1 The Ottoman Military-Industrial Complex

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman economy was under increasing pressure from head-to-head competition with European manufacturers, on the one hand, and military exigencies, on the other.⁷ Following his accession to the throne in 1789, Sultan Selim iii (r. 1789–1807) embarked on a series of reforms, at the centre of which was a programme of military reorganisation to create a professional army along European lines. Originally the name given to the new army, Nizam-ı Cedid (lit., New Order) eventually came to encompass the entire reform programme. Industrialisation policy aligned with the primacy of military reform, focusing mainly on military enterprises such as gunpowder mills, cannon factory, and small textile workshops.⁸ Only a few of these establishments approximated the scale and organisation of a modern industrial workplace. The majority remained barely larger than artisan shops, operating on low technology and employing eight to twenty workers.⁹ The state production units primarily produced goods for a limited market; there was minimal interest in scaling up production through cheaper unit costs.

Among the few factories catering to the civilian market were a woollen mill and a paper factory constructed in 1805 in Beykoz, a picturesque village with a rich water source at the northern end of the Bosphorus on the Anatolian side.¹⁰ In the textile sector, Selim iii tried to protect local manufacturing against imports by banning the use of certain imported fabrics such as English broadcloth and encouraging the elite to use locally manufactured textiles. A contemporary visitor to a silk factory that had been built in Üsküdar, a district bordering on the north of Beykoz, reported fifteen hundred hands working at a thousand looms. Following the new dress reform under Mahmud ii, under which rich figured clothing was replaced with plain dress, the numbers fell to 300 hands at 750 looms.¹¹

In 1807, the Janissary corps, the elite infantry units that were central to the old military establishment, led a popular revolt. This culminated in the collapse of the New Order and ultimately resulted in dethroning the Sultan.¹² In the following two decades under Sultan Mahmud ii’s reign (r. 1808–1839), few, if any, industrial attempts were made.¹³ The establishment of machine-operated factories worthy of the name would have to wait until the advent of the modern army.¹⁴ In 1826, following the abrogation of the Janissaries, Mahmud ii initiated a wide-ranging military, fiscal, and bureaucratic reform programme entailing the establishment of a new army through mass conscription.¹⁵ As the new European-style professional army, Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (lit., the Victorious Muhammadan Troops) replaced the Janissaries; the old brightly coloured uniforms made of luxurious materials gave way to dull-coloured clothing made of coarse materials.¹⁶ For the already struggling Ottoman clothmakers, this came as a further blow for it meant the end of a certain degree of protection from foreign competition.¹⁷

By the end of the eighteenth century, cotton and silk textiles, the two most emblematic textile products of the empire, were being locally produced and even exported, with cotton being the second most important sector of the Ottoman economy after grains. The empire’s self-sufficiency in cotton textiles continued until the 1820s, mainly because the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars provided some respite for the region. Thereafter, European competition went into full throttle.¹⁸ Initially, it was mainly the small manufacturers in the urban centres of the empire who suffered, while home production continued, albeit with difficulty. The crisis gradually expanded geographically and spilled over into other sectors toward the mid-century. During the reigns of Mahmut ii and Abdülmecid i (r. 1839–1861), the Ottoman textile market came increasingly under European dominance as the empire turned into a raw materials supplier for European manufacturing and a market for their products.¹⁹ The international export market disappeared for wool, cotton, and linen clothmakers, but expanded for the export of rugs, lace, embroideries, and raw silk. The overall effect was an expansion in the size of the market accompanied by a steady shrinkage in the already miniscule importance of the Ottoman industrial economy at the global level.²⁰

With worsening terms of trade exacerbated by an expanding military budget, the Ottoman statesmen gradually recognised the unsustainability of their dependence on foreign manufacturing. Their vision of achieving military parity retained primacy, but there was also now a burgeoning recognition of the wider significance of industrialisation for economic development. Ottoman modernisers, arguing that traditional manufacturing methods could not compete with European factories, began to advocate for the establishment of large, modern factories.²¹ There were two factories established in the 1820s and 1830s that symbolised the intricate relations between the Ottoman state’s modernisation efforts and its industrial policy.

The first factory, which was established in 1826 after Mahmud ii had abolished the Janissaries, was an imperial spinning mill, İplikhane-i Amire ( Imperial Spinnery; also known as Riştehane-i Amire). It was located in Eyüp, a district at the confluence of the Kağıthane and Alibey streams at the head of the Golden Horn. Three palaces were demolished to make way for the building site for this factory. One foreman and 106 workers used animal power to operate fourteen spinning wheels with 120 spindles to produce cotton yarn and rope mainly for the navy and the new corps.²² The factory was also known as the “rope barracks” (İplik Kışlası) because part of it accommodated soldiers.²³ Later on, the building was partially converted to a prison for petty criminals, with prison labour also utilised in the factory. The prison labourers’ situation was described as “falling into disaster” by the head imam of the neighbourhood.²⁴

“No traveller should leave Constantinople without paying a visit to the Fez Manufactory of Eyoub,” insisted the British traveller Julia Pardoe after witnessing Feshane, the Imperial Fez Factory (Feshane-i Amire) in 1836: “The building, which is entirely modern, and admirably adapted to its purpose, stands in the port, near the palace of Azme Sultane, on the site of an ancient Imperial residence.”²⁵ Feshane was the last sizeable military factory founded before the Tanzimat reforms. The fez had been introduced to the army in 1826; three years later it was being worn by all civil servants. And it was because it removed the visible distinction between non-Muslims and Muslims that the headdress became a key marker of modernisation.²⁶ The Ottomans had initially imported their fezes from Austria, France, and Tunisia. In 1828, they brought twenty-three foremen from Tunisia to start local manufacturing. When the first production unit, Darüssinae, located in Kadırga, proved to be too small, production was moved to an imperial seaside residence in the Golden Horn in 1839. With the installation of mule-powered wool weaving looms in 1843, the factory expanded into carpet and gabardine production as well. Between 250 and 300 workers worked at Feshane during this period, manufacturing 300,000 fezes every year, the majority of which were for the troops, whilst the remainder were handed over to the bazaars. Yet, the volume of local production was not enough to curb the increase in European imports, making technological and organisational improvements inevitable. In 1844, the management of Feshane was handed over to Belgian experts, who succeeded in increasing production levels by importing machinery from their country.²⁷

