"The Industrial Revolution" and "the Age of Capitalism" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, are often linked to economic developments in Western Europe and the United States. The papers in this panel present evidence of industrialization and related developments in late Ottoman society, and suggest that the history and cognate terminology of capitalism and industrialization should be revisited, taking into account Ottoman and other non-European experiences of these global phenomena.
During the nineteenth century, the traditional guild-based structure of Ottoman handicraft production was undermined by the mass-production methods of foreign and domestic factories, culminating in the wholesale abolition of guilds in 1912 by the Unionist government. In the decades that led up to this destruction of an age-old economic structure, the prerogatives of guilds were steadily eroded by the concessions granted to foreign companies, a process that effectively "proletarianized" the workforce in many sectors. In some sectors, such as the shipping industry, the mechanization and proletarianization of the workforce was delayed due to resistance from the porters. In other sectors, like Bursa's silk textile industry, the shift in the mode of production was swift and forceful, resulting in the obsolescence of the once-large handicraft silk filature industry between the 1840s and 1860s.
In the new factories that replaced older workshops, working conditions were unsafe, working hours were long, and workers were overwhelmingly juvenile and or female. By the early twentieth century, these conditions led workers to organize, although strikes and formation of unions were strongly discouraged by the state. Workers sometimes voiced their discontent through petitions to the authorities, letters to newspapers, and used foremen as intermediaries between workers and employers.
In the absence of laws to protect the public interest, communally owned public resources and waqf properties were appropriated by early capitalists, while Ottoman urban centers faced their first environmental problems due to industrialization. Late Ottoman government's incapacity to cope with the problems of unrestrained capitalism, the fetishishization of industrialization, and failures in conflict resolution ignited sectarian tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. In the matrix of class and sectarian conflicts, Ottoman cities were ready to explode at the outset of the First World War. The foreign occupation of Anatolia and Istanbul intensified the existing problems related industrialization and escalating economic and social tensions.
By focusing on the context of industrialization, this panel seeks to cast new light on familiar problems experienced by late Ottoman society.
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Miss. Elcin Arabaci
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.
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Mr. Can Nacar
On Thursday, 30 March 1911, a tobacco factory in Istanbul fired twenty-two workers, when they refused to accept a cut in their wages. The next day, some of the workers in the factory announced that they were going to declare a strike. In response, the factory administration informed the nearby police station of the incident and several police officers quickly arrived at the factory. The officers induced workers to resume their work and asked foremen involved in the unrest to accompany them to the police station. Once in the station, the foremen were reminded of their right to go on strike but also warned not to hold illegal meetings.
Why did the officers choose the foremen to accompany them to the police station? Was this an exceptional occurrence or not? How did workers and employers in different industries and government officials view foremen? What was the role of foremen in controlling, organizing, and mobilizing workers? Focusing on tobacco and transportation industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire, my paper sets out to explore these questions. In doing so, it seeks to shed some light on asymmetrical power relations between capital and labor in these two industries and on how these relations were reproduced, reinforced, and sometimes contested by foremen.
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Mr. Kadir Yildirim
As part of its efforts toward economic reform and industrialization in the 19th century, the Ottoman state sought to encourage the private sector through the granting of concessions to private companies. As a result of these incentives, private companies established themselves in a broad range of sectors, from textiles to railroads and shipping, making their impact felt not only in economic life, but also in working life and social life.
The shipping and transportation industry was one important sector where the emergence of private companies dramatically transformed the lives of workers, whose deeply rooted economic practices were suddenly overturned. In 1880, the Ottoman state granted concession contracts for its ports to a number of foreign capital companies, endangering the livelihoods of the porters and boaters who had for centuries handled the work of commodity transportation at these ports according to a system of individual licenses (gediks). When the privately-owned companies began to install barges and cranes in the ports in order to mechanize the loading and unloading process, porters and boaters experienced a decline in the value of their gediks. The companies presented them with a difficult choice: they could either grant the companies a predetermined share of their incomes, or else they could become direct employees of the companies who owned these newly-built barges and cranes. In so doing, they would be dispossessed of the privileges of their gediks and forced to join the proletarian class.
Starting in the 1890s and lasting through 1915, the clash between Ottoman porters and private companies spread to almost every port in the empire, from Istanbul to Thessaloniki, Zonguldak to Beirut, and Izmir to Samsun. The porters' tactics ranged from attacks on machines and company-owned commodities to attacks on company employees. Although these tactics helped to delay the transformation, we can observe that they did not succeed in preventing the elimination of the old gedik system and its replacement with a workplace controlled by privately-owned companies. Drawing mainly on archival documents and periodical sources, this paper offers a case study in evaluating the effects of economic transformation on Ottoman working life and social life.
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Mr. Erol Ulker
My paper deals with how European capital investments operated in Istanbul during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. I focus on the formation of the Belgian-registered Constantinople Tramway and Electric Company (CTEC). In the course of the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), this multinational acquired the financial and administrative control of the Ottoman Tramway, Funicular, and Electric Companies in Istanbul. It played an important role in the transformation of the urban structure of the city in this process by financing not only the construction of the Silahtarağa Power Plant but also the expansion and electrification of the tramway lines on the European side of the city. My paper argues that the repayment of the loans extended by CTEC became a major problem right after the de facto occupation of Istanbul by the Allied powers in November 1918. This problem came to surface with a struggle between CTEC and the Ottoman municipal government (Şehremaneti) over the prices of services provided by the Tramway, Funicular, and Electric Companies. I demonstrate that during the initial years of the Allied occupation in Istanbul, this struggle evolved into a major political issue with the intervention of the French authorities to back CTEC’s demand of quadrupling the prices against the resistance of the municipal government, and with the rise of the organized labor movement that demanded a substantial increase in salaries.
