1 The Story: From Economic Colonialism to Economic Nationalism

It would not be inaccurate to describe the atmosphere of policymaking in the first years of the republic as “the urge to have done with empire.” The speed of the republican state’s superstructural and legislative reforms in the 1920s struck the international community as remarkable. Things were much slower in the economic realm though, because of the imperial commitments inherited from the latter part of the nineteenth century. The temporary economic provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), with regard to the Ottoman debt and customs tariffs in particular, hampered state capacity to assume the role of an autonomous policymaker. To begin with, this entailed Turkey relinquishing her right over the regulation of its trade regime and monetary policy. In addition to its massive international debt, the country was suffering in the face of the physical destruction of warfare and the financial and human cost of the population exchange with Greece, which meant, among other things, the loss of a significant portion of its skilled urban labour force. Despite its efforts, the republican regime was unable to reduce its dependency on the early industrialised economies during the first years of its existence.⁸

Then came the shock of the Great Depression. Turkey was one of the primary-goods producing countries hit hardest by the deflation that followed the 1929 crash. The vulnerability of the Turkish economy revealed that legal and cultural reforms were not enough to banish the Ottoman past to oblivion. The regime had already set up a temporal dichotomy between the Ottoman past and the republican present thanks to the superstructural changes. Following the global capitalist crisis, this dichotomy now shifted to the realm of economic policy, positioning factory-based industrialisation as the key symbolic site for revolutionary vigour and radical change. By the early 1930s, the state elite and middle-class intellectuals were becoming increasingly attuned to the depiction of the Ottoman economy as a colonial dependency controlled by European foreign interests. They argued that sustained industrialisation was the only way to transform the economic geography of a semi-colonised empire into a robust national economic entity.⁹

Perhaps the clearest expression of this came from a pro-government journalist, who resorted to racialised images of slave labour and Asian colonialism to describe the condition of the young republic. Prior to etatism, he lamented, Turkish cotton was “only as worthy as a Negro’s sweat.” But hope reigned by the end of the 1930s, he argued, as each rotation of the spindles erodes “part of our Asianness.”¹⁰ By the middle of the decade, industrialisation and economic nationalism would become key issues in Kemalist modernisation. The image of the belching industrial smokestacks, referred to “Atatürk’s minarets” by a group of foreign experts, dominated the political and intellectual landscape to an extent that is difficult to imagine in the present-day era of deindustrialisation.¹¹ The project of modernisation was now synonymous with industrialisation, and the image of the factory embodied the republic’s eagerly anticipated future.

The distasteful memory of the Ottoman external debt, financial deficit, and dependence on European industrial technology and skills intensified the rush to construct a manufacturing industry that would both lighten the import burden and develop the essential basic elements of industrial management: adequate capital resources, competent management, skilled labour, and a responsive internal market for the later stages of industrialisation. The Kemalist leadership claimed that Turkey had no more time to lose; she needed to move fast to overcome the centuries-long inertia and catch up with Western industrial modernity. A desire to accelerate history and sweat out the lingering poison of the Ottoman influence underscored policymaking. The first five-year industrial plan reflected that sense of urgency, and, similarly to the import substitution industrialisation attempts that would be planned in later decades, focused on the manufacture of previously imported simple consumer goods for which internal markets and local raw materials existed and labour-intensive production methods could be employed.

The result was successful. The implementation of the industrial plan began in 1934 and, by the end of the decade, Turkey was already producing basic consumption goods that had previously been imported. Industry’s contribution to gross national product increased from 11.4 per cent between 1923 and 1929 to 16.9 per cent between 1933 and 1939.¹² Large-scale government investment together with infusions of private capital resulted in a great expansion of the textile, cement, and sugar industries, as well as the creation of certain new ones such as paper, glass, rayon, iron, and steel. The index of physical output of medium-scale and large-scale industry increased from thirty-five in 1930 to one hundred in 1939, and the overall index of industrial output increased from sixty-four in 1938 to 115 in 1950. By the end of the 1930s, dependence on textile and foodstuff imports had fallen, while the share of capital goods had increased from 14.5 per cent to 37.2 per cent of total imports.¹³ The government also managed to repay a good proportion of its external debt, and attain a balanced budget.¹⁴ In 1945, the state was employing more than 100,000 workers in its factories. Five years later, this figure had reached 150,000, that is, fifteen per cent of the almost one million workers in manufacturing out of a total population of 12.6 million.¹⁵

Shortly before the government’s second industrial plan, which aimed to expand and roll out state industries, the shadow of another war would extend across the world.¹⁶ Turkey did not participate in the war, but the country nevertheless suffered severely amid the pressures on the global war economy. Industrial output decreased during the early years of the war as a result of intense shortages of imported machinery and spare parts as well as the toll that military conscription took on the already instable labour supply. In face of the fifty per cent fall in wheat production, the government initially tried to intervene through price controls, but abandoned this path in 1942. A hike in prices followed, resulting in a thirty per cent decrease in real wages.¹⁷ In the pages to follow, the reader will encounter state workers describing their impoverishment during the war years. Meanwhile, the formation of the wartime black market economy and widespread smuggling gave rise to the social category of war profiteers.

Private industrialists, who had accumulated a sizeable amount of capital thanks to wartime inflation, threw their weight behind a rival, more pro-business political party formed by a rrp splinter group. It was baptised the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, hereafter the dp), as a direct criticism of rrp rule.¹⁸ Etatism, which by 1945 had enveloped all major fields of the economy, represented one of the major lines of division between the Democrat Party and the chp, and, as such, came under increasing scrutiny. At the same time, the emergent and profoundly different postwar politico-economic order forced the chp to drop its long-standing policy of protectionism. The tensions of the Cold War developed quickly and intensely in Turkey, the furthest geographical outpost of the non-communist world. With an eye to admission to the new international organisations, and under pressure from Soviet territorial demands, the country came under the increasing influence of the North Atlantic coalition-in-the-making. To qualify for International Monetary Fund membership and to benefit from the Marshall Plan, the government initiated a major shift in economic policy involving devaluation and a set of foreign trade liberalisation measures. Etatist priorities gave way to agricultural development and export promotion; state resources were diverted to infrastructural investments to expand markets, and foreign credit became an important financial resource.¹⁹ The tide had turned by the end of the 1940s, opening up a whole new chapter in republican Turkish history. In 1950, the chp lost power after twenty-seven years of uninterrupted rule. In the Shadow of War and Empire narrates this series of events, and analyses the historical outcomes as well as their impact on industrialisation in modern Turkey.

2 The Argument: Controlling Labour on and beyond the Shop Floor

If one side of the Janus face of state-led industrialisation as it developed in 1930s Turkey entailed a sense of anxious but hopeful urgency, the other side displayed pure fear. Rapid industrialisation meant the rapid growth of an industrial working class. This is where the Turkish ruling elite’s complicated relationship with Western modernity enters the equation, signifying both an ideal to catch up with and a dark example to avoid repeating at all costs. The rulers desired all that industrial modernity represented, except for the violent history of class strife and class struggle. In 1935, the economic affairs minister assured the nation that Turkey’s shortcut to industrial modernity was safe because the policymakers knew the bumpy roads that the industrialised countries had taken all too well.²⁰ He held up the 1936 Labour Code, which was modelled on Italian fascist legislation of 1935, as the strongest evidence of that “wisdom” and assured the public that it would “clear away the clouds of class consciousness once and for all.”²¹

From the very beginning, and although industrial employment remained modest up until the 1950s, Turkish industrialists acted out of fear of “the dark side” of industrialisation, that is, its potential to spread subversive ideologies. It was this fear that propelled the ruling elite to act as if it faced a large, militant, and organised industrial labour force, and to subdue the language and politics of class under the language and politics of the nation. Two interrelated factors came to their rescue here: the timing of industrialisation and etatism as a republican constitutional principle. Together, they fuelled a nationalist narrative of industrial work, mobilising a work ethic that concealed the unequal and coercive relations of production and, thus, subordinating class divisions in service to the nation.

Throughout the early republican period, the ruling elite would refer to the legacy of the Independence War with searing intensity. If the Ottoman Porte, a synecdoche for the central government of the Ottoman Empire and named after the gate leading to the principal state departments in Istanbul, embodied a purely self-interested and disloyal ruler, the republican parliament embodied a selfless and patriotic leader who had proven his loyalty in the liberation struggle. As the temporal marker of that break, the memory of the Independence War was central to the nationalist ethics of sacrifice for the rapid reconstruction of the country. Industrialisation, according to this official historiography, meant a revered effort to reconstruct a country that no longer belonged to a privileged few but to the entire Turkish nation. The time was ripe to demand a patriotic effort in the form of work. An International Labour Office report from 1949 described two prevailing aspects of public opinion with respect to the labour question in Turkey: the sense of national unity generated by the independence movement and the distrust of labour based on often inaccurate knowledge of developments in other countries.²²

By placing the state at the heart of the industrialisation drive, etatism built on the ideal of industrial labour as patriotic service. Combined with populism, etatism as a constitutional principle safeguarded the Turkish state against the infiltration of class interests, promising developmental benefits to the nation as a whole. This set the Turkish case apart from the well-known Latin American populism of the same period. While the latter rested on a cross-class coalition of workers and industrialists, the former either rejected the existence of class altogether or subsumed it under a supra-class state. It followed logically that etatism was a class-neutral and nationalistic development plan; it was a powerful political and ideological concept as much as a pragmatic economic policy. The government succeeded in institutionalising the concept of a neutral state above class that would intervene directly in the socioeconomic order to minimise foreign economic dependence, eliminate class inequality, and prevent the emergence of class-based politics. Under etatism, workers would come up against this ideal whenever they attempted to challenge both the external and internal regulation of labour. This effectively dismissed the exploited status of labour in public discussion.