The industrial site selection for these two factories points to the mentality shift in Ottoman development thinking. Three imperial palaces were demolished for the construction of the imperial mill, another imperial residence was transformed into a fez workshop, and other factories were either built in the place of or located inside old imperial buildings.²⁸ The ornate imperial edifices were erased from the urban fabric to make space for the architectural symbol of European development, “with its prominent chimneys and clerestoried roofs over large sheds.”²⁹ Architectural grandeur gave way to functional spaces to reverse the image of a stagnating, oriental empire. A century later, scholars would mourn the loss of the elegant wooden palaces by the Golden Horn to textile factories, calling it the sacrifice of modernity.³⁰ But to reform-minded Ottomans, factories pointed to a bright future. In the contemporary Sefaretnames, that is, documents recounting the journeys and experiences of Ottoman ambassadors in foreign lands to be presented to the Sultan, factories were recurrently cited as a source of wealth and power.³¹ “Industry and science—factories and schools,” wrote Bernard Lewis, “were the talismans by which both Mahmud ii in Turkey and Muhammad Ali in Egypt tried to conjure up the wealth and power of Europe, and thus maintain the European-style armies which were their prime concern.”³²

Inspired by the success of Feshane, the Ottoman state established several new factories. A small water-powered spinning and weaving mill was built in Sliven (Bulgaria) in 1836 to produce woollen cloth for military uniforms. The factory director was Polish, the foremen were German, and the workers, Bulgarian. Initially a state-owned factory, it was later rented out to private capital.³³ A calico factory in Izmit, a broadcloth factory in Sliven, and a weaving factory in Zeytinburnu followed. The machinery of the calico factory in Izmit was renewed around the same time as Feshane.³⁴ In addition to these state investments, private industrial investment also took hold in the 1820s. Entrepreneurs, both local and foreign, built factories and imported technology. Steam-driven silk reeling got off the ground in Salonika and Bursa in the 1830s.³⁵ Between 1831 and 1840, military establishments such as the shipyard, cannon factory, and small arms factories started embracing steam power as well.³⁶

Despite the monopoly protection they received, the state factories could not reduce the empire’s import dependency on textiles. Even those larger in size mainly adopted artisanal practices and concentrated on the final stages of manufacturing.³⁷ They suffered from fuel and raw material insufficiencies, dilapidated machinery, transportation, and other economic infrastructural problems.³⁸ They were also poorly managed, with the military elite serving as supervisors instead of technically trained personnel. When William Fairbairn, a prominent Scottish shipbuilder and inventor of the riveting machine, visited the public works in Istanbul on the Sultan’s invitation in 1839, he found the imperial dockyards, small-arms manufactory, cannon foundries, powder mills, and rope factory in “a very primitive state.”³⁹ Though new machinery had been introduced shortly before his arrival, it was far from perfect and “the native workman appeared to me to be at a loss how to work and manage machinery of such a complicated character.”⁴⁰ Another foreign visitor to the Ottoman factories of the 1830s also noted the elaborate and expensive machinery falling rapidly to ruin at the cloth and paper factories in Beykoz.⁴¹ The partial use of the imperial mill as a prison was also a result of poor management.⁴² Still, some establishments were improved and continued operation.⁴³ A tannery, leather goods, and shoe factory established in 1810, as well as Feshane, for example, survived the Ottoman Empire to become two of the largest state-owned factories in republican Turkey.

By the end of the 1830s, another industrial centre of the empire was on the ascent, the fate of which would be inextricably bound up with the industrialisation of the imperial capital. Fascinated by the military reforms carried out by Sultan iii, the governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, had decided to pursue an ambitious economic and military agenda to transform his province into a semi-independent union. His industrialisation plan, launched in the 1810s, encompassed military production, agricultural processing, and textiles. By the 1830s, a thirty-thousand-strong workforce was labouring across thirty cotton mills in Egypt.⁴⁴ The Porte was eyeing Muhammad Ali’s industrial and military success with fear and fascination.⁴⁵ Compared with Egypt, factory production in Turkey remained limited, with an industrial workforce of five thousand labouring mainly in Istanbul and its hinterland.⁴⁶

But manufacturing suffered a fatal blow when the Ottomans were forced to sign the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty of Balta Liman in 1838 in return for European military support against Muhammad Ali’s revolt. The agreement represented an utter surrender to the European laissez-faire system since the Ottomans had to abolish most state monopolies and other import-export controls.⁴⁷ The treaty also marked the beginning of a series of agreements with European powers through which the Ottoman internal market would be incorporated into the world economy. The tariff rate on imports was reduced to nominally low levels until World War i. At the same time, domestically produced commodities were subjected to a twelve per cent internal customs duty when transported within the empire.⁴⁸ The barriers standing in the way of European merchants were thus dismantled, causing imports, especially of textiles, to soar. As in other contexts of delayed industrialisation, the semi-colonial conditions of dependency made it difficult for Ottoman manufacturing to take off.

Despite the differences in their scope and success, the factories in the two industrial centres of the empire shared three characteristics. First, the industrial efforts were all largely geared toward military and palace use, rather than any large-scale production for a mass market. Second, labour, especially skilled labour, and industrial expertise were scarce. Forms of unfree labour and an extensive dependence on foreign engineers, supervisors, and workers were widespread. Third, by the 1840s, both industrial plans had failed. Muhammad Ali’s factories survived until 1841 mainly thanks to the protection provided by the monopolies. But, after his defeat in 1841, he, too, was forced to implement the conditions of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman treaty. Thereafter these industries underwent a rapid decline. In Turkey, most factories had been abandoned by 1849.⁴⁹ But, before this final blow, the 1840s would witness yet another ambitious industrial move.

