This article follows the above research strategy to examine the making of a series of laws that sanctioned intervention into property relations on land in variety of ways. These are the deportation, land distribution and settlement laws of 1920s and 1930s. Although none was about property rights per se, in each case, even the prospect of a possible infringement on rights of landowners proved enough to stir up the parliament. The findings of the archival research expose that while some of the bills were eventually modified in ways that favored property owners, more often the result was vaguely formulated provisions. Such research findings affirm the hypothesis that there were occasions Kemalist leaders failed to impose their will on the parliament. Then the question arises: how was it that a handful of politicians successfully challenged what appears to have been an all-powerful government? This question has been posed in relation to the parliamentary opposition to Law for Providing Land to Farmers and the dominant tendency has been to associate those who confronted the government with landowning interests. I instead argue that it is necessary to scrutinize deeper the institutional mechanisms through which powerful interests in society were reflected in high politics. The republican regime instituted and, in turn, operated within a legal system responsive to property rights claims. It was this legal system, I conclude, which gave the Council of State the leverage to overturn certain government decisions and strengthened the hands of those who upheld the rights of property owners in the parliament.

Sharecroppers used the Soviet occupation of northern Iran (1941-1946) and the formation of the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan as opportunities to challenge the existing social and economic order of Iran. Existing scholarship treats the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan (1945-1946) as an important moment in Iranian and world history. The creation of a semi-independent state by the Democrat Party of Azerbaijan was a high-water mark for Azeri nationalism and leftist politics in Iran. Similarly, the Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946 was a turning point in the Cold War and was mentioned by Winston Churchill in his Iron Curtain speech as proof of the Soviet Union’s expansionist intentions. Thus, the Autonomous Republic is treated as product of Soviet machinations implemented by their misguided proxies, the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan. This narrative largely ignores the participation of ordinary residents of Azerbaijan whose participation was critical to the initial success of the Autonomous Republic. This paper seeks to answer the question, what was the role of sharecroppers in the Soviet occupation of Azerbaijan? Further, why did sharecroppers cooperate with Soviet authorities and the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan? My research will critically engage with Iranian government documents, Iranian press accounts, American and Russian diplomatic sources, and memoirs of the period. Some of these sources have been neglected entirely, while others were examined with the assumption that sharecroppers could not have been important. Methodologically, I will embrace the tenets of the Subaltern Group and critically examine these documents to investigate the shared position and consequent common mentality of Iranian sharecroppers. Azeri speaking sharecroppers were united by their common position at (or at least near) the bottom of the social and economic order in Azerbaijan. Sharecroppers seized the opportunity presented by the collapse of government control after the Allied invasion and began to withhold the landlords’ share of the harvest. Peasants actively cooperated with the Tudeh party and Soviet authorities in order to change their economic and social position. Sharecroppers were not passive or reactive in this relationship. Rather, sharecroppers made a contribution on their own and independent of either bourgeois national or revolutionary elites. The actions of sharecroppers were not synonymous with the wishes or designs of the Soviet Union, the Tudeh party, or the Azeri Democrats. In fact, these three entities tried and failed to control the violence and political activity of sharecroppers.

The olive tree in the Palestinian West Bank is by far the single-most dominant plant in terms of cultivated area and crop value, yet there has been no agrarian, historical analysis of the topic in English. This is despite its nationalist political symbolism, as a sigil of sumud or steadfastness, and its economic importance — a good crop can contribute 20-30 percent of the value of the territory’s total agricultural production. This paper draws upon a range of archival and both governmental and non-governmental published primary sources from American, British, French, Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian archives in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew to assess the changes in the olive sector over the latter half of the 20th century, intentionally crossing political periods for comparative purposes. In the process I aim to answer the following questions: Where specifically in the West Bank were olive trees planted and why? What were the main uses and outlets for the resulting products? And the overarching question: How did the olive tree come to be the dominant planting in (and by extension the dominant symbol of) the West Bank? Existing scholarship assumes stagnation under the Jordanians, followed by a boom in productivity in the early Israeli period. However, the Israeli occupational infrastructure depended almost entirely on the remnants of the Jordanian bureaucracy, and early gains under Israeli occupation were the result of investments made during the Jordanian period. In addition, Jordan maintained significant ties to the territory over the two decades following the Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1967. Contrary to popular perceptions, the cultivation of the olive and production of olive oil in the West Bank largely continued to expand under both Jordanian rule and Israeli occupation, thanks to hands-off policies of neglect. Israeli military rule, especially in its first decade, was more of a continuation of Jordanian policy than a rupture, at least until the first intifada (beginning 1987) prompted radical shifts in both Israeli and Jordanian policies. At the same time, a range of longer-term trends — such as rising production costs with modernization that have lead to globally uncompetitive prices, compounded by Israeli land confiscations and tree uprootings — have threatened the economic survival of the olive sector, regardless of both its political importance and the increasing marketability of Mediterranean olive oil globally, thanks to recently improved understandings of its dietary and health benefits.

In Braudel’s (1972) terms, land reclamation is what made civilization possible on the plains of the Mediterranean – transforming marshy, malaria infested places to places of settlement (for agriculture, towns, etc.). Developments to make land cultivatable and/or suitable for settlement have long been central to state and empire building, and in the early modern to modern era land reclamation increasingly took the form of place-making for expanded commodity production. And expanded commodity production increasingly moved to non-irrigated semi-arid and arid regions: take the western US, northeast Brazil, the secano (or interior) of Spain. In this paper I address this “desert frontier” by detailing the role of land reclamation in semi-arid regions in Egypt during the two periods of the country’s heightened integration into the world economy – in the long 19th century and in the neoliberal period. In both periods the state was a central actor in claiming the land by force or cooptation from those who had been using the land. The state made the land cultivatable through, for example, extensive water works, land leveling, electricity grids, and transportation routes. In contrast to Moore’s (2015) commodity frontiers in historical capitalism, which were developed with little capital, the desert frontier has required considerable capitalization and has been dominated by large-scale investors. In this world-ecological analysis, the levels of capitalization needed to turn these places into specialized zones of production express the contradictions of bringing unpaid/work energy (of the silted soil, aquifers, ancestral lands, and on and on) into the circuits of capital. Further, this particular form of expanded commodity production in Egypt – land reclamation – reflects the logics at work vis-à-vis the country’s uneven integration into the world economy. This paper is based on research from my book manuscript "The Making of a Corporate Agri-food System in Egypt," which draws on mixed methods doctoral research conducted in Egypt between 2008 and 2012. References: Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol 1. New York: Harper & Row. Moore, J.W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso.