1 Space, Ideology, and Industrial Site Selection

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Poster in the special new year issue of Vatan, 1933

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In the special New Year issue of Vatan (Homeland) newspaper, a Santa Claus-like bearded Father Time figure holding a scythe engraved with the word zaman (time) tears off the year 1933 from the calendar to mark the beginning of a new year imbued with industrial imaginary. In the foreground, a steam train bearing the crescent and the star, the two figures of the Turkish flag, emerges amid a heavy steam cloud, invoking a sense of speed and power. A huge factory complex with nine tall smokestacks piercing the sky forms the backdrop. Symbolising the two most important state policies of the 1930s, the steam train and the large factory framed Turkey’s industrial future.

The year 1933 also marked the tenth anniversary of the young republic. In its first decade, the state prioritised the nationalisation and extension of the railway network. The Tenth Year March, still a powerful part of Kemalist iconography today, celebrates the success of the republic’s railway policy: “in ten years, we [the Turks] covered the motherland with an iron web of railroads.” Setting railroads alongside war victories, the rousing patriotic song reproduces the hegemonic state narrative that presented the war on underdevelopment as the consequential next step in the war for independence.

Underdevelopment, however, was not evenly distributed. Above all else, the railway network inherited from the empire highlighted regional inequalities. Before 1923, foreign concessionaires had built the railway lines in accordance with their interest in developing market-oriented agriculture, an accumulation regime that resulted in “an evident inequality between the market-oriented western regions, the surplus-producing interior, and the subsistence-farming east, northeast, and southwest.”⁵ And because they belonged to different regional economies, the sub-networks remained unconnected. The disconnected railway lines reflected a disarticulated economy that cut the inner Anatolian regions off from the coastal areas that were producing primary products for the Western markets. The railway linked Istanbul, the Aegean coastal area, and the eastern Mediterranean, but did not serve central Anatolia (except for a few towns around Ankara), the Black Sea region, or the eastern provinces. At the ground-breaking ceremony for the largest industrial investment in central Anatolia in 1934, the prime minister called this “a typical colonial economy.”⁶ The flow of commodities between the vast cereal-growing regions of inner Anatolia and the consuming cities was so limited that it was cheaper to feed the population of Istanbul from Iowa rather than Ankara and Konya.⁷ In the eyes of the republican elite, the spatial integration of the country represented the transformation of what remained from the semi-colonised empire into a politically and economically independent nation-state.⁸

Dating back to the same year as the first five-year plan, Baltacıoğlu’s words capture the intricacies of high modernism’s apogee: the mastery of nature, including human nature. As a whole, the plan and the framework in which it was implemented embody the faith in rapid social transformation and authoritative intervention that James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State as a characteristic feature of many twentieth-century attempts at social change. In its quest to make society “legible”, and more administratively manageable, Scott argues that the state has to achieve a combination of three elements: the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state, a weakened civil society, and an aspiration for the administrative ordering of nature and society. The common ideology of “high modernism” that drives large-scale social engineering projects rests on this administrative approach to both humans and their environments. Mustafa Kemal himself, and other leading figures of the Kemalist modernisation project as a form of high modernism in its authoritarian variant, would perfectly blend into the crowd imagined by Scott to populate the Hall of Fame of high modernist figures, and their faith in and desire to achieve “a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.”¹⁰ Particularly fitting to our case is the myriad ways in which ideology is enshrined in the official practices of national state bureaucracies in accordance with Scott’s analysis of nation-building and governance.

As the republican rulers searched for a way out of underdevelopment, a world-historical change in the way nation-states related to the social and economic structures of the society was under way. Beginning in the 1930s, Timothy Mitchell argues, the very notion of the economy underwent a transformation. Previously understood as how resources are managed and power exercised, the economy gained a new definition as the totality of the relations of production, distribution, and consumption within a given country. The emergent discourse of the economy as the “total process” fuelled the discourses of nation-making by providing a new way for the nation-state to represent itself and “imagine its existence as something natural, bounded and subject to political management.”¹¹ State-led industrialisation in Turkey built on this conception of the nation as a bounded and integrated totality, combined with the accompanying faith in its potential and obligation to act like an economic collective pursuing a common goal. The infamous 1935 chp programme and its formulations of etatism, which we have closely looked at in previous pages, dictated that all industrial enterprises, state or private, “shall follow one another in such a way as to render the country as an industrial unit.” The geographical dispersion of new industrial investment was the logical and practical result of this vision.

The spatial politics of the republic took concrete form in three policies that relocated the economic and political centre from western to central Anatolia: moving the capital from imperial Istanbul to Ankara, a small town roughly in the middle of the country; extending the railroad; and the construction of new state factories in medium-sized towns near the republic’s new capital.¹² The territorial boundaries of the nation-state excluded the important old economic centres of the empire, disrupting the former regional economies. The linking up of the disconnected railway sub-networks in central Anatolia became a priority for the republican state in achieving an integrated economy and a unified national market.¹³ Starting in the second half of the 1920s, the government expanded the railway network with the double-goal of creating a national market and transmitting the ideology of national modernity to all corners of the country. By the end of the next decade, all foreign controlled railways had been nationalised and most of the medium-sized provincial cities were interconnected.¹⁴

It was no coincidence that etatism saw its first official and public mention at the opening of the railway line that integrated the central Anatolian town of Sivas into the railway network in 1930. Taken together, railway policy and etatism embodied the young state’s strategy for leaping over centuries of underdevelopment and kick-starting the Turkish economy along the highway of rapid industrialisation. The late development of the country had given rise to a feeling of backwardness and a sense of urgency that affected both the modes of setting economic goals and the ways chosen to achieve them. This anxiety about being late, the widespread desire to “compensate for centuries-long neglect” and to catch up with the West economically and culturally underlined the spatial organisation of the industrialisation effort.¹⁵ “We are running on a short cut [toward industrialisation],” Bayar said in 1935, taking advantage of the fact that “we know everything about the roads walked by [industrialised] countries.”¹⁶

The linking of industrialisation with the larger Kemalist project of nation-building and modernisation distinguishes early-republican industrial culture from preceding (or succeeding) periods and also informs the distinct character, design, and location of early-republican factories. Industrial design and layout communicated changing social expectations, progress, and power. Republican factories distinctively differed from the ornate late-Ottoman factories in terms of their construction material, size, and the prioritisation of efficiency.¹⁷ To foreign visitors, “the silhouettes of elongated sheds, high chimneys, isolated columns” in the otherwise underdeveloped provincial towns looked like they were “set up there by mistake.”¹⁸ Having travelled the country from the Black Sea to the Syrian frontier in the south, and from Smyrna to the Russian frontier in the east, Linke wrote: “But nowhere, not even at Ankara, did I find the contrasts more sharply expressed, the past, the present and the future closer to each other, than at Kayseri.” After the shabby buildings and poorly dressed crowds in the streets, the sight of the factory reminded her of the “fantastic constructions” set up for the 1936 British science fiction film Things to Come.¹⁹ Where foreigners saw strangeness, the local elite saw potential for social and cultural transformation.

But Kemalists were hardly unique in their high expectations for the proliferation of factories. In the interwar period, the public romance with the industrial workplace increasingly celebrated the factory aesthetic based on the idea of order, on the promise of efficiency, and on technical virtuosity both in the West and the Soviet Union.²⁰ As the encapsulation of industrial modernity, factories embodied the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity and came to be seen as carriers of an inevitable linear progress from tradition to an urban, industrial modernity in the context of late industrialisation. Both the history and the myth of the factory signified a new ordering, not only of the working space and the working time, but also the reordering of communities, especially of the national kind.²¹

The expected impact of these industrial investments in the name of progress and development penetrated every aspect of the social, transforming the very modes of social life and cultural identities. In this regard, state-led industrialisation was at the same time a “civilizing mission” linked with the larger Kemalist project of nation-building and modernisation.²² In the words of a contemporary prominent intellectual and bureaucrat, the extra-economic motivation behind “dispersing industrial establishments to the inlands, the remotest corners of the homeland” was to demonstrate a modern, civilised, and progressive living style to the locals.²³ The idealised images of an industrial Anatolia in official publications, argues historian of architecture Sibel Bozdoğan, were “nationalist statements on how land truly becomes ‘patria’ when transformed and tamed by industry.”²⁴ This would not be an easy transformation, however, especially with regards to securing the labour force needed for the new factories.

2 Industrialising Anatolia

Aware of the connection between the evolution of a railroad system and the development of a national market, the republican rulers decided to build the new state factories on the railway lines. Policymakers took three factors into consideration in industrial site selection: their proximity to raw materials, the potential to develop underdeveloped regions, and national defence requirements.²⁵ In 1932, Soviet experts carried out investigative visits to Anatolian cities, and prepared detailed reports on the existing structure and the development possibilities of multiple industries.²⁶ They advised the establishment of two textile factories in Kayseri and Nazilli. These and two other textile factories in the first five-year plan were constructed along the major railroad lines and connected to either one of the two largest cotton-growing areas around Adana and Aydın plains.²⁷ Two sugar factories in Eskişehir and Turhal (1933) and a major new cement factory in Sivas (1942) were also built along railway lines. The iron and steel works of Karabük, the largest, and the most contentious, industrial investment, was built near the then recently nationalised coal mines of Zonguldak along the newly constructed Filyos-Zonguldak railway.

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Railroad network, factories, and planned cities in Turkey in 1940

h. çağatay keskİnok, “urban planning experience of turkey in the 1930s,” metu jfa 27, no. 2 (2010), 178

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From this point on, state factories would play a significant role in republican urban planning, which, as a political practice of social transformation, displayed powerful physical markers of national modernity. In an accelerated manner during the 1930s, the urban space was fashioned along nationalist practices, performances, and symbols of nationhood. Urban planning schemes displayed a remarkable uniformity: lying tangent to the old town centres, the new Republic Avenue (Cumhuriyet Caddesi) hosted the new town hall and other state buildings, and Station Avenue (İstasyon Caddesi) connected the railway and the city centre. Modern-looking neighbourhoods extended along the axes of these avenues. State factories were located slightly outside the new centre, to which they were connected by the railway. Modelled after the company towns of the late nineteenth century, these factory complexes had all the elements of the simplified “garden-city” concept of the 1920s, a method of urban planning based on a planned town of limited size with broad streets and a spacious layout and surrounded by a green belt.²⁸

As the physical encapsulation of Western modernity in the minds of industrial policymakers, the factory site embodied the unique benefits of urbanism and functioned as a training ground for armies of model citizens. In the early 1930s, Mustafa Kemal took a direct interest in the construction of a sugar factory in Eskişehir, a small town some 250 kilometres from Ankara. He chose a site close to a railway station not because of infrastructural logistics but because “[p]eople must see the factory.”²⁹ The prime minister promised to the people of Bursa during the 1935 ground-breaking ceremony for the Merinos Wool Factory that the factory complex would function like a small town lighting up its surroundings.³⁰ Four years later, a journalist described the factory complex as “an industrial abode of the republican will, a masterpiece of the republic” that changed the cultural and social constitution of the entire city of Bursa.³¹ “The factory and the city can no longer be thought of separately,” a journalist wrote of the Kayseri Factory, for the former had changed the infrastructure as well as the economic and cultural life of the latter.³² A French traveller similarly observed the modernising effects of these industrial settlements in 1937: “With a strong and well-cared road structure, green areas, sanitary neighbourhoods, well-organised water and electricity provisions, stadiums, and market places, these centres of settlement change the face of the old cities they are located in.”³³ After the establishment of the state factories, the urban population of Bursa, Adana, Kayseri, Sivas, Izmit, Malatya, and Nazilli increased by between forty and one hundred per cent from 1927 to 1945.³⁴ The areas adjoining the factories became desirable places to live, as new neighbourhoods with a Sümer hairdresser here and a Sümer coffeehouse there emerged around the factory complexes.³⁵ Later in the century, these new neighbourhoods would turn into “privileged clusters,” causing social tensions that would hinder the integration of these factory campuses with the city.³⁶ But even in the 1930s and 1940s, enthusiastic state propaganda and favourable press coverage on industrial site selection failed to convince everybody.

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Preparations for the opening ceremony of the Nazilli Factory, 1937

courtesy of ilhan öden

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Foreign expert visitors to Turkey were heavily critical of the rationale behind the industrial site selection.³⁷ The Thornburg mission, for example, questioned the decision to locate factories “in places where supplementary occupations are needed because of more meagre resources for the sustenance of life than are usual even in Turkey.” The disregard for labour supply, the authors claimed, evinced that the motive was “probably more political than social, and economic considerations have played little part in the choice.”³⁸ In terms of planning for labour and raw material requirements, the iron and steel plant in Karabük was deemed to have been the worst mistake. An entire city had to be created to serve the various furnaces, mills, and shops of this “economic monstrosity.”³⁹ Over-enthusiasm, inexperience, and a lack of statistics partly explained such failures, A.H. Hanson argued, but the main problem lay in the handling of the planning and its implementation.⁴⁰

The politics of foreign expertise also played into the critique of industrial site selection. The Americans, for example, blamed the German and British advisors for “foisting such a white elephant on the Turkish people” in Karabük.⁴¹ Zvi Yehuda Hershlag, an Israeli professor of economics, could partially justify the site selection but the “element of gigantomania in the striving for magnitude of the project,” he argued, was causing erroneous considerations by the German and British advisers.⁴² The Germans were also blamed by locals for machinery problems. In 1933, Germany and Turkey signed a comprehensive clearing agreement, which dictated that Turkey had to buy German goods in return for her exports. In 1939, Webster cited a Turkish engineer’s complaints over how easy it had been for the German experts to convince the German-trained managers of state factories to buy machinery from Germany that they did not need.⁴³ The director of the Adana Cotton Factory reported in 1935 that the outdated English machinery from 1895 could only be replaced with German machinery because of the clearing agreement between Turkey and Germany. The agreement left Turkey in possession of German marks with which she could buy nothing but what the German government offered her. “Hence the German machinery,” Linke wrote, “hence the German armaments there and in the Balkan countries.”⁴⁴

Almost a decade after the launch of state-led industrialisation, a Sümerbank inspection report explained the extra-economic rationale behind the establishment of state factories by way of a comparison between private and state enterprises. The private sector’s geographical choices, the report argues, are based on economic calculations such as raw material supply and energy needs, whereas locations for state enterprises are chosen based on the long-term interests of the nation.⁴⁵ Beyond mere economic investments, state factories were social investments, in that they would function as the carriers of national social development: or, in the words of the prime minister, “moral and social institutions of culture and civilisation for our nationalist, republican country.”⁴⁶

In the post-wwii development literature, the efforts of new states to assert their authority over their territorial inheritance after gaining independence is a central theme. In analysing the “pursuit of effective nationstatehood” following decolonisation and the creation of new nations in Africa and Asia, for example, Gunnar Myrdal discusses development and its planning in relation to the processes of “national consolidation” and an “integrated national community.” Rationality and productivity were the poster themes of national development plans. However, Myrdal also argues that development thinking and planning could not be merely reduced to a vision of economic growth. The new states were in search of “the new man or the modern man, the ‘citizen of the new state’” with a set of values including efficiency, punctuality, diligence, orderliness, and preparedness for change.⁴⁷ In the modernising rhetoric of the 1930s, state factories were the trail blazers for the rapid economic development of the country and the springboards for a giant leap into a modern, industrial lifestyle.

The director of the Turhal Sugar Factory told Webster that one of his aims was to make sure that “every worker shall return to his village with an unshakable desire to live at a higher level.” He was thrilled to see that the factory supplied workers with wages to clear their debt; but more importantly it gave them “a little education” and “the élan which has displaced the lethargy and hopelessness characteristic of Turhal before the factory was erected.”⁴⁹ The opening up of the village economy played an important part in that “education.”

3 Consuming Industrial Modernity: State Factories and the Rural-Urban Connection

An intricate connection between state factories and the rural economy emerged as one of the pillars of the first five-year plan. The Turkish state’s industrialisation effort differed from state industrial investment strategies in other contexts such as India and Egypt, where the displacement of locals and the total disappearance of villages to make way for prestigious state factories (“Nehru’s Temples”) created long-term conflict between the locals and the state.⁵⁰ The construction of state factories on vacant land away from residential areas eliminated such conflicts over space. Furthermore, in choosing an industrial development plan over an agricultural one, the government adopted the strong language of interconnectedness between the two sectors. A successful agricultural policy depended on a sound industrial base, the minister for economic affairs declared in 1936.⁵¹ The primacy of the textile sector in the state investment plans evinced this dependency. Textile manufacturing would contribute to the integration and expansion of a national market by increasing raw material production, on the one hand, and providing cheap commodities, on the other.

But the government’s post-Depression policy of increasing cotton prices to protect the producers would clash with the industrialisation drive. In 1935, the economic affairs minister criticised the preference of private textile manufacturers for cheaper imported cotton, calling it anti-national because it would mean the return of the “colonial economy.” Locally manufactured yarn was expensive, he admitted, but it was our nationalist duty to ensure that Turkish industry benefited Turkish agriculture.⁵² At various official ceremonies on factory sites, government representatives emphasised the benefits that state factories would bring to the peasants. In Ereğli, the prime minister introduced the factory as a lucrative customer for cotton producers; in Turhal, he stressed that the population of eight close-by cities, including the villagers, would profit from the factory; in Nazilli, the minister for economic affairs said: “we establish industry to help agriculture”; in Kayseri, he claimed industrialisation would benefit the peasants by pushing up raw material prices.⁵³ At the 1935 ground-breaking ceremony in Nazilli, Bayar reminded the farmers in the audience how they had complained about the low selling-prices of their produce during his previous visit in 1930. The region needed a factory, he had replied then, and that factory was now being built—with state money. He then asked the audience if they supported the etatist policy, and the crowd allegedly shouted: “We would give our lives for it!”⁵⁴

State factories did indeed create regional economies around them. Investment in textile factories increased the Anatolian goat and sheep population, improved the quality of Turkish cotton, and encouraged better farm practices.⁵⁵ The average output of industrial crops increased from 500,000 tonnes per year between 1928 and 1935, to 1.2 million tonnes for 1936–1940, and to 1.8 million tonnes for 1946–1950.⁵⁶ For example, the Turhal Sugar Factory awarded beet contracts to eighteen thousand farmers, the majority of whom were engaged in subsistence farming. Between 1,300 and 1,400 local labourers were employed at the refinery during a three-month employment “campaign.” Although wages were low, it enabled the locals to secure a debt-free winter. The refinery also created a substantial annual revenue for the state railway company.⁵⁷ State industries slowly opened up the closed village economy, dragging the peasantry into market relations.⁵⁸

The industrial use of previously undervalued local agricultural products increased rural household incomes. But, according to the planners, the benefits that state industries would bring for the rural economy went beyond this. State industries would also cheapen consumer goods, creating “a healthy balance between Turkish citizens’ income and expenditure.”⁵⁹ Textiles, once again, had a special role here because they were the first and foremost commodity that would change the culture of the Turkish village. During his 1933 visits to Defterdar and Bakırköy, the prime minister set out his expectations for state textile factories: “I want cheap, really cheap clothes. The poor strata should not remain underclothed; we need to produce the cheapest clothes possible for our poor nation.”⁶⁰ And cheap factory-woven cloth did indeed change village clothing.⁶¹

The government had established the Domestic Goods Bazaars in 1926 to sell the products of the Hereke Factory. The bazaars began to sell Sümerbank manufactures in 1933 despite protests from private merchants over the state becoming a merchant.⁶² Sümerbank opened its own stores, first in Istanbul, and then in Ankara, Izmir, Mersin, and Adana. In 1942, there were twenty-three Sümerbank stores across the country. Before the war, domestic products could not compete with the cheaper imports, but war-induced import difficulties increased the demand for Sümerbank products. By the 1970s there were more than two hundred stores dispersed throughout the country.⁶³

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Poster for Sümerbank stores, c. 1940s

courtesy of sİbel bozdoğan

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As the circulation of state-manufactured goods expanded, an anti-import sentiment grew. In interwar Europe, the increasing circulation of American imports had begun to fuel a whole new economy of desire in the form of cinema, print advertising, rotary presses, and new consumer goods.⁶⁴ The end of the war further stimulated this economy by increasing the circulation of these commodities and cultural artefacts. In Turkey, this coincided with a change in monetary and trade policy. To qualify for International Monetary Fund membership and for participation in the Marshall Plan, the government initiated a major economic policy change involving devaluation and a set of foreign trade liberalisation measures. In 1946, the chp devalued the lira by 54 per cent against the US dollar, seeking to gain a comparative advantage in terms of competitiveness before its entry into the Bretton Woods system. The government also abolished the drastic import restrictions that had been in effect since the 1930s to attain a favourable balance of trade. Devaluation, government officials claimed, would not only increase the value of the exports, it would also protect local manufacturing from imports.⁶⁵ The increasing trade deficit proved them wrong.