2 Ottoman Industrialisation in the 1840s

It is perhaps ironic that the largest and broadest industrial effort by the Ottomans came in the 1840s, that is, shortly after the Anglo-Ottoman commercial treaty forced the Ottomans to surrender their monopolies and tariff authority to foreign powers. However, besides an almost complete surrender to European laissez-faire, the decade of the 1830s culminated in an Ottoman modernisation programme known as Tanzimat (lit., reorganisation), aimed at administrative, economic, and military centralisation and rationalisation. If the centralisation of bureaucracy is the practical ally of capitalism, we can argue that the Tanzimat was a political corollary to the trade agreement of 1838.⁵⁰ The Ottomans were now engaged in heated debates on the best strategy for economic development, focusing on the two familiar and interconnected axes that would come to dominate economic policy discussions well into the first decades of the republic, as we shall see in the next chapter: agricultural versus industrial development and liberalism versus protectionism.”⁵¹

In the 1840s, the Ottoman state tried once more to bridge the growing technical and technological gap with Europe. State investment in industry peaked when the state allocated a large part of the Imperial Privy Purse (Hazine-i Hassa) budget to industrial development projects, and launched a great variety of industries under the name of Fabrika-i Hümayun (Imperial Factories). This new wave of industrialisation displayed five main differences from previous attempts. To begin with, the new establishments were partially mechanised and employed larger workforces. They were built in places such as Izmit, Hereke, Bursa, Kayseri, Konya, and also Balkan cities, expanding the industrial geography of the empire. State establishments constituted the largest part of industrial investment, but private industrial investment, partly local and partly foreign in origin, grew in this period as well. Industrial sectors also expanded and diversified. Last but not least, the perception of industrialisation as an economic policy changed. Instead of being merely a method for reducing import dependency for military requirements, local industrial production became a goal in itself.⁵²

The Turkish Manchester project embodied this policy change. The construction of this agro-industrial complex began in 1843 under the full administrative and operational control of a prominent Armenian family, the Dadians. From the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, six subsequent generations of Dadians held the office of Barutçubaşı, the directorship of the imperial Ottoman powderworks. Thanks to their practical and empirical industrial knowledge, they played a founding role in the industrialisation efforts of the Ottoman state by establishing imperial factories producing gunpowder, weaponry, paper, silk, cotton, and cast iron around the capital as well as Izmit, Bursa, and Izmir (Smyrna).⁵³ The family owed their rise to industrial leadership to a technical failure at the end of the eighteenth century.

3 The Dadian Family

In 1794, Selim iii had commissioned a Frenchman of Spanish extraction to build a horse-driven mill for the Imperial Powder Works to produce European quality gunpowder. When the pulley of the mill broke, to the great annoyance of the Sultan, the foreign secretary sent word to his watchmaker, Arakel Dadian. A self-educated Armenian, Arakel was a jack of all trades; he worked as a goldsmith, a watchmaker, a miller, and a weaver. He repaired the pulley, and built a completely new one. The Sultan then asked Arakel to construct a water mill for the Azadlı Gunpowder Factory in Küçük Çekmece. Impressed by the success of this construction, he appointed Arakel to chief gunpowder maker in 1795. Arakel then managed to mechanise the entire gunpowder production process; he transformed parts of the plant into mechanical workshops and built different kinds of machinery including weaving looms.⁵⁴

Ohannes Dadian, Arakel’s third son, began working at the gunpowder factory in 1813 at the age of fifteen, a year after the death of his father, and his older brother Simon Amira Dadian became the chief gunpowder maker. Ohannes learnt machine building from Armenian foremen. He was the director of the paper factory in Beykoz between 1820 and 1822, and the weaving mill in Eyüp between 1826 and 1829.⁵⁵ Initially the two brothers, Ohannes and Simon, were entrusted with constructing the imperial spinning mill, but they failed and resigned. In 1827, Ohannes invented two machines, one for the small arms factory and the other for the rope factory. He presented both machines in the palace garden to Mahmud ii, who rewarded the inventor with praise and a handsome payment.⁵⁶

With these words, Ohannes summarised the expectations placed by the Ottomans on local manufacturing: to produce basic consumer goods, to reduce the foreign trade deficit, to follow and transfer the European technical and technological developments, and to create employment.

Ohannes’s next task was a double order: starting broadcloth production at Feshane and finishing the construction of a broadcloth factory in Sliven without delay. In the meantime, he continued building and repairing machines, impressing Abdülmecid i, who, after a visit to the Imperial Powder Works, exempted the Dadian family from all forms of taxation.⁵⁸ This success was followed by the construction of a broadcloth factory in Izmit, a cotton mill (later silk factory) in Hereke, and an iron foundry in Zeytinburnu, the Grande Fabrique, under Ohannes’s control. He made two more visits to Europe and returned with English machinery, engineers, and European workers.⁵⁹ Between 1842 and 1844, he was in Paris and London. The Times reported favourably on his activities in Great Britain, from where he sent back home “a complete woollen-mill, a silk-mill, a complete set of tools for works for the repair of steam-engines, and various mechanical instruments.”⁶⁰ Besides his recognition as an inventor and industrial expert at the Ottoman palace, Ohannes also succeeded in becoming a member of industrial societies in France, England, and Scotland. During his 1847 mission to import new machinery from Europe, his two sons accompanied him. He returned with European mechanics, chiefly Germans. He went on to build the first iron boat of the empire at Zeytinburnu, the location where MacFarlane remarked on the flying sparks.⁶¹

By the time of the iron foundry’s construction in 1843, Ohannes Dadian had established and was in control of a variety of state factories. These comprised a small arms factory in Dolmabahçe, a silk factory in Hereke, a nail factory in Yeşilköy, a leather factory in Beykoz, a broadcloth factory in Izmit, a carpet weaving and a yarn factory in Hereke, and a steam-powered mill in Istanbul.⁶² The broadcloth factory in Izmit was the second largest state factory built during that time. It was built in 1843 using European construction techniques and equipped with the finest available machinery. This factory was initially run by a British manager, and it employed two hundred workers. In 1846, it was turned into a state factory to produce wool yarn and cloth for military use to a quality equal to European manufacturing.⁶³ With the money earned from the management of the Izmit Factory, the Dadian brothers established another factory some thirty kilometres away on the northern shore of the Marmara Sea in Hereke in 1843.⁶⁴ This factory started as a cotton mill using English and German machines and operated by Italian and French workers.⁶⁵ But before the end of the 1840s, with new machines brought over from Austria by Ohannes Dadian, production shifted to fancy silk products for the palace.⁶⁶ The cotton machinery was then transferred to Istanbul in 1850 and used at the Bakırköy Factory.⁶⁷