But where did industrial workers belong in this official narrative? To borrow from Satish Deshpande’s work on Nehru’s socialism, Kemalist industrialisation imagined the “patriotic producer” at the heart of the nation, surrounded by the apparatus of state-led planning; Turkish state factories anteceded “the temples of modern India” by two decades.²³ The myth and the reality of the Turkish revolution gave etatism the ideological legitimisation it needed to call upon workers without giving them a voice in the national polity. State factories became the centrepieces of postimperial nation-making, and state workers epitomised the ideal of the patriotic producer. In contrast to a private factory, where a profit-making ethos would dominate, a state factory was a thoroughly and openly politicised space where workers were expected to toil for the benefit of a developmentalist regime.

His pride in Turkish labour policy was widely shared. The first director of the Bakırköy Factory under etatism confidently explained his managerial vision to a European visitor: “If we take care from the outset not to create an exploited proletariat, if we make our workers feel that this factory belongs to the state and, therefore, to them, and if we really keep all the doors open to them to advance—why shouldn’t we succeed?”²⁵ After a visit to the Bakırköy Factory in 1945, a journalist claimed: “the worker finds a heaven at [state] factories.”²⁶ Another journalist described workers at Bakırköy as “shining, happy, and proud people.”²⁷ Throughout the period, and especially until the emergence of a labour press after 1946, such celebratory reporting abounded, setting out state factories as exemplary national workplaces that provide their workforce with superior social and economic citizenship rights and serve as a model for ideal industrial relations for the whole nation.

The state ideology of class harmony found its strongest expression in the institutionalisation of compulsory arbitration that, once again, combined the claim to the supra-class character of the Turkish state with the fear of class conflict. Compulsory arbitration made perfect sense to a prominent contemporary social policy expert, who argued that because the state, as the largest industrial employer, by definition protected the public interest, it would also protect the interests of workers.²⁸ Turkey thus diverged from other contexts of state-led industrialisation, where the state intervened actively in the labour-management relationship, first to protect labour, and then, when labour grew too strong, to control it through compulsory arbitration and other methods of repression. The Turkish state had already “clipped the wings” of the labour movement quite effectively in the 1920s, that is, before the state-led industrialisation arrived in full force.²⁹ In the absence of the right to strike and collective agreements, the state served as the dominant and decisive voice in industrial disputes. At the same time, it largely abstained from intervening in wage determination processes, where, despite the appearance of bureaucratic rules and regulations for state industries at least, individual contracts remained the exclusive instrument regulating employment relationships. In the 1930s, foreign experts criticised the lack of any consistent wage policy at state factories; by the mid-1950s, a prominent contemporary sociologist observed that wages at state factories were determined on the basis of “social justice and moral deliberation.”³⁰ Although the 1936 Labour Code empowered the government to issue minimum wage rates, only a few of these were actually issued. The situation remained unchanged even after the emergence of a trade union movement because unions were not able to play an effective role in arbitration. Wages remained low, and productivity problems persisted.³¹ The employers’ solution to this, including the managers of state factories, was further work intensification.

The reality of shop-floor relations simply did not square with the contemporary representations of state factories and their workers. Neither does it tally with the descriptions of worker passivity found in various scholarly pieces on the period, writing that positions state action central to an analysis based mainly on state-produced archival material. Re-embedding agency at the workplace level is important for two reasons. First, under conditions of repressive industrialisation, where class-based organisations are banned, workplace resistance requires particular attention. Second, in workplaces where the state plays the role of both employer and regulator, connecting worker agency to state formation and nation-building is key to understanding the making of working-class citizenship.

The ideology of patriotic labour failed to a large extent on the shop floor for a number of reasons. In spite of nationalist propaganda, serious and chronic problems of poor efficiency and low productivity characterised the operations of state factories from the very beginning. As early as 1934, industrial policymakers, who were closely following developments in both Europe (especially Germany) and the Soviet Union, underlined the need to rationalise industrial production and sought the help of foreign experts to reorganise production and implement scientific methods of labour control. The renovation of the Bakırköy Factory in 1934 was therefore meant to signify a mentality change, from the simple financial control of industrial enterprises to the combination of rational work and patriotic labour.³² But the operation of the Bakırköy Factory, and other state factories for that matter, remained trapped between the bottlenecks of centralised planning and the reality on the shop floor. There was a considerable gap between formal planning and practical execution, pointing to the fact that Turkish planning and centralisation were open-ended processes rather than a top-down implementation as in other contexts of planned industrialisation.³³