A language of economic nationalism began to charge the anxieties over the increasing availability of imports. These anxieties then quickly turned into a “struggle against luxury” that combined economic concerns and moral anxieties.⁶⁶ Luxury became a symbol of the social decadence of the elite, and was parodied as a sign of the class aspirations of working people. As a form of conspicuous consumption, the purchasing of luxury imports posed a serious threat to an imagined indigenous tradition and national economic policy. The republican elite often attributed the collapse of the Ottoman industries to consumer preferences for foreign products, and hoped that a nationalist discourse would eliminate this.⁶⁷ Disappointed middle-class writers urged industrial workers “to increase our local manufacturing … to protect our national pride,” and investors to spend limited foreign currency reserves on “investing in industrial enterprises that would create employment” instead of importing luxuries.⁶⁸ Another author pointed to the “ridiculousness” of the fact that “foreign currency is spent on imported fabrics, nylon gewgaws … when we have delightful woollen cloth produced locally.”⁶⁹ The reader might remember the scene in Chapter 1 where the French director of an Ottoman state textile factory was eventually caught after presenting imported cloth as local wares to the Sultan for years. By the end of the 1930s, the reverse was the case. Sümerbank textiles were being sold as imports, an economics journal warned: “They sell them as English and French textiles … Do not be deceived! These textiles bear the design of Turkish artisans, and are produced by Turkish workers under the supervision of Turkish engineers in Turkish factories.”⁷⁰

To these authors coming from the birthplace of mass consumption, consumption levels and patterns in Turkey were not compatible with an industrial development plan. The picture as seen through the eyes of the republican elite, however, was quite different. Upon hearing from a merchant that his best radio sales were in Kayseri, Ereğli, Nazilli, and Adana because the locals in these new industrial centres were accessing the radio for the first time at factory cafeterias, a journalist happily broke the news that “after so much waiting and hardship,” a new lifestyle had arrived in the Anatolian villages. This was the same journalist that had decried Turkish cotton as having previously been seen as “only as worthy as a Negro’s sweat,” whereas by the end of the 1930s every turn of the spindle was eroding “part of our Asianness.”⁷³ In distinguishing his country and his people from the horrible fates of the enslaved Africans and the colonised Asians, he alluded to the trope of a nation recovering its former glory; this summarised the republican faith and optimism in rapid development from an agrarian colonial economy to an independent industrial economy. But the industrialisation drive faced one big problem: where would the state factories find the required industrial workforce in a predominantly agricultural society?

4 National Planning versus Local Labour Markets

In the 1930s and 1940s, state-led industrialisation was experiencing chronic labour instability. To begin with, the political exigencies of nation-building after World War i played a part in reducing the labour supply. Turkey’s population had been ravaged by consecutive wars, forced migrations and deportations, epidemics, and high infant mortality. The population in the republican territories fell from sixteen million in 1913 to thirteen million in 1923.⁷⁴ During the first two decades of the twentieth century, much of the Ottoman industrial labour force was removed by deportation and emigration. As late as 1915, Turkish workers made up only fifteen per cent of the industrial workforce.⁷⁵ Finally, the 1923 population exchange with Greece had led not only to the loss of an important source of cheap labour but also to the loss of artisanal skills especially in urban areas.⁷⁶

The new nation-state sought to bolster its birth rate and population growth by pursuing aggressive pronatalist policies, and succeeded in growing the population from 13.5 million in 1927 to 18.5 million in 1945.⁷⁷ The urbanisation rate, however, remained low until the beginning of rural-urban migration in the 1950s.⁷⁸ The urban population increased from 2.2 million to 3.9 million between 1927 and 1950, whereas the rural population increased by almost 6 million. Almost eighty per cent of the labour force was still working in agriculture by 1950.⁷⁹ In 1941, the exiled urban planner Ernst Reuter wrote that the threat of urbanisation had not yet arrived in Turkey. There was even a slight decrease in the percentage of the population living in cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants between 1927 and 1940.⁸⁰ The scale of rural-urban migration was not comparable to nineteenth-century Europe or the interwar Soviet Union, a Turkish social scientist noted in 1950.⁸¹ As late as 1955, only twenty-five per cent of the population lived in cities, with almost twenty per cent of city dwellers living in the country’s five largest cities.⁸² The urbanisation rate increased steadily thereafter, reaching 31.9 per cent in 1960.⁸³ Istanbul was and remained the most populated city: its population doubled between 1927 and 1960, and hit almost 1.5 million.⁸⁴

In 1932, more than half of the industrial workforce in the country worked in Istanbul (28.4 per cent), Zonguldak (14.9 per cent), and Izmir (12.6 per cent).⁸⁵ As might be expected, labour instability brought with it heavier consequences for the newly opened factories near small Anatolian towns without a potential labour supply. Some of the new locations were in the middle of nowhere, sometimes even unknown to the administrators in the big cities. Until 1935, Karabük, for example, was a neighbourhood of thirteen households that did not even appear on the map. The hamlet emerged in administrative documents only after a railroad station was built nearby.⁸⁶ Kayseri was similarly unknown, with a young teacher from Istanbul becoming quite distraught during a desperate search for information on how to find his way after being assigned to a school there in 1925.⁸⁷ The population of the town centre had decreased from 56,000 in the early twentieth century to forty thousand in 1927 following to the forced migration of religious minorities. After the opening of the factory, it initially increased to forty-six thousand in 1935 before more than doubling in 1955.⁸⁸

A young engineer lamented the effort it took to discipline these workers. “In the beginning they were like a herd of stampeding animals,” he said. The morning and evening controls of two thousand building workers would take two hours each time because the mostly illiterate men could not remember the numbers they had been assigned to use at the check-clocks. He reported partly solving the problem by sewing their numbers onto their jackets and having the overseers deal with the clocks. But the checks often turned violent, with workers, frustrated by the delay at the gates, attacking the overseers. The engineer fired the workers involved, which meant they lost any claim to their wages for that month. He defended himself by claiming that the men were “so used to kicks and blows that any corporal punishment wouldn’t make the least impression on them.” Dismissals worked; the control time was shortened by more than half.⁹⁰