In line with MacFarlane’s description of “the Kingdom of Dadians,” the family enjoyed extensive authority over industrial decisions ranging from site selection, machinery purchasing, hiring, to manufacturing, and were subject only to imperial control through fund allocation.⁶⁸ Ohannes Dadian used this authority to construct the new industrial complex away from the already existing industrial centres in Istanbul and its hinterland. The selection of Zeytinburnu as the site for the industrial complex signalled an important shift in the industrial geography of Istanbul. Until then, the state-funded imperial factories were concentrated in three major zones: Beykoz on the Asian side of the Bosporus, the entire Golden Horn area, and, beyond Istanbul to the east, in the textile town of Izmit and the adjacent village of Hereke, outside the city proper. With the construction of the Turkish Manchester on the Marmara coast, industrial activity moved further to the southwest of the city, a spatial move that would change the urban fabric in the following decades.

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Industrial buildings and enterprises in Istanbul, 1800–1850

gül köksal, “istanbul’dakİ endüstrİ mİrası İçİn koruma ve yenİden kullanım önerİlerİ” (phd diss., istanbul TEKNİK ÜNİVERSİTESİ, 2005), 236

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Industrial buildings and enterprises in Istanbul, 1850–1900

ibid., 237

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4 The Agro-Industrial Complex

As the Ottoman industry expanded and technologically improved, its need for technical maintenance increased. By the end of the 1830s, if a steam engine at the gunpowder plants, shipyards, or small arms factories broke down, it would either be replaced or sent to Europe for repair. The construction of an iron factory, the Grand Fabrique, lay at the heart of the plan for the industrial complex to end this dependency.⁶⁹ After an unsuccessful site search in Haliç, Ohannes Dadian, together with British engineers, visited several possible sites and estimated the construction cost.⁷⁰ They chose Çubuklu, a neighbourhood in the Beykoz district on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, and Zeytinburnu as the most appropriate sites. Because Çubuklu was far from residential areas, workers’ accommodation would be a problem. In Zeytinburnu, there was a large inn to serve as worker accommodation, and the nearby Yedikule could potentially house workers; for engineers, Bakırköy had rental houses.⁷¹ In the end, most workers lived in the barracks constructed on the site. The area only became a working-class neighbourhood with the construction of the railway that connected Küçükçekmece to Yedikule in the 1870s.⁷²

The two Dadian brothers finished the construction of the iron foundry in 1844.⁷³ The foundry was set up in a square enclosure with some 210 to 240 metres on one side and an adjacent two-storey barracks with a central corridor of 200 metres in length. At first, it produced a wide variety of products including pumps, small machines, steam engines, swords, ploughs, locks, cannons, iron rails, pipes, pen knives, and razors mainly for the military and for small producers in the area.⁷⁴ After the 1850s, however, production began to focus on guns and ammunition, and eventually this was their exclusive output.⁷⁵ The industrial complex incorporated the establishments that were already in the area such as the Imperial Powder Works, a second gunpowder factory in Azadlı, Küçük Çekmece, a salt basin to the east of the complex, and old tanneries and candle workshops in Kazlıçesme.⁷⁶ As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, a boatyard was constructed in Bakırköy, where the first steamship of the empire was assembled, albeit mostly with pre-fabricated material from England.⁷⁷ There was also a small and short-lived professional school in the complex to teach and train technical personnel.⁷⁸

The site featured an ambitious model farm devised as the nucleus of agricultural development and improvement. The Ottomans tasked an American agricultural expert, Dr Davis, with producing cotton. Besides his expertise in agricultural science and cotton seeds, Dr Davis had brought his four emancipated slaves from South Carolina and he had plans to build South Carolina-style plantations throughout eastern Thrace. The emancipated slaves, whom MacFarlane described as “the best agricultural labourers we ever saw in Turkey,” constructed a ginhouse with six cotton gins of English make, which ended up going to rust because there were no hands to attend to them.⁷⁹ The industrial farm was left to its fate eventually, and the frustrated Dr Davis quit in 1848.⁸⁰ The fate of the factory he produced the cotton for proved to be more complicated.

5 The Construction of the Basmahane

The native manufactory that was to be supplied by cotton produced on the model farm was a textile mill, Basmahane, near Bakırköy. Located between Yeşilköy and Zeytinburnu, several kilometres west of the iron foundry, the site was situated conventionally along a smooth coastline in the vicinity of abundant water sources such as the Çırpıcı stream. The suburban quarter of Constantinople known as Hebdomon (Lat. Ad Septimum) dates back to the late fourth century. Initially serving as a military district, it developed as an area of imperial resorts and retirement villages. After being looted and destroyed several times, the district lost this function and was eventually abandoned to its fate. In an archaeological excavation on the factory site in 2013, a variety of Byzantian architectural ruins were found dating back to between the sixth and thirteenth centuries. Some of these ruins were partially destroyed during the construction work at the factory site in 1933 and 1944.⁸¹

The district came to be known as Makro Hori (lit., long village, as it extended two kilometres along the coastline) in the late Byzantine period. The name was adapted to Makrıköyü (with “köy” meaning village in Turkish) when it was captured by the Ottomans in the fourteenth century and turned into a district of gardens and orchards full of sacred springs under Ottoman rule. Until the seventeenth century, it remained a Greek village. By the mid-century, the village had a mosque. After Ohannes Dadian constructed the gunpowder works in the district, the number of Armenian residents increased. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the district was once again a summer resort with predominantly Turkish residents.⁸² When the first railway connecting Istanbul to Sofia was constructed in 1874, Makriköy became one of the six stations connecting the suburbs to the city centre.⁸³ It was eventually renamed Bakırköy in 1925 when the republican state changed the place names of foreign origin. The district became a suburb of Istanbul on 30 May 1926; as of 1952, it was home to 48,000 Turks, 1,435 Jews, and 6,860 Armenians.⁸⁴