Foreign and local experts alike agreed that the problems facing Turkish industry went beyond technical issues of productivity. The two main problems for state factories were “the deep sickness” of skills shortages combined with the inefficiency of worker control. The micro-level study of industrial relations offered in this book reveals that a strictly authoritarian world of labour lay hidden behind the ceremonial façade of a scientifically managed, worker-friendly industrial landscape. Industrial managers resorted mainly to work intensification to increase productivity, relying heavily on the iron rule of the foreman on the shop floor. The foremen fell back on tight supervision, abuse, profanity, and threats in order to maintain or increase work effort. In 1943, a foreign expert referred to the operational basis of state textile factories as “the anxiety to increase production,” comprised of a lack of scientific labour control and a managerial mentality of getting the most out of the workers and the machines.³⁴ Supporting evidence came in the 1950s from a local expert, who wrote that industrial policymakers had omitted to consider giving labour its fair share in the benefits of rationalisation in order to secure its cooperation.³⁵ In the cacophony produced by nationalist pride and the anxiety of underdevelopment, redistribution remained a distant idea, and state workers toiled for low wages and for long hours under a regime of repressive industrial relations.

Various scholars have shown that state-led industrialisation was directed by the general logic of capital accumulation. Except for a brief period in the early 1930s, when the scope of active state involvement provoked intense conflict within the ruling bloc, industrial policymakers were largely in agreement that etatism meant a mixed economy in which state and private investment were complementary. By 1935, private enterprise was defined as the “basic idea” in the party programme. The state used the relative autonomy it enjoyed under etatism to develop the socioeconomic and institutional infrastructure required to expand the sources of capital accumulation and mechanisms of surplus extraction.³⁶ Between 1932 and 1939, the total amount of private capital invested in industry increased by more than eighty-six per cent.³⁷ By the beginning of the war, a prominent economic historian wrote, the country had already passed the critical first threshold on the difficult road to industrialisation, thanks to the increase in the rate of accumulation.³⁸ In 1939, thirty-four per cent of all factories were in the hands of private industrialists. The process accelerated during the war years, taking the figure to forty-five per cent by 1945.³⁹ Industrial workers came out of the war overworked, exhausted, and impoverished. Having seized the exceptional opportunity for profiteering, private capital emerged from the war years with unprecedented rates of accumulation achieved mainly through speculation and black-marketing.⁴⁰ The burden of industrialisation fell on the peasants and the industrial workers.⁴¹

In the Shadow of War and Empire joins this critical chorus to expand on the point further. Etatism served as the “nursemaid” of Turkish capitalism by providing it with lucrative credit options, expanding the national market, increasing the available technology and know-how, and developing industrial labour and management skills; it also created a labour regime that accelerated, aided, and nurtured private capital accumulation.⁴² Based on a new state-sponsored ideology of industrial work that combined nationalism and the ideal of harmonious industrial relations, both at the workplace and the national levels, the 1935 party programme institutionalised the nascent nationalistic labour regime. The 1936 Labour Code, the 1938 Associations Act (Cemiyetler Kanunu), and the 1940 National Defence Act (Milli Korunma Kanunu) added to these restrictions. The emergent labour regime had long-term consequences for the structure of industrial relations in Turkey in the way that it would shape state, employer, and trade union policies in subsequent decades.

My argument is premised on there being more to labour control than the sphere of production. The labour market is a mental and cultural—as well as an economic— structure, where historical actors negotiate a socially and culturally desirable order. The articulation of state and cultural discourse plays a central part in the constitution of labour control regimes. Building on the discursive representations of a class-neutral state on the one hand, and of “the national economy” and the worker-citizen’s place in it on the other, etatism played a central role in shaping both the real and discursive contours of the labour regime. Industrial policymakers resorted to etatism to ideologically mobilise and motivate workers to commit their labour power to the process of industrialisation. Such discourses were not only at work in legislation pertaining to industrial relations; they were also embedded and integrated into the regimes of labour control at the workplace level. The regime’s perception of its industrial workforce affected the management of industrialisation both on the shop floor and at the commanding heights of the economy.

As the state tried to mould industrial class politics into nation-building, the rhetorical devices of history and public memory became a contested terrain where employers’ demands for a labour imbued with patriotic motives clashed with workers’ demands for their share in the fruits of national development. The workplace emerged in this process as a crucial site of struggle, where workers, managers, and industrial policymakers would act on particular hegemonic representations of class and national identities. Besides working time and wage payments—the two main sources of major struggle within capitalist production relations—workplace politics manifested themselves as a negotiation of power over the boundaries between the identities of class and nation. In the 1930s and 1940s, workers contested the national narrative of industrial work and its accompanying labour control regime. The subtle, yet pervasive, worker agency expressed, first, at the micro-scale of the workplace and, then, in the trade union movement culminated in the rising tide of worker militancy in the 1960s and 1970s.