Unruly behaviour among migrant workers also complicated railway construction projects. The Austrian engineer supervising the Simeryol (Sivas-Malatya-Erzurum) railway line reported that “occasionally [a worker] grows wild and thrusts his knife into somebody else’s belly.” But thanks to the exhaustion from the ten-hour working day, workers did not “feel up to a great deal of nonsense” and spent their time in the military tents they shared with ten to fifteen others. Aware of the potential for conflict between migrants from different regions, the management kept them in separate tents.⁹¹ Frequent ethnic conflicts were successfully manipulated to break worker solidarity in the Zonguldak mines, where the management relied on ethnic stereotypes to determine who would get a job and which job they would get.⁹² At Karabük, assumed ethnic characteristics played a role in labour recruitment. Workers from certain provinces were assigned to hot shops, for example, due to their “tolerance for hardship,” while Laz workers were given assembly jobs because they were thought to be “agile and light on their feet.”⁹³

In Chapter 1, we saw the widespread use of unfree labour in Ottoman factories. The republican state also resorted to unfree forms of labour, mainly of two types. Chronologically, the first of these involved the labour-based prisons that emerged after the amendment of the penal code in 1936. Convict labour was initially used in agriculture, but in the 1940s it was extended to state factories and mining enterprises, where each working day counted as two days of imprisonment. Prison labourers earned daily wages and slept in dormitories instead of prison cells, which, according to Gerhard Kessler, made them the most obedient workers. By the end of the decade, the labour-based prisons incarcerated one third of the entire convict population, that is, seventeen thousand inmates.⁹⁴ In 1942, there were 150 women prisoners working at Kayseri Factory. These women were so content with their working conditions, an economics journal claimed, that they did not leave the factory even after their sentence expired.⁹⁵ Three years later, the number of women prisoners had increased to 190 at Kayseri. Karabük and Malatya factories had 523 and 292 convict workers, respectively, all of whom were male. The authors of a 1945 inspection report, however, did not share the enthusiasm of Kessler and the writer in the economics journal. They did not observe a willingness on the part of the convict workers to continue working at the factories after they had served their sentence. At Kayseri, for example, only eleven such women chose to stay on. Moreover, the inspectors objected the use of these “hard to rehabilitate” prisoners in the factories. To protect the respectability of industrial workers, they claimed, convict workers should better be employed in home-based industries.⁹⁶

The state had also begun to use convict labour in mining operations in 1937. Their number increased considerably after the enactment of the National Defence Act on 18 January 1940. In addition to cancelling much of the recently enacted labour protective legislation, this law institutionalised a forced labour regime (mükellefiyet) in the Zonguldak coal basin. In 1942, the mines employed fifty-eight thousand forced labourers, who toiled under the threat of physical torture and of harm to their families. The law remained in force until 1948 and it was formally abolished only in 1960. In 1948, there were fifteen thousand convict workers in the mines. These convicts worked side by side with free workers, and earned ninety per cent of the latter’s wage. They would receive their payment at the end of their sentence.⁹⁷

Due to the absence of a ready supply of local labour, state factories had to create a social and material infrastructure to attract workers to the new industrial centres.⁹⁸ The Soviet mission noted in 1932 that because Nazilli did not have any “free workers,” which in this context meant dispossessed wage labourers, the two thousand workers needed by the factory had to be brought in from elsewhere. The experts then suggested areas for building worker houses.⁹⁹ The dependence on outside labour continued into the 1940s; by 1945, fewer than one third of state textile workers were being recruited from the local labour markets. Factory inspectors blamed this on industrial site selection as well as the inefficient employment policy. Because they depended on migrant workers, the new state factories spent a lot on worker accommodation, but a decade after their establishment, they could neither recruit locally nor retain the migrant workers.¹⁰⁰

Visiting the Kayseri Factory shortly after it was opened, Webster was impressed by the athletics field (which, an engineer had earlier boasted to Linke, was an “an exact replica of the stadium at Cologne”), which included a football stadium, swimming pool, gymnasium equipment, riding track, and space for other pastimes. But there were only two thousand workers on the factory’s payroll, fewer than half of what was estimated, and the factory operated on a single shift. Additional living quarters would be the only solution to increase the number on the payroll, Webster wrote. Single workers slept in dormitories, while some married men lived in poorly built company apartments because in the city there were few vacancies and almost no decent quarters available.¹⁰¹ Until 1944, that is, when the price of agricultural products started to fall, six hundred weaving looms lay idle due to labour shortages.¹⁰² In the Zonguldak mines, too, American experts blamed productivity problems on the absence of living facilities, which hindered the “building up of a skilled, experienced mining force.”¹⁰³

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Machinery at the Kayseri factory, c. 1936

courtesy of sİbel bozdoğan

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Enervating shortages of skilled workers and high rates of labour turnover were the biggest concerns of the director of Kayseri Factory, who had to hire three thousand workers to maintain a steady workforce of two thousand. “His workers came from villages all over the countryside, attracted by stories about the pleasant working and living conditions at the new factory,” Webster reported.¹⁰⁴ Leaving their homes for the first time in their lives, many workers “succumbed to homesickness.” And then there was malaria. During the first summer at the factory, a mild epidemic rendered a large number of workers hysterical and caused a serious labour shortage.¹⁰⁵ About half of the workforce had malaria between 1942 and 1943 in Kayseri, the numbers halved after the factory took measures but in 1945 twenty-two per cent of the workforce still suffered from the disease.¹⁰⁶

At the ground-breaking ceremony in Nazilli, Bayar reassured the crowd that the factory would not take jobs away from the local weavers; on the contrary, it would supply high quality yarn to handloomers, help them with marketing their products, and provide them with jobs at the factory if they so wish. “Before too long,” he continued, the factory would turn Nazilli into “a developed town.”¹¹⁷

In view of the paucity of data on the background of factory workers in the 1930s and 1940s, it is difficult to know to what extent handloomers became factory hands. A contemporary academic claimed in 1948 that the Sümerbank factories had failed to attract the handloomers. Ninety per cent of handweavers in the Denizli region said they would prefer not to work at local factories.¹¹⁸ The Thornburg mission similarly reported that the many thousands of handicraftsmen in the bazaar shops of the cities remained an untapped source of labour.¹¹⁹ A 1949 International Labour Organization publication reported that the time gap between the disappearance of the old guild system and the development of modern industry impeded the adaptation of traditional skills to the methods of factory production.¹²⁰ The ongoing complaints on labour instability and the persistent lack of skilled labour in the 1950s supports this claim. In Istanbul, a survey conducted among a hundred workers found no prior artisanal experience in the early 1950s.¹²¹ According to a 1958 United Nations report, the considerable increase in employment in medium and large-scale industry between 1927 and 1954 was a result of rapid population growth rather than manufacturing establishments’ drawing labour from agriculture and small-scale industry.¹²² But what about that other cheap labour supply used globally in textile manufacturing?

5 “But Where Are the Heroic Turkish Women?”