The available information on the early years of the factory is scattered and contradictory. Many sources give the year of establishment as 1850.⁸⁵ This information, which is based on hearsay rather than archival research, has remained commonly accepted. In 1951, the factory celebrated its centenary, although in 1949, Fazlı Turga, a one-time director of the Bakırköy Factory had given 1840 as the year of the factory’s establishment and even provided details about the operation of the factory in the early 1840s.⁸⁶ The factory was established as a weaving mill to produce calico, Turga wrote, and with the instalment of the famous Platt brothers spinning machinery in 1843, it became one of the most modern factories of the time.⁸⁷ Later publications uncritically reproduced the incorrect date of 1850, endowing it with the status of truth. Interestingly, some historians repeated the mistake even after citing MacFarlane’s 1847–1848 visit to the factory. And then there are other scholarly sources that cite 1840, or even 1839, as the year of establishment.⁸⁸ The most reliable source so far is a recent dissertation by Engin Kırlı. Based on a rich array of primary sources, Kırlı found that the decision to build the factory, which was cited either as Veliefendi Basma Fabrikası (Veliefendi Calico Factory because it was located next to the Veliefendi Stream) or Basma Fabrika-i Hümayunu in the archives, dates back to 1845. Construction started the following year, and production began on a limited scale in 1847. It took another nine months before the factory was working at full capacity.⁸⁹

Confusion continues about the factory’s ownership status and physical characteristics. Among the inaccurate claims made by historians are the following: Ohannes Dadian established the mill originally as a private enterprise; the famous Armenian architect Garabed Balian designed the factory building as a four-floor stone or brick building; the factory was transferred to the imperial treasury in 1850; production stopped in 1860; the factory management was transferred to the Quartermaster General’s Department of the Ministry of War in 1867; and there was no renovation or renewal efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁹⁰ Kırlı’s archival findings contradict these claims. The Bakırköy Factory was a state factory from the very beginning; it was funded by the Imperial Privy Purse and controlled and managed by Ohannes Dadian.⁹¹ The building had three storeys and was indeed designed by Garabed Balian.⁹² In 1848, MacFarlane described the factory as “an extensive cotton-mill, calico manufactory, and print works” erected “in a swampy hollow near the sea, and the choked-up mouth of another creek.”⁹³ The site was notoriously unhealthy, he claimed, remembering having been advised against passing through so as to avoid malaria fever.

In the initial years, the factory imitated English broadcloth designs using wooden printing blocks, which MacFarlane claimed that the Dadians seized from John Duckworth after firing him.⁹⁴ Later on, the factory gained fame by producing Turkish and Arabic designs and motifs.⁹⁵ The factory primarily manufactured calico, but silk and cotton cloth, a cotton or linen percaline known as “kirpas,” shirts, handkerchiefs, and gloves were also produced in the early years. By 1852, kirpas production surpassed calico, and calico production stopped completely in 1861. Kirpas remained the primary product of the factory until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.⁹⁶

The factory was initially managed by the Ministry of Imperial Factories (Fabrika-i Hümayun Nezareti). In 1857 it came under the management of the Privy Purse. An extensive renovation followed this transfer: the factory site was extended, forested, and surrounded by walls; a water pool, a mosque, and workers’ barracks for single workers were constructed.⁹⁷ Management was transferred again in 1876, to the Quartermaster General’s Department of the Ministry of War (Harbiye Nezareti Levazimati Askeriye Dairesi). This saw production shift to nettle cloth, tent canvas, and dress fabric for the army. Contrary to the claims that the factory was never renovated, there were waves of construction and also new machinery installations. Production soared during the Crimean War, for example, and a workers’ barracks was built to ease the discontent of the overworked labourers.

Until 1857, the factory operated at a loss. Between 1857 and 1864, profits were minimal. But after 1867, an increase in production brought with it a substantial increase in profits. Although it did not stop, production slowed down in the first half of the 1860s, possibly due to the increase in cotton yarn prices caused by the American Civil War. Difficulties in yarn provision continued until the end of the century, forcing the factory to buy yarn from the Yedikule Spinnery.⁹⁸ After 1865, production increased substantially making the factory a profitable enterprise. Renovations intensified between 1864 and 1869, and by the 1870s, in addition to the production units, the factory had a garden, workers’ housing, a coffee house, a general store, and a public bath.⁹⁹ But production interruptions remained commonplace. For example, in 1890 a worker demanded a transfer to the Feshane Factory, complaining of loss of wages due to production outages at the Bakırköy Factory. But the factory began producing new types of products in the 1890s. In addition to tent canvas, it now also produced home textiles.¹⁰⁰

Ohannes Dadian had complete control over the planning and construction of the factory from the very beginning. According to Kırlı, he was the first manager as well. However, MacFarlane tells a detailed story of two Duckworth brothers that Ohannes Dadian had brought from Lancashire to manage the factory. He placed the brothers in a farmhouse, situated on an area of land where the native workers refused to live because of the bad conditions. It was not long before they both died of malarial fever. John Duckworth, the son of one of the brothers, then became the director, but shortly afterward, he found himself in a conflict with the Dadian brothers and got fired.¹⁰¹ Ohannes himself was fired in 1850, probably following an investigation into the Dadians concerning allegations of corruption.¹⁰² A Muslim Ottoman, Hurşit Efendi, replaced Ohannes. Kırlı cites his negative report on the factory spinners as evidence of Ohannes Dadian’s faulty planning back in 1846, as well as of his inefficient and corrupt management until 1850. There were other accusations of corruption directed at Ohannes regarding his management of other state factories in the same period. He lost the management of Hereke and Izmit Factories in 1850 as well.¹⁰³ It is said that the family managed to regain their personal property and continued to hold the title of Barutçubaşı until later in the century.¹⁰⁴ Some hundred years later, however, the republican industrialists would erase this Armenian Ottoman industrialist’s name from the history of the Bakırköy Factory.