3 The Historiography: Industrial Workplace in Global Labour History⁴³

A narrative of crisis had pervaded the discipline of labour history for more than two decades by the time I joined the field in the mid-2000s.⁴⁴ This sense of a crisis was a response first and foremost to the socio-political problems of the 1980s. Two of these problems directly concerned the field of labour history. First, the argument that the “forward march of labour” had been halted cast doubt on the political primacy of working-class movements.⁴⁵ Second, the very idea of work as the cornerstone of modern society was coming under intense critical scrutiny.⁴⁶ Although unspecified, the category of work at stake here was industrial work, as evident in the term coined by social scientists to describe the new social order: post-industrial. Manufacturing had little contemporary resonance, they contended, and the once-emphasised industrial working class was now a marginal phenomenon.

One prominent approach that developed as a response to the perceived crisis of labour history was that of global labour history. By questioning an agenda that was seen as focusing on male workers in industry and other large-scale operations, global labour history broadened the geographical and thematic foci of traditional labour history. As research on non-industrial societies outside Western Europe and North America proliferated, labour historians began to transcend the traditional dichotomies between free and unfree labour, paid and unpaid work, and formally and informally organised workers.⁴⁷

But what happened to the study of the industrial workplace when labour history found a new home? As the steady fragmentation of work and workplaces induced historians to explore previously neglected categories of workers, the potential of the industrial workplace for understanding the workings and logic of capitalism ceased to impress. In their efforts to counterbalance the disproportionate focus on industrial workers and the industrial workplace, labour historians this time relegated industrial work to the margins of the discipline and de-centred the workplace as a site of value production, exploitation, and class. Leon Fink observed that the new insights of labour history were coming at a cost of certain blinders, with the marginalisation of industrial labour in the global labour history framework being one of them.⁴⁸

The move away from the historical study of industrial work and the industrial workplace is problematic in two ways. First, in the last two decades or so, factories have received attention almost exclusively at times of crises, such as the Rana Plaza collapse, the Foxconn suicides, and the liquidation of large public-sector companies in developing countries. But, in a world awash with manufactured goods, factories have not disappeared. Nor have they lost their relevance to capitalism. On the contrary, they remain significant sites of employment that are crucial to capitalism. The relocation of industrial production has created more factory jobs in developing economies without entirely destroying them in the developed world. Moreover, the tide seems to have turned at the level of economic policy, as evident from Donald Trump’s promise to revive American industry, former British chancellor George Osborne’s aspiration for “a Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers,” and India’s Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” slogan for his development agenda. More recently, the technological “reshoring” of manufacturing jobs has been on the agenda for industrial capitalists. And then there is the capital flight taking unexpected directions. For example, the Taiwanese multinational company Foxconn established workshops in Central and Eastern Europe, a region which has become the electronics industry’s second-tier global location, just behind East Asia.⁴⁹ The 2019 Netflix hit documentary American Factory—and the first film produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company—tells the story of a Chinese auto-glass manufacturing company opening a division in a shuttered General Motors factory near Dayton, Ohio, in 2016. Last but not least, companies within the service sector (call centres) and logistics and distribution (warehouses) have adopted the factory as a model of production, where workers are highly regimented and their activities constantly measured against metric performance standards, provoking arguments that they constitute present-day “Satanic mills.”⁵⁰ Overall, these developments suggest that the factory’s “invisibility” in both current and historical agendas is less an outright disappearance and more a matter of marginalisation and disqualification.⁵¹

Second, the body of scholarship on the industrial workplace is highly unevenly distributed between the global north and the global south because of inequality in the means of research production, including but not limited to the complex politics of archival work. Within global relations of unequal academic exchange, local processes of state and class formation have shaped national historiographies.⁵² By the time the factory and industrial work ceased to impress historians with its potential for understanding capitalism, industrial workplaces in much of the global south had been explored in only the most peripheral way.⁵³ Though it is true that the extent of scholarship on industrial labour is significantly smaller in contexts outside Western Europe and North America (the socialist scholarship on the industrial workplace, especially after 1945, should of course be included here), the difference is not only a matter of quantity. The subject has taken different paths in “the north” and “the south.” Even if the historical shift to the industrial workplace was systemic and global in character, it was definitely not uniform or linear. Historically, capitalism created a variety of labour relations both within and between industrial workplaces.

