Çağlar Keyder

Economic growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 : two paths to the twentieth century

Part 1: Historiography, Data and Methods 1. Definitions and Historiography of Retardation 2. Data and Methods Part 2: Welfare 3. Per Capita Income and Real Wages Part 3: Productivity 4. The Productivity of Labour and Structural Change 5. Agriculture 6. Industry

Paths of rural transformation in Turkey

This article describes the transformation in Turkey of an independent peasantry under greater market integration. It is argued that in addition to capitalist farming, which only constitutes a geographically specific development path, petty commodity production in Turkish agriculture may be analysed through three distinct transformation trajectories. These trajectories are described by means of village case histories; then each development tendency is analysed within its articulation into the larger economic unit. The discussion aims at illustrating the potential variation in petty production under the domination of capitalism.

Agriculture and the state: An inquiry into agricultural differentiation and political alliances: The case of Turkey

The following is a study of the changes in Turkish agriculture and peasantry preceding the industrialisation of the country. This ‘stylised’ history of the Turkish economy between 1923–50 will illustrate our analysis of the dynamics of transformation and the non‐transformation of traditional agriculture. Although the discussion is specific to the historical facts of Turkish agriculture, we hope that its theoretical content will point toward a methodology for the analysis of the reciprocity between the policies of the state and class structure.

Moving in from the Margins? Turkey in Europe

Historically Turkey has been the ‘other’ for Europe. Turkish identity has taken shape via an ambivalent relationship with an idealized Europe. There was resentment due to the perception of exclusion, but also an intense desire to belong. As the project of official association with the European Union progressed, each of the partners had to ask questions about the meaning of culture and identity. At first there was a conviction that the prospect of entry would never turn into reality. The entrenched state elite in Turkey could therefore go through the steps with impunity. However, after the 1990s, new Turkish social groups, independent of the state elite, took the project more seriously, and embarked on serious democratization, as promised in various agreements with the EU. At the same time the Union experienced a similar reversal, with Brussels envisaging Turkeys accession as a real possibility. This new alignment of forces led to an intense debate on the topics of European identity and the frontiers of Europe. If the EU opts for a more constitutional and less cultural representation of the meaning of Europe – thereby implying that its borders could extend even further in the future – then Turkeys accession may well take place.

A brief history of modern Istanbul

Nationalising the imperial capital The history of modern Istanbul, like the history of modern Turkey, begins with the end of the First World War and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The city that became Istanbul was, famously, established as an imperial capital – the new Rome that would take over the functions of the seat of empire from the decrepit old Rome. The geography of the seas and continents surrounding the city made it a natural focus, which in the longue duree would assert itself as the centre of networks whose nature and relative weight changed in time, but whose topographies exhibited continuity. Over the thousand years of its Byzantine incarnation the city’s fortunes waxed and waned, until it was reduced to a dependency of Genoa after the ravages imposed by the Latins during the Fourth Crusade (1204–61). The Ottoman dynasty revived Istanbul’s centrality to the larger Eurasian region and helped resuscitate its economy, not only as a trading post, but also as a centre of what we would today call cultural industries – education, books, the higher arts and exclusive items of consumption for the wealthy. The city’s size soon came to dwarf any competitor in the entire Middle East and the Balkans; its imperial riches and the consumption capacity of its inhabitants made it into the largest marketplace in that region.

Class and State in the Transformation of Modern Turkey

The origins of the Republican state in Turkey may be traced back to the bureaucratic rebellion against the peripheralisation of the Ottoman Empire. The mechanisms of nineteenth-century integration of the Ottoman economy into capitalist networks, that is trade, debt, and direct investment, had allowed for the rapid expansion of a class that acted as intermediary between the local economy and European capitalism. From a systemic point of view there were two reasons establishing the material basis of a conflict between the traditional bureaucracy and the new class of merchants and bankers. First, these intermediaries were the physical agents of capitalist integration, threatening to change the very principles of the traditional system guarded and defended by state functionaries. It did not require great foresight to comprehend the implications of the replacement of a bureaucratic system by market rationality for the traditional role of the bureaucracy. Secondly, if the bureaucracy attempted to take a more active role in the new world, through effecting a transformation from above of the social system, it risked losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the social groups making up the traditional order.

