Take any book from a library shelf on the political history of Turkey and it is likely that you will find nothing about industrial relations. Yet, fourteenth in the world, Turkey was by far the most industrialized country in the entire Muslim world, only recently surpassed by Indonesia, whose population exceeds that of Turkey by a factor of 2.5. Only three EU members (Germany, Italy, and France) surpassed Turkey's manufacturing output in 2020,Footnote 1 but industrial development remains the missing element in the historiography of modern Turkey.
Görkem Akgöz's In the Shadow of War and Empire fills this gap with thorough research. The book tells the story of a state-owned textile factory in Bakırköy, a district of Istanbul, between 1839, the date of its establishment, and 1960. The factory played a crucial role in the state-led industrialization efforts of the Republican regime in the early twentieth century, serving as a cocoon not only for the later dynamics of the country's industrial development, but also for gender relations, nationalist ideology, urbanization, and modern state apparatus.
The book consists of six chapters in two parts. In the first part, Akgöz recounts the historical context of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century, which made the founding of the Bakırköy Factory possible. Chapters One and Two relate the state-led industrialization efforts of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire to the class and elite dynamics during the early Republican regime in the 1930s, which led to what Akgöz calls “direct etatism as a capitalist project of industrialisation”.Footnote 2
Chapter One takes us to the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The imperial political elite initiated an industrialization policy in response to military pressure from Western European powers. The Bakırköy Factory, part of what Akgöz calls “the Turkish Manchester project”, was a strategic component of this policy. In a sense, the history of the factory is also a history of the empire: the ethnically and religiously mixed workforce, which included women and even a number of African slaves, reflected the diverse human geography of the empire. Akgöz provides a good discussion of the commonly overlooked factors that limited the success of the project. For example, the military aggressiveness of Muhammad Ali, thanks to his more successful industrialization project in Egypt, pressured the Porte to yield to British pressure and open its domestic markets to industrial imports. The chapter also contains important corrections: Although the factory represented the developmentalist ethos of Turkish nationalism, it was an Armenian family, the Dadians, who were behind the construction of the factory.
The Republican regime had to overcome the industrial legacy of the Ottoman era. In Chapter Two, Akgöz shows how the early Republican cadres used the Bakırköy Factory and other state-owned production facilities in the 1930s to achieve this political goal as part of the broader project of etatism. A complex web of relationships, including the split between the liberal and nationalist factions of the ruling elite and the fluctuations between the United States and the Soviet Union, determined the extent and form of etatism.
Chapter Three delves into the logic of this etatism and examines how the early Republican cadres used state-led industrialization as an instrument of their civilizing mission not only in Istanbul, but also in the provincial cities of the country. Akgöz argues that “industrial site selection was a state strategy designed to achieve national consolidation and effective statehood” (p. 108). Based on the testimonies of foreign experts and observers, Akgöz's archival studies show that this project led to mixed results. New factories contributed to the local economy, while the factories suffered from constant labour shortages and the unruly behaviour of workers. The increasing employment of women in state-owned factories reflected the new regime's intention to use industrial production as a tool to change gender relations. For Akgöz, “state-led industrialisation had a dual function. Economically, the crisis of capitalism and the rise of economic nationalism in the interwar period provided a window of opportunity to catch up with Western industrialisation. Politically, etatism was a project of socio-spatial integration designed and commanded by a ruling elite that had witnessed the territorial disintegration of an empire” (p. 149).