6 Labour in State Factories

In the 1850s, there were around five thousand women and men working in Ottoman state factories. Despite the small size of the factory workforce, state factories suffered from the Ottoman economy’s chronic problem of labour scarcity, and thus resorted to a variety of mechanisms. Initially, the locally recruited unskilled workers for state factories were found among convicts of misdemeanour offenses, who would work off their sentences, and army conscripts.¹⁰⁵ The state also tried to recruit civilian workers through incentives such as military duty exemption.¹⁰⁶ Last but not least, orphaned children toiled in the Ottoman state factories.¹⁰⁷

Due to the shortage of skilled labour and lack of industrial expertise, state factories of the 1840s were heavily dependent on foreign workers, foremen, and managers.¹⁰⁸ Basmahane also employed European men from the beginning of its operation.¹⁰⁹ Already in 1844, Ohannes Dadian was blaming the foreigners for the losses made by the factory. They slacked off, he claimed, despite their high paycheques. In fact, their wages made up only a part of the yearly losses, still Ohannes sent some of them back to their home countries. He complained about their unwillingness to train the native workers, arguing for the need to open technical schools. The dependency on foreign foremen can be assumed to have reduced over time, as we as can see from the decrease in their number. In 1857, seven European foremen worked at the factory; by 1864, there was only one.¹¹⁰

The lack of discipline among the local workers was also cited in archival documents. A 1846 document, for example, described textile workers as “obstinate” and “unable to tell good from bad.” They left the factory after a few months of work, and thus perpetuated the dependency on foreign workers.¹¹¹ Already in 1848, MacFarlane was critical that hardly any work was done at the good English machinery. Most workers lounged about with their hands in their pockets: “Some had gone home, and others, vexed by arrears of pay, were wishing that they had never come.” Foreign workers also received their share of his disdain. The foreign stocking weavers had made a few dozen stockings, he wrote, but their chief pocketed the money he made by selling the Dadians some worthless machinery and had gone back to Nottingham. Because the model farm proved to be a failure, the factory used English cotton yarn to weave calico. The manager presented the final product to Sultan Abulmecid as “triumphant evidence of the progress his subjects were making in manufacturing.” The production costs must have been very high, he concluded, for not only the spinners and weavers but also because the bleachers and dyers, pattern-designers, and block-cutters were Englishmen waiting most of the time idle for cotton supplies.¹¹²

The factory used an ethnically and religiously mixed workforce. Of a total of 120 employees in the factory in 1849, nineteen were African slaves. Kırlı cites an archival document mentioning that “the ruler of Africa, Bernuh,” sent these Muslim-named slaves to the Ottoman Empire in 1844, but he does not pursue this lead.¹¹³ Most probably, these slaves were sent from the African state of Niger known as the Bornu (or Borno) Empire (1396–1893), a caliphate and an ally to the Ottoman Empire.¹¹⁴ These slaves worked at Bakırköy and Hereke Factories, and in accordance with the common practice of freeing slaves after seven to nine years of service in the Ottoman Empire, they were freed by 1859. Those who wanted to stay were treated as free factory hands afterward. In 1864, there were eight freed slaves working at the Bakırköy Factory.¹¹⁵

Of the 310 workers in 1852, 155 were Muslim, including the African slaves. In 1864, there were 190 Muslim and 106 non-Muslim workers at the factory. In 1876, these numbers were 279 and 77, respectively.¹¹⁶ Clearly, the workforce composition was changing to the advantage of the Muslim population, but the reasons behind this change are unbeknown to us. Also unknown is the composition of the non-Muslim workforce at the factory. According to MacFarlane, the Dadians “barred out the Greeks from all their establishments” and preferred to employ “their people.”¹¹⁷ Indeed, with the construction of the Imperial Powder Works in Bakırköy in the eighteenth century, the number of Armenians in the district increased to the effect of doubling the population.¹¹⁸ In the 1830s and 1840s, the Dadians built an Armenian church and a school in the vicinity at the request of the Armenian workers.¹¹⁹ Arguably, the availability of labour, especially Armenian labour, played a role in the selection of the Zeytinburnu district for the industrial complex. In accordance with the common practice of employing orphans from ıslahhanes (lit., reform houses), that is, vocational state orphanages, at Ottoman state factories, students from an orphanage managed by Yedikule Surp Pırgiç Ermeni Hospital worked at the iron foundry.¹²⁰ Already in 1836, an imperial decree had ordered the collection of thousands of Armenian youngsters “from eight to fifteen years of age” from Anatolia to work at factories in Istanbul, including the iron foundry, under extremely harsh conditions.¹²¹

As is the case historically, female labour was widespread in Ottoman textile factories. Pardoe wrote about the five hundred women—Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Turks—at Feshane in 1836.¹²² Factory production co-existed with other forms of production such as the putting-out system.¹²³ In 1848, MacFarlane was struck to see Armenian and Greek women from the “poverty reigned … dreadful” factory district anxiously waiting for a distribution of work at Feshane.¹²⁴ In 1951, the then director of the Bakırköy Factory claimed that women were first employed at the factory during World War I.¹²⁵ This was certainly not the case, but it shows us how the republican industrialists sought to represent the Ottoman industrial experience. I will address the politics of these representations in the coming chapters.

7 The Demise and Memory of Tanzimat Industrialisation

The Ottoman industrialisation effort lost its momentum rather quickly. Already in the mid-1850s, an empty central treasury was making it increasingly difficult to meet the costs of industrial investment.¹²⁶ The majority of the 160 industrial enterprises either disappeared or were out of operation by the end of the 1850s.¹²⁷ There were three sets of reasons behind the failure of this attempt at industrialisation.