To begin with, and mostly based on a series of global antinomies on working-class formation such as traditional versus modern, co-optation versus autonomy, and resistance versus integration, history written outside Europe has mostly been “the historiography of ‘(not) yet,’ of absences.”⁵⁴ Similarly to the problematisation of the absent bourgeoisie as “the collective hero of western civilisation” in Soviet historiography, or the “dominance-without-hegemony” thesis in Indian historiography, the dominance of state over society and the implications of a missing native bourgeoisie have been most prevailing paradigms in Ottoman and Turkish historiography.⁵⁵ In India, for example, historians cited the weakness of capitalist development and the persistence of “pre-modern” non-class loyalties as evidence for the unthinkability of a working class, let alone a class-conscious working class.⁵⁶ In the same vein, when I first expressed my interest in the labour history of the early republican period, a prominent Turkish historical sociologist asked me whether there even existed a working class worthy of study at all.

The enduring resilience of the law and the state in studies on Turkey’s working-class history misses the complexity of labour-state relations. As a latecomer to issues being raised by social and transnational history, scholarship in Turkey has remained largely state-centred, policy-oriented, and insular. Reduced to the prey of state ideology and manipulation, the working class is usually presented as an ideal construct at the service of state ideology, whereas the state is conceptualised as a more or less autonomous bureaucratic apparatus.⁵⁷ Because labour historians have tended to reduce class formation to stages of economic development, they have rarely passed through the gate of the industrial workplace to analyse the social relations in production, including regimes of labour control, changes in the labour process and technology, shop-floor cultures, and the production of gender, ethnic, and racial difference on the shop floor.⁵⁸ Historians have mistaken state and management discourse and objectives for what actually happened inside the workplace because they viewed the industrial workplace as the derivative of external orientations to work rather than as a source of conflict and identity. Because working-class formation and political development seem to have occurred in a sphere external to the workplace, the rank-and-file politics of workers and their mentalities, identities, and everyday experiences have virtually escaped scholarly attention.⁵⁹

The challenge facing historians of industrial labour, especially in the global south, is to take the recent historiographical and theoretical insights and bring them to bear on the industrial workplace. By interweaving the history of the industrial workplace with questions of national and transnational movements of labour and capital, memory, state policy, and national ideology, we can view history in our own regions in a new light. The economic, social, and political transformations of the industrial workplace have not only mirrored but also shaped national and global shifts; a study of its history presents a way of approaching broader historical processes while engaging with specifically local questions.

We are lucky to have a base to build on for a more totalising and less particularistic history of the industrial workplace. Industrial workplace-based research in labour history and in fields adjacent to labour history have left behind a theoretically and empirically rich tradition. From the renowned American Hawthorne study within a social psychology framework in the 1920s and 1930s, to the anthropologically informed studies of factories in the 1940s, and the expansion of British industrial anthropology and sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, shop-floor studies have grown central to social theory.⁶⁰ In the 1960s, autonomous Marxists coined the term “social factory” to explain how the capital accumulation process escapes the confines of the factory and extends into society as a whole.⁶¹ In the 1970s, labour process theory revitalised sociological studies of work by focusing on how the indeterminacy of labour power generated struggle and resistance on the shop floor.⁶² It became commonplace for researchers of industrial workplaces to challenge abstract conceptions of workplace conflict and class struggle, and to conceptualise industrial conflict beyond its overt, organised expression and incorporate it into their analyses of the daily experiences of workers and their representatives, composing a far more complex picture of the past.

Scholars theorising the workplace in historical studies joined this concerted effort, drawing on labour process theory and social history. Arguing that the worker’s worldview was formed above all at the point of production, they called for the study of workers within the workplace itself, the site where “working people and the capitalists confronted each other [and] the labour process is actualized” and where “the theory and practice of industrial relations strategies meet, founder, are successful or modified.”⁶³ Analyses at this level offer a view into the nitty-gritty of formal and informal mechanisms of political mediation on the shop floor.

Recent studies have begun to recognise the centrality of the workplace and shop-floor organisation to an understanding not only of working-class experience and the process of intersectional identity formation, but also of wider social developments. They have conceptualised the industrial workplace beyond a local and inward-looking unit, to incorporate different angles beyond the exclusive focus on labour relations. Through new interpretative lenses, they have addressed a range of questions such as the construction and reconstruction of social identities in relation to the experience of work, the production of social difference both in relation to labour and social practices, and the discourses around it.⁶⁴ There has also been an upsurge in interest in the anthropological study of the industrial workplace. Recent work on the anthropology of industrial labour has focused on the experience of flexible work on fragmented shop floors, that is, the unequal employment status between regular and casual, or between company and contract workers. Underlining how Taylorist and flexible forms of production are recombined and reconnected on the same shop floor, anthropologists have analysed labour relations among workers enjoying different work statuses and benefits while working in the same industrial workplace, sometimes doing the exact same job. Anthropologists have also underlined the intricate connections between the local workplace and global markets. By linking localised centres of production with wider global relationships and forces, they have shown how chains of production and consumption relate to industrial relations.⁶⁵ The time is ripe for a cross-fertilisation between history and other disciplines, from anthropology to critical organisational studies and geography, and to explore the industrial workplace as a key place to challenge the models of a linear and uniform progress of capitalism and to analyse its combined and uneven development across time and space.