The second part of the book presents the details of Akgöz's archival work on the Bakırköy Factory from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. Chapters Four and Five deal with the tensions between workers and management at the Bakırköy Factory. In Chapter Four, we see that management practices in the state-owned factories were repressive, that labour exploitation was intense, and that workers did everything they could to resist the pressure, albeit often in isolated and individual ways. The section on the details of the renovation of the Bakırköy Factory in the 1930s from an Ottoman-era relic to a modern industrial facility is an excellent part of the book. Akgöz covers a wide range of topics here, including the gap between the planning mentality and the actual execution of planning decisions in various factories, relations between foreign and local experts, and hiring, promotion, and wage policies. The social background of foremen, disciplinary practices, relations between skilled and unskilled workers, conditions and use of machinery, on-site vocational training practices, labour turnover, and gender dynamics are also discussed in detail in this chapter. The lack of housing for workers led to the creation of Istanbul's first large squatter settlement in Zeytinburnu, the neighbourhood right next to the Bakırköy Factory. The Bakırköy Factory thus indirectly shaped the urbanization dynamics of the country in the post-war period. What makes this chapter particularly noteworthy is the fact that Akgöz also tracks down the voices of the workers in the archives and reproduces them effectively for the reader.
In Chapter Five, Akgöz argues that a new labour regime emerged after World War II as a result of “the interplay between the crisis of the one-party regime and the rise of the international welfare discourse”, (p. 227) and examines the petitions submitted by Bakırköy workers to trace the salient effects of this regime at the workplace level. This chapter contains many interesting insights into the effects of inflation on workers’ living standards, wage disparities between workers, and the irregularity of wage increases.
Chapter Six relates these shopfloor dynamics to the early labour union movement in state-owned factories after World War II. The chapter begins with the story of a successful work stoppage in 1943 at the Bakırköy Factory, which was a precursor to the brief episode of labour resistance in this and other factories until 1946. Akgöz argues, “[h]ad it not been for the crisis with the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the short-lived 1946 unionism had the potential to change the course of the labour movement” (p. 284). Although the government crackdown ended this episode, union membership spread among the working class and Turkey became the most unionized country in the Middle East after Israel in the early 1950s. As in the previous chapters, Akgöz combines this history with the biographical accounts of (now activist) Bakırköy factory workers who, in different ways and with different ideologies, played a crucial role in raising awareness about the labour movement. The turbulent political biographies of these workers illustrate the prospects of the political struggles in and around the Bakırköy Factory until the first coup of the Republican regime in 1960, which ushered in a new and promising phase in the long history of the labour movement in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
The book is well organized thematically: The chapters tell a well-connected story in chronological order. As a historical sociologist, Akgöz carefully examines hard-to-find statistical data on the industrial history of the early Republican era. The book offers a multi-layered account of numerous topics, including industrial history, urban politics, factory planning, national development, gender relations, and labour-management relations: Included are details about the urban planning of provincial cities, the early squatter settlements in Istanbul, comparisons with similar etatist projects in Egypt and India, the views of foreign experts on the new factories, the efforts of factory managers to recruit workers from local labour markets, and the proletarianization of women.
The book is full of fascinating biographical details and stories. Akgöz's characters range from young children to a new generation of foreign-educated engineers, union organizers, and first-generation female factory workers. The stories of the key figures shed light on proletarianization, elite formation, and activism between the 1930s and 1950s.
Individual chapters of the book make excellent teaching material for a variety of topics, including the history of the Middle East and the late Ottoman Empire, gender studies, development studies, colonial studies, and labour and industrial relations.
In 2023, Turkey was the fifth largest textile and clothing exporter in the world after China, Italy, Germany, and India (UN Comtrade 2024).Footnote 3 The fastest expansion of this industry happened after a bloody coup in 1980 replaced import-substituting industrial policies with a neoliberal export-oriented growth strategy. The Bakırköy Factory enabled the country's largest agglomeration of the textile and clothing industry in the European part of Istanbul. To this day, tens of thousands of textile and garment sweatshops operate in the neighborhoods just within a few miles of Bakırköy.
I have spent many years studying the often informal industrial labour relations in this region, but it was only after reading Akgöz's book that I was able to see the impact of the earlier state-led industrialization policies that materialized in the Bakırköy Factory on labour practices in these sweatshops. Indeed, Akgöz's Bakırköy Factory is still alive, albeit in the form of these thousands of microscopic textile and garment sweatshops. The book is thus a promising place to show the historical connections between the earlier state-led and more recent neoliberal industrialization strategies, which Akgöz will hopefully pursue in her future studies.