Corruption reigned supreme in the management of the factories. For example, there was a French director of a state textile factory who presented imported cloth as local goods to the Sultan for years and escaped when caught. Lack of coordination and disregard for expert advice were widespread. During the construction of the iron foundry, for example, an Armenian foreman disregarded the calculations of European experts regarding the construction of a chimney. The chimney subsequently collapsed, causing the death of thirty workers.¹³⁰

The second set of reasons concerns the cut-throat competition between Ottoman and European wares, especially in the textile industries. The consecutive trade agreements with European powers banned the Ottoman state from protecting local industries. A government-commissioned report from 1868 stated that in the last three to four decades, the number of cloth-making looms in Istanbul had fallen from 2,750 to twenty-five. Between 1827 and 1850, English imports increased by 842 per cent and cotton textiles made up 85 per cent of total imports. The decline continued into the next century, with the import of cotton textiles increasing some hundredfold between 1820 and 1914. International competition thus struck many fatal blows to the empire’s industrialisation efforts.¹³¹

Last but not least were the problems related to domestic infrastructure and policy. Due to the inefficiency of transport infrastructure, for example, as well as inapt environmental conditions such as malarial swamps, factory operations became even more expensive. And the lack of a rational and consistent economic policy only aggravated these problems. It is true that at least some of the Ottoman statesmen recognised the interconnectedness of industry with other economic activities such as agriculture, financial administration, commerce, and public works. But any efforts to come up with a solid economic policy remained isolated and superficial as the cumbersome Ottoman bureaucracy kept busy with fiscal considerations at the expense of developmental policies.¹³²

By the mid-1860s, the Ottoman state had made another attempt at industrialisation. An industrial improvement commission (Islah-ı Sanayi Komisyonu) was established in 1864, organising industrial exhibitions and opening industrial schools. Under Abdülaziz’s rule (r. 1861–1876), the Bakırköy Factory was renovated, resulting in an increase in production. In the 1870s, private factories expanded rapidly in number, and after the 1880s the state established additional industrial entities as well. But this second wave remained modest in its effect; the Ottomans failed in redefining their terms of participation in the international economy. Industrial production proved limited compared with the handicraft sector, and the import burden continued to grow. In the textile sector, cotton gradually took over as the fibre of choice. Per capita cotton textile consumption was almost three times as high as that of woollen and other cloth put together by the 1910s. Between 1820 and World War i, the volume of cotton imports increased over a hundredfold and their share in domestic consumption increased from less than five per cent to more than eighty per cent.¹³³

In 1891, apart from the gunpowder and tobacco factories, there were four state factories operating in Istanbul, engaged in tanning and manufacturing woollen and cotton yarn and cloth and fez at quite high production costs. By 1913, the empire was exporting eighty per cent of its production of raw cotton, but importing about the same percentage of its consumption of cotton thread and ninety per cent of its cotton textiles.¹³⁵ Despite hefty investment and the transnational transfer of industrial technology and expertise, the end results of the industrialisation efforts in the 1840s were, in fact, a relative decline and de-industrialisation for the empire. The arrival of the factory system and the textile technology in the Ottoman Empire was delayed by a century in the context of rapid integration into the world markets and the mid-century boom of the world economy. The next attempt at industrialisation would have to wait until the 1930s, after the Great Depression had given birth to the paradigm of a national economy.¹³⁶

Starting already in the 1860s with the Young Ottomans’ critique of the Porte, the conventional narratives of Ottoman economic history have characterised the nineteenth century as a period of political and economic decline. As we shall see by the end of this chapter, in the early republican period, the failed crash industrialisation programme was either completely ignored or it came to be a matter of mockery. The first director of the Bakırköy Factory, Fazlı Turga, criticised the Ottoman industrialisation efforts as “random and haphazard.” The few cotton factories, he continued, were nothing but a “worn-out legacy.”¹³⁷ With the onset of state-led industrialisation in the 1930s, the demonisation of the Tanzimat industrialisation efforts gained further ground as the Kemalists presented the Ottoman ruling elite as their constitutive other.

8 The Bakırköy Factory in the Twentieth Century

Details on the history of the factory around the turn of the century mainly derive from one essay and a speech by the then director, Şefkati Türkekul (the reader will meet him again in the coming pages), at the centennial celebration of the factory. Türkekul knew a great deal about the factory’s past, possibly because his father, District Governor Şemsettin Bey, also managed the factory between the time of the armistice and the establishment of the republic. In 1894, an earthquake hit the factory, destroying the chimney and cracking the walls. The factory ceased operations amid the calls to demolish the entire building. The factory director successfully resisted these calls; the factory building was repaired and production resumed again in October 1898.¹³⁸

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The weavery of the Bakırköy factory, c. 1920s

alageyik, “bakırköy bez fabrikasının,” 81

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By the beginning of the First World War, the Bakırköy Factory was the oldest of the nine cotton mills in operation. It had a total of 6,400 spindles, six thousand of which were in use, and one hundred weaving looms. Of the 3,024 workers in the cotton industry, Bakırköy employed 417 workers and produced 8.4 per cent and 14.9 per cent of cotton yarn and cloth, respectively.¹³⁹ During the war, the factory commenced double-shift operations and produced gun slings made of cloth due to the scarcity of leather. Behind this production was a foreman from Bursa, Nuh Bilal Efendi, who developed a foot pedal loom and wove slings that were of the same quality as those made in Germany. Toward the end of the war, food provision for workers started, which, according to Şefkati Türkekul, was a good managerial practice on the part of the factory director Major Ali Rıza Bey, who understood “the connection between production and a worker’s belly,” and slaughtered three sheep on the factory site every day. The factory came under French occupation in 1918 for one and a half years, during which time production continued. The management building was lost to a fire in this period.¹⁴⁰

In 1921, under the Ankara Government, another management transfer saw the factory come under the control of the General Directorate of Military Factories under the auspices of the Ministry of War. A three-year-long repair and renewal project entailing machinery modification and replacement followed. Production resumed once again on 15 September 1924 with an almost hundred per cent increase in yearly production from 370,000 metres to 600,000 metres. In 1925, management changed once again, this time to the Turkish Industry and Mining Bank (Türk Sanayi ve Maadin Bankası).¹⁴¹ Over the next two years, the factory was electrified and it “got rid of” the German steam looms dating back to 1852. A separate weaving department equipped with sixty simple-technology looms was established in 1931, and English carder and roving machines were installed; the preparatory department was also extended. The factory pioneered modern machinery technology in the cotton industry, Türkekul claimed. When the first automatic weaving looms came to Turkey in 1927, they were tested at the factory. In 1931, Swiss twisting machines, and American warp and weft machines were installed. Modern bleaching and finishing machines were also used at the factory for the first time in 1933.¹⁴² The impact of these renovations was substantial. Between 1932 and 1934, the factory’s market sales increased from fifty-two to seventy per cent of its total production, with the rest of the products being sold to the state. The factory’s market share increased from 0.92 to fourteen per cent.¹⁴³