This book joins the recent efforts to open up the national histories of labour based on modernisation theories by attending to the worker’s concrete experience at the point of production. In exploring the complex dimensions of class as a lived experience and structured determination, it strives to overcome the divide between the micro level of the production floor and the macro level of state policy, doing history “from the bottom up, all the way to the top.”⁶⁶ It treats the Bakırköy Factory not as the background to the story, a closed and inward-looking unit behind-the-scenes, but as a “contact zone,” that is, a seemingly static locality made up of circulations of capital, labour, and industrial expertise, as well as the politico-economic visions of different state regimes.⁶⁷ Both in history and in cinema, the global perspective in any close-up is implicit, argues Carlo Ginzburg.⁶⁸ The close-ups in this book focus on workers’ everyday practices that are replete with agency, and I build on them to reconnect worker agency to the wider societal structures it is embedded in.

4 The Book: Sources, Themes, and Organisation

In the Shadow of War and Empire offers a broad variety of perspectives and voices through which to examine both the official and celebratory narratives as well as the critical counternarratives on etatism. Throughout the book, the reader will hear from bureaucrats, intellectuals, foreign and local industrial experts, employers, managers, and, last but not least, workers themselves. To present these diverse voices, I draw on a broad range of sources, including state documents, inspection reports, travel writing, memoirs, workers’ files, oral interviews, and periodicals.

Turkey’s relatively weak archival infrastructure and its historically modest levels of popular literacy have tempted scholars of labour to opt for textual analyses of the discourses generated by dominant groups. This has impeded the pressing task of undoing the elite-centred historiography. Materials that allow us to see and understand what workers were doing and thinking, or data of any kind on the actual work process, are hard to find in Turkey. As are worker voices on how they experienced work, how they made sense of their lives and the wider forces operating in society, and how they lived with the demands and constraints of industrial labour. For the brief period of trade unionism covered here, there are virtually no documents actually produced by the unions. As a whole, the scant, scattered, and mostly normative nature of historical material has been a major constraint in writing this book. Partly to overcome this difficulty, I dynamically move between different scales of analysis. In order to demonstrate the complex and varied ways in which nation-building and industrialisation interacted on and off the factory floor, I have pieced together Bakırköy workers’ life trajectories from slim and sketchy material, highlighting the embeddedness of their experiences and the choices available to them in the larger context of hierarchical relations of power and domination. Although I have not been afraid to indulge in reasoned and informed speculation or comment, I have tried not only to explicitly note such instances but also to keep them to a minimum.

Since they present workers’ voices most clearly, a few words on the workers’ files are warranted. In the mid-2000s, the workers’ files were still at the factory site. In my first attempt to view them, I was told they had been lost. After spending more than a year going back and forth between government offices, I learnt that they had become dark archives, meaning that they lay uncatalogued and inaccessible to researchers in the basement of the Republican Archives. Six months of persistence later, I gained extremely limited access to specific records following a process of personal negotiation. During the two months of my permitted access, I was able to request files based on limited information (namely, name, staff number, birth place, and date) on Excel sheets covering all state workers. Under these circumstances, finding the file of a worker who worked in the Bakırköy Factory in the 1930s or 1940s felt like winning the lottery. Not being allowed to photograph or copy the documents, I took handwritten notes. I spent several years pestering the national archives for further access to these files, but to no avail.

This severely limited archival access served to silence the voices of child workers. They were certainly there, and they were many. But their voices could not be found in the archives. With female workers, I had slightly more success, but almost all of the very few files that belonged to women were empty, except for their initial employment forms. Despite my efforts to recruit alternative sources through which women could speak, I could not overcome the gendered silences of documentation and history. At this point, I can only hope for further studies that investigate in more detail how class and gender interacted on the shop floor.

The book comprises two parts. Part 1 covers the state strategies of industrialisation, first, in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and, then, in republican Turkey. From the construction of the Bakırköy Factory in the 1840s to the implementation of etatism in the 1930s, it focuses on the political economy and macro processes of peripheral industrialisation. The central themes here are postimperial state discourses, labour legislation, spatiality of development, and local labour markets. With Part 2, we enter the gates of the Bakırköy Factory, but without losing sight of the relations of production, the external regulation of labour, and the worker experience outside the workplace. The experience-near analysis of the lived reality of state-led industrialisation on the shop floor here builds on the macro processes described in Part 1. By reducing the scale of historical analysis, I redirect the reader’s gaze toward the dense textures of workers’ everyday lives, social relationships, and political agency. Relationships and bargaining at the point of employment, gender relations on the shop floor, and the development of the trade union movement are among the central themes I explore.