When we last met the Public Works Department clerk at the beginning of this chapter, the starry, sky-like appearance of the Kayseri Factory had lured him in and filled his heart with national pride and sense of duty. But something disrupted this picture-perfect image of the Turkish state factory: Why could the factory, which had only a ten per cent female workforce as opposed to the required ninety per cent, not attract the women of Kayseri? Spinners were mostly male in this Anatolian factory, he wrote, although spinning “of course does not befit men.” The factory manager complained to him that Kayseri women chose to work on their handlooms at home instead of working at the factory. The clerk could not understand why women who were already spinning at home in the hinterland of the factory looked crossed-eyed at factory work. Why, he asked, were the heroic Turkish women who had fought and worked side by side with men, first, in the Independence War and, then, in the republican revolutions, running away from their national duty at the factory? Some argued the problem was men’s bigotry while others blamed women for looking down on factory work; and there were those claiming low wages kept spinning women at home. Our factory-loving author was not convinced. To him, the reason that women did not come to the factory, “the homely place of labour and honour,” was because the “high ideal of the factory” was still not understood by the people.¹²³

At the same time as the factory acquired a potent social imagery in interwar Turkey that was cast in both economic and cultural terms, another equally (or possibly even more) powerful signifier of modernity was gaining ground. The secular republic represented nothing short of an all-out attack on existing social institutions relating to the status of women, making their legal and social status the banner of Kemalist development narratives.¹²⁴ A central feature of the nascent state’s self-identification was to distance itself from its Ottoman legacy. References to a remote and mythical past glorified as a golden age were common currency within Turkish intellectual circles of the period, with women playing the forefront role in this glorification.¹²⁵ In her 1930 Turkey Faces West treatise published in the United States, a prominent national heroine figure, the novelist and feminist Halide Edib, called for a “cleansing” of Turkish culture from foreign elements. The inferior position of women was a result of Byzantine and Persian, as well as Islamic, influences, she claimed; the “genuine” nomadic culture of Anatolia “would delight the soul of the western feminist in some respects … [because] women are on an equal footing with men in every respect.”¹²⁶ This narrative would lose none of its appeal among middle-class women and men alike in the coming decades. By the end of the 1940s, a female author writing for a middle-class feminist newspaper portrayed the republican regime as a morning full of light and joyful excitement for women, who had just woken up from a centuries-old suffocating night. By recognising women’s right to work, the republic, she claimed, saved women from the dishonour of being mere toys for men.¹²⁷ The condemnation of certain aspects of Ottoman patriarchy associated mainly with religious bigotry became part of official state ideology, making celebratory images of women in public life central to the iconography of the new regime. A series of legal reforms concerning women’s legal and civil status were undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s. These included the replacement of the Islamic civil code with the Swiss secular code, the abolition of polygamy, the recognition of women’s right to vote, and a nationwide campaign for girls’ education.¹²⁸

Comparisons between the gendered oppression women suffered under the Ottoman imperial rule and their emancipation in the republic filled the pages of the mainstream media and fuelled state and middle-class intellectual discourses. These comparisons celebrated the republican present as a historical moment, with women in Turkey first encountering modernity through their entry into modern forms of labour, including factory work. The mixed-gender industrial workspaces and recreational facilities significantly reinforced the republic’s secularisation agenda and strengthened its claim to a new positioning of the state vis-à-vis women. As key spaces for a modern and secular state in the making, factories could be seen as a sort of Westernised cultural representation of the world with women at the forefront.

Despite Üzel’s and many other republican elite claims, factory work was not a novelty for women in Turkey. In a similar way to the historical trends in Western Europe, female industrial employment emerged as a result of the transfer of home production to factories in the Ottoman Empire, making textiles the single most important industry. Historically, the employment of women and children in textile production worldwide has been higher than in other industries. Although slightly lower than the global average, this was the case in the Turkish textile industry as well.¹²⁹ Women had worked in factories in Rumelia since the 1840s. In Ottoman Salonica, the heart of the tobacco sector, for example, young Jewish girls constituted an important part of the workforce, particularly in the textile and tobacco industries.¹³⁰ By the 1860s, silk factories in Bursa employed both Muslim and non-Muslim women.¹³¹ By the end of the century, approximately three thousand workers, primarily women and children, worked in tobacco factories.¹³² In Anatolia, Izmir and Istanbul were the two major sites of cigarette production, and factories in these cities had an almost fifty per cent female workforce.¹³³ A women’s publication from the 1910s reported a massive female labour force in the textile sector working in miserable conditions.¹³⁴ The textile and food processing industries were the two main industries with the highest levels of female employment, but with time, women took up industrial jobs in other sectors as well. For example, in 1897, 121 of a total of 201 workers at the Istanbul Match Factory were women and young girls.¹³⁵ According to the 1913–1915 industrial census, almost one third of the total industrial workforce across the empire was female.¹³⁶

In terms of ethnic composition, Muslim women made up a small part of the total female workforce. The Régie Française des Tabacs tobacco factory in Istanbul did not employ Muslim women in 1914, for example,¹³⁷ and when it finally did, male and female cigarette makers and packers worked in separate rooms.¹³⁸ In 1912, in response to reports of sexual abuse in tobacco workshops in Aydın, “the local government stipulated that women tobacco workers were to be hired only with the permission of their guardians, employed in separate rooms, and paid their wages by female accountants.”¹³⁹ With the First World War, the number of Muslim women on the shop floors started to increase.¹⁴⁰ Of the eight thousand workers at the Imperial Military Factory, Feshane, in 1917, five thousand were women and children. “[This is] a complete revolution,” wrote the editor of Frankfurter Zeitung upon seeing men and women working together at this factory, “caused by the necessities of the war.” Female labour at this factory, as well as everywhere else, had become indispensable.¹⁴¹ Though he did not comment on the religious composition of the workers, the demographic change suggests an increasing presence of Muslim women on the shop floor. This increase accelerated after the 1923 population exchange with Greece. Worker statistics from the 1930s and 1940s do not specify the ethnic and religious identities of workers. However, given the demographic change explained above and women’s increasing presence in the public sphere under Kemalist modernism, it would be safe to say that the majority of women in factories in the 1930s and 1940s were Muslim.