GEOPOLITICS AND NEW SPATIAL IMAGINARIES

The three articles that follow in this CAS feature collection—those by Candela, Harrar, and Fisher Onar—were first written for a workshop entitled “Shifting Geopolitical Ecologies and New Spatial Imaginaries,” during the third Inter- Asian Connections conference in Hong Kong, in June 2012. The aim of the workshop was to identify and bring into discussion emerging mental, cultural, and political conceptions of spatial categories in Asia. Workshop organizers Caglar Keyder and Ravi Arvind Palat introduce the articles below and Palat provides background and context for the articles in his own article, “Maps of Time, Clocks of Space: Changing Imaginaries of Asia” (397–410).

La Turquie, de la périphérie au centre ?

Historiquement, la Turquie est un « autre » pour l’Europe. Identite europeenne et identite turque ont pris forme au travers d’une relation ambivalente (eloignement vs. proximite). Ceci explique pourquoi l’association formelle de la Turquie a l’Union Europeenne a pu poser probleme – forcant chacun des partenaires a une interrogation sur le sens de la culture et de l’identite. Dans un premier temps a semble prevaloir une conviction selon laquelle la perspective d’integration ne deviendrait jamais realite. Puis, de nouvelles forces sociales turques ont repris a leur compte les engagements vis-a-vis de l’UE dans une perspective de democratisation du pays. De fait, jusqu’a la fin des annees 1990, ce sont des forces sociales nettement distinctes de l’elite d’Etat qui ont promu l’idee d’integration a l’UE. Celle-ci a fait parallelement l’experience d’un renversement du meme ordre : lorsque Bruxelles a finalement projete d’integrer effectivement la Turquie, s’est fait jour un intense debat sur les themes de l’identite europeenne et des frontieres de l’Europe. L’UE semble avoir desormais opte pour une representation plus constitutionnelle et moins culturelle de la signification de l’Europe – impliquant donc que ses frontieres pourraient encore plus largement s’etendre a l’avenir.

Democracy and the Demise of National Developmentalism: Turkey in Perspective

I understand democracy to refer not only to the procedures for effecting the choice of a government, but also to the existence of civil rights, encoded in a legal framework of some durability. In this sense most of the transitions to democracy of the last decade appear incomplete. In a social context characterized by the domination of a strong state, the absence of established civil rights implies the reversibility of political arrangements such as procedural democracy. Only the entrenchment of civil rights and the construction of an inviolable private sphere would constitute a sufficient basis for the consolidation of political rights — and of a public sphere founded on these. Barrington Moore’s (1966) well-known maxim of ‘no bourgeois no democracy’ is appropriate to this discussion. While national developmentalism ruled in peripheral countries, especially when it was built upon the legacy of a strong state, as it was in the case of Turkey, neither the bourgeoisie, nor any other social group was in a position to struggle strongly for civil rights. Consequently, they could not defend democracy either. Now, with the collapse of national developmentalism, the bourgeoisie enjoy the potential for emancipating themselves from state tutelage, and, in the process, they have an interest in establishing a framework of civil rights. This possibility is the most encouraging sign for the consolidation of democracy on a strong foundation.

Proto-Industrialisation and the Periphery

research: Capitalism and industrialisation in the core, and imperialism and de-industrialisation in the periphery. As we shall see, the relationship derives from the determination of the role of preindustrial manufacturing in the core and in the periphery. As a first approximation the problem may be posed in the following terms: if preindustrial manufacturing preceded industrialisation in the core, was the destruction of similar activity through foreign competition the principal cause of the inablity to industrialise in the periphery? Economic historians have always attempted to describe the nature and implications of preindustrial manufacturing, especially in the core. This literature in the last decade has turned around the concept of &dquo;proto-industry,&dquo; which is the general name given to non-traditional manufacturing activity outside of the major urban centers during the two centuries preceding the industrial revolution. Since Franklin Mendels published his account of the relationship between proto-industrialisation and demographic trends in Flanders, proto-industrialisation has become a growth field.’ Articles, collections, and conferences around the theme abound. It is not my intention to review this already large and growing literature. Rather, a discussion of proto-industry will allow me to examine and evaluate the location of pre-industrial manufacturing in the core and in the periphery. It will be useful at this point to review the characteristics of proto-industry as these have been discussed by economic historians. A recent summary of the literature by P. Deyon offered three constitutive elements.2 First, protoindustrialisation should be distinguished from traditional local handicrafts and petty domestic industry in that it was oriented to a larger market beyond the locale of production. This is an important characteristic which emphasizes the historical novelty of the phenomemon and its distinction from earlier petty production. It also defines protoindustry as a particular form of manufacturing activity not to be confounded with a mode of production (e.g., petty commodity production) or