At the same time as these renovations and mechanical updates were going on, the factory underwent two more rounds of management transfer. The reader will find the reasons behind these multiple management transfers in the next chapter, but suffice to say here that they reflected the search for an economic policy and institutional restructuring during the republic’s first decade. In 1933, the factory came under the management of the Industrial Office for a short while and on 11 July 1933, the factory finally reached its final destination through its transfer to Sümerbank, the state holding that would manage the factory until its privatisation in 2004. At the time when Sümerbank took over the factory, it had 3,200 spindles and sixty weaving looms, produced 1,100 tonnes of yarn and seven million metres of cloth annually, while it employed 369 workers.¹⁴⁴

Immediately after the takeover, Sümerbank adopted a reconstruction plan. Old buildings were demolished. Except for the base of the water tower, nothing from the built structure survived.¹⁴⁵ The new factory building was designed by the most prominent architect of the time, Sedat Hakkı Eldem, whose nostalgia for the demolished imperial residences of the nineteenth century we have noticed above. The site of the initial factory building of three or four floors was now the space between the newly built cotton warehouse (ambar) and the repair workshop. The new factory building had a total of 8,928 spindles, 320 weaving looms, and a large-capacity dyeing and finishing department. Five years later, in 1949, the factory was extended once again. By 1951, it had 39,000 spindles, and 445 weaving looms.¹⁴⁶

The challenge also applied to three other major factories inherited from the Ottoman Empire: Feshane for woollen textiles; Hereke for wool and silk; and Beykoz for leather and shoes. Together, these four factories were the physical symbols of a hundred-year-old industrial aspiration. Their modernisation was incorporated into a comprehensive five-year industrial plan in 1934, when, a century after the first, it was time for the second attempt at state-led industrialisation. Originally established against the background of the world-market integration of a nineteenth-century peripheral economy, they were re-born as modal spaces of Turkish national industrial modernity.

It was this national aspect that would dominate public opinion on factories and factory work in the following years. In Türkekul’s account of the factory’s history, we find the echoes of an almost fifty-year-old ideology of national economy that emerged in the Young Turk era. The persistence of Mehmet Şükrü Bey in keeping the factory open, the diligence and inventiveness of Nuh Bilal Efendi, and the benevolence of Major Ali Rıza Bey are all instances of the fitness and commitment of Turkish/Muslim elements for industry against the background of an industrial history full of foreign and ethnic/religious minority figures. Major Ali Rıza Bey, for example, was much loved by the workers, who called him “Father.” Interestingly, as the reader will see in the upcoming pages, Türkekul himself enjoyed the same epithet during his directorship, pointing to continuity in managerial ideology and practice.

In his speech at Bakırköy’s centenary celebration, Türkekul did not mention Ohannes Dadian by name. He recounted that the factory had been founded by “a citizen entrepreneur,” and that Hurşit Ağa was its first director, acknowledging that the entrepreneur had done so much for the factory that “it would be fair to call him the founder.” Sidelined in the factory’s foundational history, the Armenian Ottoman inventor and entrepreneur only returned to the story when Türkekul proudly narrated the replacement of his Armenian foremen with Turkish men. Some of these had entered the factory school at the age of twelve and worked at the factory until 1920. The oldest worker at the time of the speech, that is, in 1950, was Hidayet Usta, who had spent fifty-seven “healthy and joyful years” at the factory. When asked about his time at the factory, Hidayet Usta, replied in a state of happy disbelief at the fact that he was sitting and eating together with the factory director, and even more incredibly with the “Pasha,” the head of Sümerbank’s board of directors, who held the rank of general. In the words of the journalist reporting on the celebration, it was a “family dinner table” of at least 1,500 “shining, happy, and proud people.” In one of the stories shared at the table, a worker of thirty-five years told how a foreign foreman, a man “who did not carry the blood of our people” responded to the “Turkish workers’ cries of hunger” after months of unpaid work during the French occupation. Pointing to the nearby Veliefendi meadow, the foreman replied: “You hungry? The meadow is there, go ahead!”¹⁴⁸

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Hidayet Usta at the factory celebration, 1950

courtesy of ergİn aygöl

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The centenary celebration encapsulated the republican structures of feeling around national industrial modernity. The hegemonic discourse sharply contrasted the failures of the Ottoman Empire with the accomplishments and vision of the Kemalist regime; and industrialisation was the most significant of these accomplishments. Ottoman industrialisation was mocked as a chronicle of ignorance, corruption, and folly. It was simply “a comedy,” a wasted opportunity in the hands of “dishonest and treasonous men,” wrote a journalist in 1939; “after learning the cost of the ridiculous, terrible history of industrialisation efforts in the 1840s, any patriotic Turk would be heartbroken for life.”¹⁴⁹ Ottoman industrialisation was “shrouded in mystery,” claimed an economics journal in 1942, but it is “now working wonders thanks to the technical and physical capacity of Turkish workers.”¹⁵⁰ The local textile industry, which came down to a few broken looms after years of neglect, was now supplying local demand to a large extent, the general director of Sümerbank claimed in the same issue.¹⁵¹ State factories are the embodiment of national will and strength, another author wrote, since they “saved us from our dependency on foreign manufacture.”¹⁵² Accelerated social and economic development was finally realising the historical potential of the Turkish nation, and the factories, especially the state-owned ones, were the carriers of that development.

In the next chapter, the reader will encounter the intricate interweaving of Kemalist nationalism with state-led industrialisation. The underlying narrative centred on Turkish workers producing with Turkish capital for the Turkish homeland. The failed Ottoman industrialisation efforts bequeathed a material infrastructure that included the Bakırköy Factory, an industrial culture in which foreign expertise played an important role, and an industrial geography that circumscribed the national industrial development agenda of the republic. In the words of a prominent Ottoman historian of the 1940s, the industrialisation efforts of the 1840s were “a distant preparation for the industrialisation efforts of today.”¹⁵³ Equally as important, these efforts left behind a failed legacy that the republican elite would use as a rhetorical device to derive legitimacy for the displacement of the labour-capital conflict. It is to the politico-economic underpinnings of the second round of state-led industrialisation efforts that we turn in the coming pages.