An alternative characterisation of Ottoman women’s industrial labour was a depiction of women’s suffering under foreign control. The republic had finally freed the Turkish women from the kafes (lit., cage, referring to the latticed windows that blocked passers-by from seeing into Ottoman homes), and brought her “by the side of the machinery.”¹⁴²

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Comparison of women’s industrial work under the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 1949

hürbilek, 15 jan. 1949

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Despite the celebratory rhetoric on women’s industrial labour and many years of insistent efforts on the part of both the state and industrialists, the number of factory women did not rise to the desired levels, even long after state-led industrialisation had taken off in Turkey. According to the first republican industrial census in 1927, 23.7 per cent of workers older than fourteen were women; the percentage increased to 35.7 per cent for workers under fourteen.¹⁴⁴ By the early 1930s, women made up a quarter of all workers. The number of women in industrial employment increased from 32,474 in 1927 to 129,076 in 1935.¹⁴⁵ By 1945, women made up 26.3 per cent of Sümerbank workers, with almost ninety per cent of these women working at state textile factories. More than one third of the Sümerbank female labour force was under eighteen and 64.5 per cent were either single or widowed.¹⁴⁶

When Linke approached an orphan girl who had unwillingly worked at a tobacco factory in Istanbul before she moved in with her aunt in Kayseri, and asked her if she liked the factory, “her eyes lit up, her face lost its expression of grown-up self-composure.” She was especially happy because the factory director had told her she could live in one of the new boarding houses built for the girl-workers.¹⁴⁸ The clerk happily noted girls aged between ten and fifteen working at stations above head-height.¹⁴⁹ The factory director boasted of not leaving these juveniles “to loaf in corrupting company,” Webster reported, and regarded factory work as a favour to them and a benefit to the society.¹⁵⁰

In many cases, local children waited at the factory garden to be chosen for recruitment by the foremen.¹⁵¹ Young local girls would be accompanied by an adult worker during their walk from home to the factory. One of them, Muazzez, told me how she hated the commute. Muazzez left the factory in 1953 when she turned twenty, after almost seven years of work. She could have qualified for insurance compensation if she had just worked another two months, but she could not face walking to and from work three kilometres each way, every day, in the freezing cold. An expression of contempt flashed across her face when she recalled the mud they had to walk through and the white frost the girls brought in on their hair and eye lashes.¹⁵²

In terms of women’s industrial employment, Istanbul also showed marked differences from the new Anatolian industrial centres. According to the 1934 statistics, female workers were concentrated in the two industrial centres of Istanbul and Bursa.¹⁵³ Hundreds of women and children would beg small textile factories for work at very low wages for twelve hours a day.¹⁵⁴ A 1946 publication by the Ministry of Labour reported an increase in the number of female workers in Istanbul from 14,350 to 46,538 between 1935 and 1943. Although the enlistment of men played an important role in this increase, the ministry argued, this could not be entirely attributed to wartime conditions. Employers preferred female labour in industries such as textiles since “the female hand is more dexterous, and the female wage is cheaper.” Women who were “trying to get out of poverty” became “a factor of production” and they did not seem to want to leave employment. Since rapid industrial development required a wider use of female labour, the increase was expected to continue, especially for the big industrial centres like Istanbul.¹⁵⁵

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Women and men at the Feshane factory spinnery, c. 1930–1940s

taha toros archive, file no. 88

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Workers at the Bakırköy spinnery, 1950

courtesy of ergİn aygöl

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The changing structure of the textile sector, however, would contradict this expectation. In 1927, women made up forty-nine per cent of workers in textile enterprises employing more than four workers in Istanbul. But women’s share in total textile employment dropped to 29.5 per cent in 1950 and thirty-four per cent in 1952. This decrease, Sabahaddin Zaim argued in his 1956 dissertation on Istanbul’s textile industry, was the result of a disproportionate increase in the number of male workers. Between 1927 and 1952, the total number of workers increased by seventy-five per cent while the number of male workers increased by 233 per cent. Behind this discrepancy was an important change in the composition of the textile industry. Before state-led industrialisation, the most developed textile industries in Istanbul had been silk, hosiery, and knitting, which were traditionally female. After 1934, male workers became the majority in the state-owned wool and cotton weaving enterprises. Following the enlistments during the war and the rapid development of the private sector after the war, the demand for female labour increased, pushing the percentage of women in the textile industry above forty per cent in 1954.¹⁵⁶

Though statistics comparing workers’ province of residence and province of birth are not available for the 1930s, it would be safe to assume that the majority of women working in Istanbul’s factories already lived in the city before their employment for two reasons. First, large migratory flows to major urban centres started only around the mid-1950s.¹⁵⁷ Second, the available archival information on the migration history of workers at two state factories in Istanbul points to migration centred on single males in the 1930s and 1940s. In a context of constant labour shortages, the demand for female industrial labour was partly due to the absence of a disadvantaged migrant group. The demand for female industrial labour persisted after the war, presenting an interesting contrast with the efforts to send factory women back home across Europe and North America.

6 Local Industrial Labour Market in Istanbul

In decisions on industrial site selection in early-1930s Turkey, an engineer argued, the cost of labour was not an important factor since it did not vary much throughout the country. The two most important factors were the availability of labour and housing.¹⁵⁸ If it was not for the extra-economic considerations, the most apt locations for new state industries would be the old industrial centres.¹⁵⁹ As we have seen in Chapter 1, the imperial capital and its hinterland, together with cities in western Anatolia such as Izmir and Bursa, constituted the industrial heartland of the country. In 1915, Istanbul housed fifty-five per cent of industry; Izmir followed with twenty-two per cent.¹⁶⁰ By the beginning of the 1930s, these concentrated urbanisation and industrialisation patterns remained intact. According to the 1932 statistics, thirty-four per cent of a total of 1,087 factories were in Istanbul; Izmir and Bursa followed Istanbul with 16.7 and 10.7 per cent respectively.¹⁶¹ By 1938, that is, after the opening of state factories in the Anatolian towns, these figures had fallen only slightly. Together, the Marmara and Aegean areas hosted 71.1 per cent of all industry. In the textile sector, eighty-six per cent of all industrial activity was being carried out in the Marmara region.¹⁶² Because they continued to attract the bulk of private investment, the share of Istanbul and Izmir in manufacturing employment increased from twenty-six per cent in 1927 to thirty-three per cent in 1950, during the postwar period.¹⁶³

In Istanbul, the number of industrial workers and artisans increased from 42,582 in 1927 to 93,897 in 1935.¹⁶⁴ “Istanbul has become a city of artisans and workers,” a newspaper article claimed, drawing on the trope of the “parasitic Ottoman social structure”: “In the past, stuck-up men with gold-framed glasses and silver walking sticks made up the majority of our city’s residents. But now, ninety-five per cent of our townsmen are artisans, workers, or at best lower-ranking civil servants. Workshops occupy the sites where once stood manor houses and waterside mansions. Istanbul is no more a city of parasites.”¹⁶⁵ Another group whose visibility in the city was increasing was the unemployed.¹⁶⁶ In Anatolian villages, newspapers reported, “the hearsay is that new factories in Istanbul are in desperate need of workers.” Many of these immigrants ended up unemployed in the city.¹⁶⁷ The city municipality had been planning to establish an employment bureau in 1935, but this did not materialize until after the war.¹⁶⁸ The labour market was left unregulated to a great extent. Despite having the largest labour pool in the country, labour turnover rates were high in Istanbul as well.¹⁶⁹ But, for Istanbul’s industrial employers, including the state, the problem was not so much the inadequacy of the labour supply as the problem of labour instability—of keeping the workers at the factories for long enough.

