Chapter 7 studies how Kasımpaşa, nearby the Arsenal, transformed into working-class neighborhoods, focusing on the complicated connections between migration networks, labor coercion, industrial production, and urban modernization.Utilizing wage and population records, it demonstrates how shipbuilding was central to the district’s demography and culture, and how regional and occupational networks were significant in settlement patterns. It investigates the connections between forced labor draft (particularly from the Black Sea coasts and Alexandria/Egypt), the increasing visibility of bachelors, the settlement of working-class families, and the urban policies and elite perceptions towards the district. It investigates the social, cultural, and economic divergence between Kasımpaşa and the adjacent Galata-Pera axis in Istanbul, the epicenter of urban reforms in the Tanzimat Era. It highlights the emergence of a working-class culture, and analyzes the proletarian experiences of working-class families and the increasing contention between working-class men and women and the Ottoman state, by focusing particularly on strikes and petitioning.

Chapter 2 discusses how the New Order regime in the late eighteenth century reorganized labor to create a regular workforce to decrease the Arsenal’s dependence on the labor market, deprive workers of their ability to (re)commodify their labor power, and thus bind them to their worksite. The chapter describes the attempts to discipline labor and investigates how such attempts created tensions between compulsory and wage labor schemes that had hitherto existed in the Arsenal. It discusses how transformations in production and the increasing anxiety with migration to Istanbul pushed for a new order in the labor force, leading to an amalgam of diverse forms of labor relations within the same site. In addition to creating a regular force of skilled carpenters and caulkers, the administration also systematized the labor draft from among guildsmen in Istanbul, and continued to utilize convicts and provincial craftsmen, trying to secure both their immobility and their productivity. Open and hidden ways of resistance and protests against the production regime of the New Order pushed the latter into a crisis throughout the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.

Chapter 4 discusses the integration of child labor into the capitalist relations of production in the Imperial Arsenal. It connects the militarization of labor with industrial and urban modernization in the context of migration crises throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyses how children were forcefully drafted before the Tanzimat and how child labor was central to the transition from tributary to military labor. It then explores how children served to the efforts to maintain military labor in the Arsenal. As the flow of refugees to Istanbul increased in the 1860s, the demanding need for industrial production and the failure of previous schemes of coercion merged with an emerging middle-class consciousness among urban elites who desired to convert the orphaned and refugee children into industrious citizens. The chapter narrates the formation of naval-vocational schools and boys’ companies and battalions within this context and introduces wages and profiles of Muslim and non-Muslim children throughout the different phases of their employment in the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory.

Chapter 1 investigates how naval reforms in the late 18th century aimed at rationalizing production, marked by standardizing, centralizing, and concentrating the shipbuilding process in the context of provisioning crisis and market relations. It gives a brief overview of shipbuilding and its transformation in the late eighteenth century, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. It highlights the increasing dependence of the navy on market relations and dynamics in the late eighteenth century, catalyzed by the provisioning crisis emanating from technological transformations, naval competition and military pressures, environmental restrictions, and political-economic challenges, as illustrated by the example of provisioning timber. Against this crisis, naval administrations introduced substantial changes in the production process under the supervision of French naval engineers, whose policies centered on professionalization and the use of “scientific” principles in shipbuilding. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the spatial concentration of capital in the Arsenal, by renewing and expanding its production capacity and exerting centralized control over the production process.

Chapter 6 analyses the connections between trans-imperial labor migration and Ottoman industrial and urban modernization in the nineteenth century. In a context marked by the mechanization of industrial production through technology transfer, the increasing political-economic ties between the Ottoman and British states, and the scarcity of workers with mechanical skills in Istanbul, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work mostly in the arsenal, as well as some other state factories. This chapter narrates the history of these workers and the community they established in Hasköy beginning with the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. It analyses the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences in the workplace and the city. It demonstrates how their contentious relationship and effective struggles pushed the state authorities to deploy skilled military workers, who were the products of the processes described in the previous chapter, to decrease and eliminate its dependence on them.

Chapter 3 investigates how military modernization and capitalist transformations converged to reorganize the labor force, understanding naval service as a form of military labor, and modern conscription as a modern form of labor coercion. Modern conscription promised the Ottoman elites the ability to employ workers with industrial skills for long periods in a more reliable disciplinary scheme, with wages far lower than the market. The chapter describes how the navy employed conscription as a tool to reduce dependency on civilian wage workers by deploying conscripts in both the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, and by devising a detailed scheme to militarize the labor force. Ottoman reformists systematically attempted to utilize modern conscription as a way to draft non-Muslim (mainly Greek) subjects from coastal areas, skilled in shipbuilding and naval crafts, as regular soldiers to the Ottoman navy. The chapter analyses the conscription process, introduces the profile of the military labor force in the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, the militarization plan and the attempts to conscript non-Muslims, and the impacts of resistance against naval conscription and the militarization plan.

The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.