Property, State and Geopolitics: Re-Interpreting the Turkish Road to Modernity

This dissertation re-interprets and re-historicizes the origin and development of capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and by doing so, it explores in a new light the question of multiple modernities. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Historical Sociology and International Relations, I argue that the formation of market societies should not be considered the outcome of economic processes, but rather of systematic political and cultural interventions into existing ways of life that ensure the commodification of the means of subsistence, especially of land and labour. Departing from the evolutionary understanding of the transition of capitalism, I show that the (early) modern world did not witness a concentric extension of largely similar market-making projects following the rise of British capitalism. Instead, historically specific social and geopolitical struggles generated qualitatively different modernities within and outside Europe. In particular, the modernization associated with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, i.e. the Jacobin model, not only proved (at least for a while) the viability of an alternative path to modernization that did not require the commodification of the means of life, but also became a model itself to be emulated and selectively adapted by others in and beyond Europe.

In this context, my argument is that from 1840 to 1950 Ottoman/Turkish modernization efforts did not follow a single project of westernization; but rather, that Ottoman/Turkish elites appropriated, oscillated between and recombined with local resources two inherently contradictory development strategies originally advanced by Britain and France. Overtime, however, the reactions from below and interventions from outside increasingly forced the Ottoman/Turkish state to consolidate the Jacobin model at the expense of market society. The state, unable/unwilling to commodify land and labour, increasingly substituted the relations of market society with the Jacobin model, while repeatedly recombining the latter with domestic social and ideological resources. The cumulative result of this century-long Turkish experiment with modernity, therefore, was a historically specific Jacobinism that bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality. Relatedly, although capitalist property relations began to penetrate the social fabric from the 1950s onwards, this Jacobin legacy had a profound impact on the manner in which capitalism was instituted in Turkey. Seen from this angle, I contend that postwar modernization in Turkey cannot be understood merely as another form of capitalism, nor can Turkeys current transformation signify a mere transition to another form of modernity.

Overall, then, the dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding of the social content, tempo and multi-linearity of world historical development. By departing from the evolutionary conceptions of capitalist development, it undermines the unilinear understanding of the Western path to modernity, which in turn has paradigmatic implications for the quality and manner of the arrival of modernity in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.