“Despite the efforts to build new industrial cities,” a trade union journalist wrote in 1947, “the number of workers in Istanbul equalled the total number of workers [in the new industrial centres].” The city was comparable to Manchester and other industrial centres across the world in terms of worker concentration in urban population, he ambitiously claimed. The two sides of the Golden Horn hosted hundreds of factories and shipyards, and thus had the highest labour density in the city. Factory workers densely populated close-by neighbourhoods, such as Eyüp, Balat, Fener, Hasköy, and Kasımpaşa. Galata followed in terms of labour concentration. Workers were dispersed across various parts of the city with considerable concentration in Zeytinburnu, Yeşilköy, and Bakırköy.¹⁷⁰

The 1930 Public Health Law defined three categories of industrial establishments based on their distance from residential areas, but rapid urban growth rendered this classification and the regulations based on it redundant. While the state was building new factories in Anatolia, private capital preferred to invest in and around Istanbul. In the 1940s, twenty-three new factories were built in the city. The locations of these new industries laid the foundations for the Bakırköy, Kazlıçeşme, Topkapı-Sağmalcılar, Rami-Topçular, and Bomonti industrial zones. The geographic distribution of the seventy-one new textile establishments in the 1950s strengthened this pattern of industrial geography.¹⁷¹

Among these industrial centres, Bakırköy held a distinct place because this is where the largest factories were located. Historically, the two old imperial textile factories, that is, the Bakırköy Factory and the Yedikule Spinnery played a part in the emergence of a working-class neighbourhood.¹⁷² In 1934, Hungarian experts considered Feshane, Bakırköy, and Gemlik as suitable construction sites for an artificial silk factory. They chose Bakırköy for its water sources and the availability of skilled and experienced labour.¹⁷³ After the war, Bakırköy, Zeytinburnu, and Kazlıçeşme were informally designated industrial zones because the land was flat and close to the sea, had an abundance of water sources, and a large labour supply, which reduced employers’ labour transport and housing provision costs. In the late 1940s, immigrants from the Balkans began to settle in Bakırköy, adding to the already high urban concentration.¹⁷⁴ In the workers’ files from the 1950s, I have frequently seen former Ottoman Balkan cities listed as a worker’s place of birth. Between 1945 and 1960, migrant workers from Thrace and Anatolia settled in the district, taking the population to above 100,000.¹⁷⁵ In the late 1940s, the Bakırköy Factory recruited workers from the district for the Kayseri Factory.¹⁷⁶ By 1961, 11.6 per cent of large industrial enterprises in Istanbul were located in Bakırköy, and 32.2 per cent of these enterprises manufactured textiles.¹⁷⁷ Industrial overconcentration was controlled to some extent through the designation of industrial zones, but concerns over urban congestion and squatter settlements would intensify in the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁷⁸

In 1953, a contemporary sociologist conducted a survey among industrial workers in Eyüp, where, he argued, “the genuine worker-type lived.” Eyüp workers, most of whom were employed at Defterdar, were highly unionised. His findings could be generalised to Bakırköy, since both neighbourhoods had been home to state textile factories. The Defterdar (Feshane) Factory, which had been located in Eyüp since 1839, had recruited workers from the local labour market since its inception. Sixty per cent of the factory’s workforce lived within walking distance of the factory; twenty per cent travelled by public transport, and the rest had to change at least once and travelled a maximum of one hour each way.¹⁷⁹ In many cases, generations from the same family were employed. Chain migration and settling in Istanbul following compulsory military service in the city were the two mechanisms through which outside labour joined the Defterdar workforce. Fındıkoğlu found that these workers did not retain any rural ties; they completely adopted the culture of industrial labour and passed it down generation to generation. In the pages of the Ministry of Labour’s journal, an author argued that a factory labourer working on the side of the Golden Horn for a daily wage of 250 piasters would not accept work in a small Anatolian town even for 450 piasters a day.¹⁸⁰ In the 1950s, private industrialists increasingly invested in the area to make use of the available labour supply.¹⁸¹

7 Conclusion

For a war-torn, underdeveloped, and young state like Turkey, state-led industrialisation had a dual function. Economically, the crisis of capitalism and the rise of economic nationalism in the interwar period provided a window of opportunity to catch up with Western industrialisation. Politically, etatism was a project of socio-spatial integration designed and commanded by a ruling elite that had witnessed the territorial disintegration of an empire. Besides vast ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences, regional economic and social inequalities in postimperial Turkey were produced by peripheral integration into the world economy. It was in this context that the ordering of national space emerged as an indication of both sovereignty and progress. Together with a nationalised and expanded railway network, factories were seen as state instruments to transform the disparate postimperial land into an integrated national unit. They were planned as channels for disseminating the new ideas of the republic and the means of connection between centre and periphery.

Although the institutional and discursive bases of central industrial planning operated on a national scale, it was the local labour market dynamics that determined the successful operation of the new state factories. In this chapter, I moved away from an aggregate analysis of state industries to reveal the inherent spatiality of industrial relations and labour markets, including their gender dynamics. I argued that a textured, spatialised understanding of state-led industrialisation is key to understanding the local dynamics of a national development project. I have shown that the main line of distinction in the spatial unfolding of state-led industrialisation was between the old industrial centres and the new industrial sites. This line has produced considerable variations in labour supply, recruitment, retention, and reproduction. The fact that workers were dispersed in widely separated plants also affected the development of trade unionism in the second half of the 1940s.

The newly built factories were designated as modal spaces of Western industrial modernity in Anatolia. In terms of their scale and symbolic value, they overshadowed the old Istanbul factories. Yet, beyond these differences lay a significant similarity. The operation of state factories would present an alternative to a “Western” style of industrialisation characterised by a long and arduous history of class conflict, a model that was utterly detested by the ruling elite of the new republic. They shared a widespread optimism that the Western experience of industrialisation could be used as a model for economic change without its accompanying social turmoil or even class divisions.

This chapter concludes the first part of this book, comprising a historical and spatial analysis of industrialisation in Turkey starting from the 1840s. I have discussed the failed nineteenth-century attempts at industrial development in the context of Ottoman peripheral integration and the political uses of this failure by the republican ruling elite. I went on to explain the political economy of postimperial Turkey and argued that, under the influence of competing world powers and in the short window of opportunity that opened after the Great Depression, state-led industrialisation emerged as a capitalist development strategy. Finally, I discussed the spatiality of planned industrialisation in relation to nation-building and the local dynamics of industrial labour.

In the second part of the book, I depart from this macro-scale political economy approach. By reducing the scale of the historical analysis, I will redirect the reader’s gaze toward the dense textures of workers’ everyday lives, social relationships, and political agency. How workers experienced the simultaneous processes of nation-building and industrialisation will be the guiding question throughout the next three chapters. I now kindly ask the reader to follow me into the Bakırköy Factory to silence the loud and powerful external voices of this ambitious national development project, and pay attention to the nitty-gritty of everyday life and the micro-physics of power on the shop floor.