The general approach adopted in terms of organisation of this book has been that of narrative analysis. The chapters follow a chronological order. The first chapter locates the politico-economic underpinnings of 1930s Turkish state-led industrialisation within the nineteenth-century peripheralisation of the Ottoman economy. In order to ground the story in place and time, it starts with Ottoman efforts to catch up with European manufacturing by constructing an industrial complex they proudly crowned the “Turkish Manchester.” The chapter presents a multi-level analysis of the political economy of Ottoman underdevelopment, the urban industrial geography of Istanbul, the financially and industrially prominent Armenian Dadian family, the technology and technical expertise transfer from Europe, and the multi-ethnic character of the Ottoman industrial workforce. An analysis of how this history was rewritten completely during the republican period sets the tone for the remainder of the book.

Chapter 2 finds Turkey in the midst of the Independence War, and follows her through the first decade of her struggles and ambitions. The central focus of this chapter is the diverse array of international and domestic forces that brought about the policy change from an open economy in the 1920s to a mixed economy of protectionism and etatism in the 1930s. Besides the politico-economic and policy determinants of state-led industrialisation, I also attend to the intra-elite conflicts, specifically the politics of foreign industrial expertise, the debate on the institutional framework of industrialisation, and the multiple failed attempts to enact a Turkish labour code. The winning party in these class conflicts within the state apparatus would go on to direct etatism as a capitalist project of industrialisation with a clear vision of class relations in the coming years.

But what was the territorial logic that lay behind state-led industrialisation? Chapter 3 starts with this question, and explains how the Turkish state elite desperately tried to undo the uneven geographical development that was left behind by the Ottoman economy under the domination of foreign capital. The spatial configuration of development thinking reflected the postimperial anxieties associated with transforming Turkey into an economically and culturally integrated nation-state. Together with a nationalised and expanded railway network, industrial site selection in interwar Turkey was part of a state strategy to achieve national consolidation and effective statehood. This chapter offers an important correction to the treatment of state industries as a unified entity by examining the differences between the old industrial centres and the new industrial sites in terms of local labour market dynamics. The historically uneven spatial development of capitalism produced considerably divergent outcomes in terms of labour recruitment and stability, as well as the conditions of labour reproduction. It was local rather than national forces that shaped labour market outcomes, especially with regards to its gender dynamics.

Shop-floor industrial relations sit at the centre of the analysis in Chapter 4. I take issue with the prevalent arguments on state workers’ working and living conditions in the 1930s and 1940s, attending to the physical conditions of production, the factory administrative structure, employment and wage policy, labour control strategies, social provisions, and housing problems. This chapter brings the disjuncture between ideological prescription and everyday practice to the fore by examining the micro-physics of power. The failed attempt at rationalising production, repressive shop-floor management practices, and isolated and individualised worker resistance are the main themes.

Building on the extended histories of workers’ shop floor experiences through their petitions, Chapter 5 depicts the factory as a space of everyday work charged with political meaning, and traces the day-to-day conflicts and compromises that took place on the shop floor in the 1940s. The Turkish state factory, like any other industrial workplace under capitalism, was a contested terrain where norms were negotiated and redefined. A two-way struggle between labour and management, however unequal the terms, over the drawing of lines of authority characterised daily interactions on the shop floor. Midway into the 1940s, a significant change occurred in the direct manifestation of class relationships over the control of the job and the line of authority. This chapter explains that change through a study of the links between the political system, industrial legislation, and the emergence of new patterns of industrial conflict.

With chapter 6, we enter the fast-changing world of workers in postwar Turkey to track down the rise of labour as a political category. Focusing on the early trade union movement, I build on the premise that workplace relations and working-class politics are not merely expressions of structural class positions, and argue that worker subjectivity contains shifting and contradictory positions that cannot be understood without paying due attention to labour relations on the shop floor. I specifically follow the life trajectories of two trade unionists during the 1950s who adopted two different insider’s critiques of the mainstream political direction taken by the union movement, and paid for their political choices. Their life stories reveal the multiple working-class political positions that were extinguished or submerged.

I now invite the reader to a century-long industrial walk in Istanbul. We will set off with enthusiastic Ottoman industrialists and their curious but cautious European visitors, continue with ambitious republican policymakers and idealistic factory managers, and end with disillusioned but increasingly determined worker-citizens. An industrial workplace overlooking the Marmara Sea, which once lay outside the city walls but was later incorporated into the city, will be our vantage point to look upon this action-packed history.